EVANGELISM AND SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT: The relationship between evangelism and social action

 [Editors Note: This is the third installment of a 5-part series from collective member Tim Chester on the relationship of Evangelism and Social Involvement.  This has been adapted from his book Good News to the Poor, IVP, 2004.  Availabe in the UK here and in the US here.]

 The relationship between evangelism and social action

 I want to make three assertions:

 1. Evangelism and social action are distinct activities

Some refuse to make any distinction between evangelism and social action. They conflate social action and proclamation into one activity.  The problem is that this usually ends up with one aspect – and it is usually evangelism – being lost.

Attempts to fuse development and proclamation cannot work from a biblical perspective for two reasons.

First, social involvement is about effecting change in history. It is historical provisional. It can be un-done. Proclamation on the other hand is about effecting eschatological change. I remember consoling a friend after the Rwandan massacres in 1994. He had spent four years involved in community development in Rwanda. Now it seemed his years of hard work had been overturned in a matter of days. The fruit of social action can be undone, the fruit of proclamation cannot.

Second, social involvement at its best is about harnessing the resources within a community. It is about empowering a community through their participation. The alternative is a paternalistic approach which is short-term, creating dependency in its beneficiaries. In good development an understanding of the problem and its solutions come from within a community. In contrast, the message of the gospel is that we are powerless and cannot participate in our salvation. Both an understanding of the problem and the solution must come from outside the community. This outside message does not come from Western technology, money, expertise, still less from free market capitalism. It comes from heaven. This is one reason for the emphasis in John’s Gospel that Jesus is ‘from heaven’.

2. Proclamation is central
Many evangelicals want to argue that evangelism and social action are equal activities. They describe evangelism and social action as two wings of bird or the blades of a pair of scissors. While evangelism and social action are partners in many situations, it is inadequate to think of them as corresponding activities of equal impact. But the greatest need of the poor, as it is for all people, is to be reconciled with God and escape his wrath. Only the message of the gospel can do this.

The adage, often attributed to St Francis of Assisi, that ‘we should preach always, sometimes using words’ will not do. Social action can demonstrate the gospel, but without the communication of the gospel message social action is like a signpost pointing nowhere. Indeed, without the message of the gospel it points in the wrong direction. If all we do are good works among people then we point to ourselves and our charitable acts. People will think well of us, but not of Jesus Christ. We may even convey the message that salvation is achieved by good works. Or we may convey the message that what matters most is economic and social betterment. We cannot do social action without evangelism.

This means: what makes Christians social involvement distinctly Christian is a commitment to reconciling the poor to God through the proclamation of the gospel.

A community development project in Honduras was working with indigenous people in the rainforest. The communities felt their greatest need was for education. But the development agency knew that loggers were progressively clearing the forest. If nothing was done the land and the livelihood of the communities would be threatened. The community had no awareness of this. So the development agency took them upstream to show them what was happening. They then began to work together on claiming land rights and establishing a reserve. Their need for education was a real need. But they had to be shown that they faced a much greater need.

It is like that with God’s judgment. People think they have all sorts of needs and often they are real and pressing needs. But there is a much greater need of which people are unaware. It is our job to take them upstream, as it were, and warn them of the coming judgment of God. We cannot wait for people to express the need for reconciliation with God. Apart from the gospel, we have enough trouble acknowledging we are sinners, let alone acknowledging that we deserve the judgment of God.

Without an on-going awareness of eternal needs over time our focus will become temporal needs. A community’s temporal needs press themselves upon us. They are, by definition, immediate. We need consciously, therefore, to keep in mind that greatest need which is known to us only through the gospel – the need of a person to be reconciled with God and escape his wrath. Time and again this has proved the greatest challenge facing Christian social involvement – to keep in view the greatest gift we have to offer a needy world: the words of eternal life.

3. Evangelism and social action are inseparable

Given that the greatest need of people is to be reconciled with God and given that this need can only be met through the message of the gospel, it might seem logical to say that evangelism has priority. It might seem a short step from saying proclamation is central to saying evangelism is our priority. The problem is that it is not clear what ‘priority’ means in this context. It suggests a choice in which evangelism should be chosen or competing priorities in which social action can be neglected. We prioritise by making a list and doing the activities at the top of the list. If there is no time left for items lower down the list then this does not matter because we have deemed such things less important. The implication of saying evangelism has priority in this sense is that it does not matter if we have no time for social action.

But such choices rarely bare any relationship to reality. In our involvement in the lives of others we cannot choose to ignore their social needs. We cannot treat people in isolation from their context. Evangelism alone might make sense in the lecture room. It may even just about make sense in a middle-class suburb. But it makes no sense at all when working among the poor. Mission takes place in and through relationships and relationship are multi-faceted. Proclamation should be central, but a centre implies a context and our proclamation should take place in the context of a life of love.

So social action and evangelism should neither be identified with one another, nor separated. Evangelism and social action should be viewed as distinct, but inseparable activities in our mission to the poor in which proclamation is central. In any relationship with the poor or with a poor community we must as evangelicals be looking for opportunities to share the message of the gospel. This is not because our social action is invalid without evangelism. It is because love requires that we share the message of hope that meets people’s greatest need.