Return to Justice

Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience

Soong-Chan Rah, Gary VanderPol

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781587433764
• eBook ISBN: 9781493404513
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Reclaiming an Evangelical History of Activism

In recent years, there has been renewed interest by evangelicals in the topic of biblical social justice. Younger evangelicals and millennials, in particular, have shown increased concern for social issues. But this is not a recent development. Following World War II, a new movement of American evangelicals emerged who gradually increased their efforts on behalf of justice.

This work explains the important historical context for evangelical reengagement with social justice issues. The authors provide an overview of post-World War II evangelical social justice and compassion ministries, introducing key figures and seminal organizations that propelled the rediscovery of biblical justice. They explore historical and theological lessons learned and offer a way forward for contemporary Christians.

Part 1: Justice Is Personal and Relational

1
The Power of Personal Story

John Perkins and the Christian Community Development Association

The first summer after planting our church in an inner-city neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we conducted a Vacation Bible School for the children of the community. Cambridge Community Fellowship Church (CCFC) was composed mostly of college students and young singles in their twenties who had been attracted to the church, in part, because of its urban ministry and social action vision. These young men and women were energized by the chance to work with urban children and youth, many of whom came from low-income housing near the church. That summer as I (Soong-Chan) observed Ivy League students and alumni demonstrate the gospel with the beginnings of a social engagement in the urban context, I realized that for many of our church members, this type of Christian involvement proved foreign to their church background.

In subsequent years, CCFC would continue evangelistic outreach to the children and youth of the low-income community in Cambridge as well as serve indigent senior citizens in a convalescence home near the church. The church partnered with a Latino church to offer tutoring and computer courses in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Boston and also with African-American churches and the Boston TenPoint Coalition to address the issue of gang-related youth violence.

One of the ministries of the Boston TenPoint Coalition intervened in the national gangs’ attempt to infiltrate Boston schools. Teamed with local police and armed with my clerical collar, I rode in the back of a police car to visit youth who had appeared on the school police blotter. We engaged the youth in the classic bad cop, good pastor routine. The police officer threatened the full force of the law, including the possibility of federal prosecution for gang activity. My role as the good pastor was to assure the youth that the community loved him and that the church would be there for him. Our shared goal was to keep the young man from joining the national gangs that were attempting to infiltrate our city. Law and grace worked together for justice.

When I look back on my experiences in urban ministry, I realize that neither my theologically conservative immigrant church upbringing nor my Evangelical seminary education had prepared me for this kind of civic engagement. I had no theological lens to understand this act of pastoral care. The seemingly singular focus on personal evangelism among many Evangelicals prevented me from seeing how riding around in a police car could actually be an integral part of the work of the church. Like many late-twentieth-century Evangelicals, I had embraced a dysfunctional and inadequate theology that revealed the impact of a twentieth-century American church history that divorced evangelism from works of social justice.

In contrast, CCFC attempted to embody the principles of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), a national ministry founded by and rooted in the teachings of John Perkins. As the founding pastor of CCFC, I had been influenced by the teachings of John Perkins through his books and through attendance at CCDA national conferences. John Perkins provides an Evangelical role model of a Christian leader passionately committed to personal evangelism with a deep concern for the lost. At the same time, Perkins has ministered to the poor and to the disenfranchised and has spoken about the radical biblical values of relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution. John Perkins revolutionized the way Evangelicals consider the role of the church in the context of a broken world. My own spiritual and ministry journey was shaped by the transformative power of his challenging words, which were amplified by the power of his story. John Perkins has lived a life that integrates personal evangelism and social concern in a way that challenged the status quo of late-twentieth-century Evangelicalism.

From Jerusalem to Babylon1

As discussed above, twentieth-century Evangelicalism witnessed a conspicuous and unfortunate divorce between acts of social justice and efforts of personal evangelism. This Great Reversal was a contrast to the integration of the two streams throughout the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, American Evangelicals demonstrated suspicion about the world. Since the world was destined for destruction, only worthy individuals in the world, not the world itself, needed saving. An optimistic view of society would be replaced by a negative approach to the world. This approach to ministry is most evident in American Evangelical engagement with the urban context.

American Christians have held a complicated relationship with the city. Often, the view of the city reflects their view of society as a whole: an optimistic view of the larger society translates into optimism about the city. The first wave of European colonialists carried an optimistic view of the New World and its cities. The blank slate of the Americas allowed for the self-perception that an exceptional people would build an exceptional society.2 The tabula rasa of the New World would be filled with the best of the Western world.3 Colonial American Christians anticipated that the cities of the New World would become cities set on a hill, New Jerusalems and Zions.4

This optimistic view of the American city would shift over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Industrialization, urbanization, and migration impacted the city in ways that the founders of these cities could not predict. The time period following the end of the Civil War and well into the latter half of the twentieth century witnessed drastic changes in the demographics of US cities. African-Americans participated in the Great Migration, relocating from former slave states in the South to cities in the North and on the East Coast. The cities also witnessed the influx of non-Protestant and non-Western European immigrants, resulting in notable growth.

However, the influx of these “unwanted elements” in the cities meant that white Protestants now perceived cities as dangerous places. As Robert Orsi states, “City neighborhoods appeared as caves of rum and Romanism, mysterious and forbidding, a threat to democracy, Protestantism, and virtue alike.”5 Cities were no longer perceived as cities set on a hill or as New Jerusalems, but instead as Babylons, the center of sin and evil. Randall Balmer notes that “Evangelicals suddenly felt their hegemonic hold over American society slipping away. . . . The teeming, squalid ghettoes, . . . festering with labor unrest, no longer resembled the precincts of Zion that postmillennial evangelicals had envisioned earlier in the century.”6

Meanwhile, suburban communities offered an attractive alternative for former residents of the city.7 White Americans (including white American Christians) would embrace the narrative that the city was a broken place while the newly formed suburbs were the new places of hope and possibility. The hope for a city set on a hill was replaced with a suburb set on a hill. The culmination of this shifting perspective came to be known as “white flight.” As a result, the twentieth century witnessed the departure of whites and white churches from the city in significant numbers.8 The suburbs became the new outposts for white Christians fearful of the changes in the city.

The perspective of the city as a sinful place is found in the numerous books on the city that emerged during the height of white flight. No longer were US cities considered to be cities “built on a hill” (Matt. 5:14). Instead they were portrayed as The Secular City or The Unheavenly City. These Sick Cities were Babylon by Choice, which had gone From New Creation to Urban Crisis, and where now Home Is a Dirty Street. This state of affairs compelled Christians to question The Meaning of the City and to ask, Is There Hope for the City?9 With the narrative of decline dominating the Christian imagination of the city, participants in white flight could easily justify their actions. White Christians could flee the city as a spiritual act, citing the desire to be a stranger to the evil of the world, to separate themselves from the evil workings of Babylon, and to flee to the comfort and safety of suburban life. The suburbs would be the new destination for those seeking to build a New Jerusalem in America. The pivot toward the suburbs resulted in the rise of quick and easy answers to successful church ministry. With the challenges of the city behind them, these suburban churches would look for effective ways to build up the church. Church growth books and church resources became readily available.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, churches in the suburbs carried out these principles of success and growth. New, state-of-the-art church buildings would attract new members to suburban congregations.10 Suburban church attendance swelled, but this did not lead to more conversions.11 Instead, suburban church growth was merely indicative of the population shift of the white community.

Harvie Conn summarizes studies conducted by Dennison Nash and Peter Berger: “The impressive increases in church membership statistics in suburbia were only a reflection of the increased number of families with school-aged children in the country, the postwar ‘baby boom’ that had helped to produce the suburban migration itself.”12 The much-trumpeted growth of suburban churches had little to do with new and innovative evangelism and church growth techniques and more to do with the timing of a population shift in American society.

As the population of white Christians shifted to the suburbs, numerous seminaries and denominations taught and advocated for church growth ministry practices that supported the suburbanization of Evangelicalism. Church growth methodology enticed pastors of fledgling churches as formulas for successful ministry, and the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) operated as one of the key magic formulas employed to grow suburban churches. The HUP asserted that churches would grow faster if they focused on reaching their kind of people. By removing the barriers of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity, churches would experience their desired levels of growth in the suburban enclaves. The HUP gave ecclesial justification for de facto segregation, which was already exacerbated by white flight.

Whether intentional or not, the HUP applied by suburban churches affirmed the wisdom of white flight, allowing the suburban churches to capture the migration of whites to the suburbs and leading to numerical growth. In turn, the growth of the suburban church gave (false) credence to, and perpetuated, the Church Growth movement principles, which offered methods of growth that were supposedly applicable to all churches everywhere.

The narrative of the city as fallen Babylon and the suburbs as the New Jerusalem continues to this day. Suburban churches in the latter half of the twentieth century believed that they were the locus of American Evangelical life. This belief in themselves as the New Jerusalem was clearly demonstrated by the numerical growth of Evangelical churches and the building of new, beautiful, and impressive church buildings.

In recent years, as suburban white Evangelicals have returned to the city to contribute to urban gentrification, the city is still perceived as Babylon, in need of help from those who had built New Jerusalems in the suburbs. Urban ministry books again reflect this narrative with titles such as The Urban Mission, The Urban Challenge, Redeeming the City, City Reaching, and The Urban Face of Mission.13 Cities that were once envisioned as beacons set on a hill, sending out missionaries to the world, were now Babylons in desperate need of missionaries—who would most likely come from the Jerusalem outposts of the American suburbs. The cities needed The Church That Takes on Trouble and suburban transplants as They Dare to Love the Ghetto, serving as Apostles to the City, each as The Change Agent who will be Taking Our Cities for God.14

These transplanted suburbanites envisioned themselves as bringing the heavenly city of Jerusalem from the suburbs to the city. While one could argue that this return to the city reflects a better narrative than the cultural disengagement that led to white flight, it isn’t much better. Both narratives reveal a deeply rooted assumption of the supremacy of an Evangelical theology rooted in Western cultural forms of church. Both narratives assume desperate cities are mission fields. While the white flight narrative allowed Evangelicals to flee the city, which in its decline had become the New Babylon, the narrative of the Jerusalem suburbs encouraged Evangelicals to return as saviors of the city.

Both narratives assume the inferiority of the city and those who have remained there. The poor and the marginalized are objects of scorn and pity. One must either flee from this reality or seek ways to be a missionary within it. Both narratives elevate white Evangelicals in the suburbs; they have made the right choices and are the exemplary Christians. Fleeing the city was a spiritual act of purity, and returning to the city was a spiritual act of Evangelical activism.

John Perkins’s Story

John Perkins offers an alternative narrative both to the story of withdrawal from the places of suffering and to the narrative of the white savior sent to the city to save the poor blacks. Through his personal story, Perkins reveals the folly of twentieth-century Evangelicalism, which had forsaken t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Justice Is Personal and Relational
• Part 2: Justice Is Public and Prophetic
• Part 3: Justice Confronts Power in Community
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover