lifeasmission

This is a piece I wrote for the Living Hope community…

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On April 4th, the city of Memphis, TN held a vigil to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Matthew and I (JR), along with Greg Jackson, had the opportunity to be a part of this powerful gathering. For me, there were two things I came away thinking about - the power of public demonstrations and the intrinsic link between social awareness/action and the gospel of Jesus.

This vigil was an overtly public display of solidarity and a public witness to matters that many would just assume relegate to the private world if not ignore altogether. The continuing need for racial reconciliation in our city, not to mention systemic issues of injustice, poverty, and oppression were brought to the forefront of peoples minds and imaginations. The day-long event was attended by the likes of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The event was shown on television, talked about on the radio, and featured in print. For many, this vigil became, if only for a short time, a public topic of conversation and dialogue. This vigil was not unlike Jesus’ public displays of healing power, prophetic witness, and proclamation of the good news of God’s Kingdom. It was the “publicness” of all Jesus was saying and doing that got him into trouble and as we left the vigil I wondered to myself, “I wonder why the church doesn’t more often find itself in the sort of trouble that her Lord and Savior was in all the time? Could it be that we are not nearly public enough with all we hold to be true about the nature of reality and God’s dream for the world? Perhaps something for us to consider.

I was also reminded of the social dimension of the good news. I do not mean the “social gospel,” I mean the gospel’s social dimension. Namely, that God’s good news is good news for all. God’s desire that all are able to experience justice, human dignity, and rescue from the evil which infests our world is paramount to a holistic understanding of the Good News that Jesus lived and died for. For the church (and therefore for Living Hope as a local expression of the church), engaging with the social issues of our context and culture is central to what it means to share in the identity of being the people of God. This begins with awareness - something that the individualism within our culture wars against. We have an increasing number of easy ways to only be confronted with what we want to be confronted with. Social awareness is something that we now must embrace as a spiritual discipline - the practice of exposing ourselves to all the facets of our world which we would rather not own up to or deal with.

Let me try to bring this home for us my summarizing this way. We worship a public and social God. As Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” God and God’s work is emphatically unbounded by any of our imaginary constraints and limitations. Flowing from this, the Christian church is not but one religious consumer choice amongst many, but rather the called-out community invited by the grace of God to publicly proclaim and socially embody God’s Good News to the world.

Check out what Matthew wrote here.