This is part 2 of a series titled, "Regaining Our Focus: A Response to the Social Action Trend in Evangelical Missions" by two veteran missionaries from Africa.
Sources of the Current Social Action Trend in Missions- "The tug of war between proclamation-oriented missions and social action is not new; however, it has become a prominent debate again in our generation. Recent key voices in evangelical circles enthusiastically promoting social action in missions include John Stott, Tim Keller, and popular Emergent authors. John Stott’s influence has been felt both through his leading role in the Lausanne International Congress on World Evangelization and through his many books. At the 1974 Lausanne Conference, more than 2,000 attendees signed the Lausanne Covenant which declared that “evangelism and socio-political involvement are part of our Christian duty.” However, the Covenant also explicitly said that, of the two, gospel proclamation is of higher priority: “In the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary.”
In spite of this clear statement, an astonishing event took place on the last day of the conference. Approximately 200 conference attendees drafted a statement entitled “Radical Discipleship” that gave social action equal status with gospel proclamation. While it was too late to change the wording of the Lausanne Covenant, Stott (who had chaired the committee that drafted the Covenant) publically affirmed the alternative Radical Discipleship position the last night of the conference. It was a watershed moment for world evangelization, essentially redefining the church’s mission.
After the 1974 conference, in the face of resistance from Billy Graham and others, Stott continued to press for an equal role for social action in Christian missions. By 1982, the triumph of Stott’s view was clear. In that year he chaired a Lausanne committee tasked to write a report on the subject. Under Stott’s guidance, the report again recommended that the church make social action and evangelism equal partners in the fulfilling of the Great Commission: They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird. This partnership is clearly seen in the public ministry of Jesus who not only preached the gospel but fed the hungry and healed the sick. In his ministry, kerygma (proclamation) and diakonia (service) went hand in hand. His words explained his works, and his works dramatized his words. Both were expressions of his compassion for people, and both should be ours.
More recently, Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has played a leading role in promoting social activism through his books, Generous Justice and Center Church, and through his prominent role as co-founder of the Gospel Coalition. Peter Naylor sums up Keller’s view succinctly: “Keller’s main thesis is that the church has a twofold mission in this world: (1) to preach the gospel and (2) to do justice, which involves social and cultural transformation and renewal.
Key figures in the Emergent Movement also avidly promote social justice—not just as an equal partner with the gospel, but as the gospel itself. For example, Brian McLaren’s vision of being missional “. . . eliminates old dichotomies like ‘evangelism’ and ‘social action.’ Both are integrated in expressing saving love for the world.
It’s a dicey line that authors like Stott and Keller have drawn for the church to walk: “We’re going to keep the gospel the main thing and focus the church on social action; in fact, in a sense, social action is the gospel too.” In theory, it’s a noble blend of word and deed, of transformational truth and dynamic love. Naturally, however, the further one pushes, the closer one gets to the place where social involvement ceases to be distinctly Christian and even starts to supplant that which is distinctly Christian. It’s no small wonder that David Bosch calls this issue “one of the thorniest areas in the theology and practice of mission today.”
In the 1990s, Stott acknowledged the danger of the dual emphasis on proclamation and social action that he campaigned for: “The main fear of my critics seems to be that missionaries will be sidetracked.” We believe that the results of the survey cited above indicate that being sidetracked is not merely a theoretical danger. Stott’s critics are correct: sending churches and missionaries are becoming sidetracked, and in many cases, pastors and missions committees barely seem aware of the distinction between missionaries who focus on social action and missionaries who focus on Bible translation, theological training, church planting, and gospel proclamation.
The Concerns- It would be unjust to represent the current shift toward social action by evangelicals as a wholesale abandonment of the gospel. In fact, in our experience most of the new evangelical missionaries coming to Africa genuinely love the gospel. Although Emergents like Brian McLaren are clearly trying to resurrect the wormy corpse of the Social Gospel, in conservative circles the problem is more subtle. Our concerns fall into three categories: history, theory, and practice.
Concern 1: Is History Repeating Itself?
As we survey what is happening in missions in our era, we wonder if enough attention is being given to the history of social activism in the North American church. We have been down this road before, and we should be aware of the lessons learned by previous generations.
In the late 1800s conservative evangelicals in the United States enthusiastically threw themselves into social reform projects in response to the pressures created by the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and immigration that typified the 1880s and 1890s. Church projects included everything from employment bureaus to day care, summer homes for tenement children, and food kitchens. These efforts were sponsored by churches and Christian groups ranging the spectrum from Calvinistic to pietistic, premillennial to postmillennial. However, evangelicals’ enthusiasm for social justice evaporated in the opening three decades of the 1900s. By 1930, in what has been called “the Great Reversal,” conservative evangelicals abandoned or severely curtailed their social action projects, primarily due to their fears of distortion and distraction.
Doctrinally speaking, evangelicals were keen to avoid the theological distortion of the Social Gospel promoted by theological liberals. The Social Gospel placed exclusive emphasis on social intervention, offering what was essentially an alternative, social salvation. In other cases, evangelicals’ concern was distraction. Over time, keen-eyed observers began to see that while, in theory, social action did not necessarily lead to replacing the cross with a soup kitchen, in practice, it often did lead to an unintentional displacement of the gospel. Having experimented with social action for a generation, and having become acquainted with its dangers, evangelicals consciously turned away from the dual-track (proclamation and social action) philosophy of the church and missions. The evangelist, D. L. Moody, had warned of this all along, saying that Christians should not go to the world with a loaf of bread in one hand and a Bible in the other, lest sinners take the loaf and ignore the Bible (Ibid., 81; see also John 6:26).
However, the lessons of the last century go further than that. Looking back, we can see that not only did social reform pose a threat to the gospel, it also had a deadly effect on missions. A case in point is the Student Volunteer Movement. The Student Volunteer Movement was a missionary movement that began in the United States in 1888, founded by university students who had a desire for world evangelism. The movement hosted large conferences at which Christian young people were challenged to become missionaries or missionary supporters; and in fact, through this movement, more than 20,000 college students became missionaries and 80,000 more dedicated themselves to support those who had sailed. Never before had there been such a large missions movement among young Americans (nor since, tragically).
The most astonishing fact about this movement is not that thousands of missionaries were sent out, but that less than forty years after the organization began to blossom, it died. In fact, very few Christians today have heard of the Student Volunteer Movement. According to David Doran, a key reason for its expiration was that it became distracted by social activism. Concerns over poverty, race relations, war, and imperialism were raised side by side with the preaching of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ: gradually the organization lost its spiritual purpose and died.
Sadly, the demise of the Student Volunteer Movement represented a broader trend. In 1900, mainline Protestant churches in the United States supplied eighty percent of North America’s missionaries. Over time, as those churches became more and more focused on social action, the number of missionaries they sent out actually became less and less. In 2000, those same (now fully liberal) Protestant denominations supplied only six percent of North America’s missionary force. Historically it appears that making social reform an equal partner with evangelism and theological training doesn’t enliven missions; it kills it.
Naturally, historical observations of this nature do not have the authority that biblical instruction does; however, before evangelicals run another lap on the track of social action missions, it would be wise to reflect on historical lessons like these. TO BE CONTINUED-
This series of articles was co-Authored by Joel James, D. Min., Pastor at Grace Fellowship, Pretoria South Africa AND Brian Biedebach, D.Min., Pastor at International Fellowship Bible Church, Lilongwe Malawi. Both authors have served as missionaries in Africa for over 20 years. This article first appeared in the TMS Journal- MSJ 25/1 (Spring 2014) 29–50
