Becoming a Just Church

Cultivating Communities of God's Shalom

Adam L. Gustine

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830841516
• eBook ISBN: 9780830873401
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

IVP Readers' Choice Award

Stop outsourcing justice!

Many local churches don't know what to do about justice. We tend to compartmentalize it as merely a strategy for outreach, and we often outsource it to parachurch justice ministries. While these organizations do good work, individual congregations are left disconnected from God's just purposes in the world.

Adam Gustine calls the local church to be just and do justice. He provides a theological vision for our identity as a just people, where God's character and the pursuit of shalom infuses every aspect of our congregational DNA. As we grow in becoming just, the church becomes a prophetic alternative to the broken systems of the world and a parable of God's intentions for human flourishing and societal transformation. This renewed vision for the church leads us into cultivating a just life together—in community, discipleship, worship, and more—extending justice out into the world in concrete ways.

Let's hold being and doing together, so we can become just, compassionate communities that restore shalom and bring hope to the world.

PART 1

AN ECCLESIOLOGY
FOR JUSTICE

JUSTICE ISN’T AN OUTREACH STRATEGY

A WAY OF LIFE FOR THE PEOPLE OF GOD

A few years ago I was involved with developing an immigrant legal ministry. Our church, located in a first-generation immigrant neighborhood, saw this as a tangible way to care for our neighbors and connect to our community. At the time it was still unusual for a local church to do this kind of work, so start-up required quite a bit of vision casting and support raising. As we cast vision broadly for this legal center, we regularly sold this ministry initiative to the larger evangelical world with a vision of evangelizing “lost” immigrants. We marketed the idea this way because of our hunch that evangelicals generally had little imagination for a legal clinic that wasn’t in its essence a cleverly disguised evangelism and church-growth strategy. We did this without regard to whether the populations we served might in fact already be Christian, and without asking if the work of providing this pathway within the US immigration system might be a worthy end on its own. We hadn’t planned on creating a dynamic in which the success of a legal clinic would ultimately be judged by the number of conversions we made. But that is exactly what we did.

Am I suggesting that God could not work through a legal clinic in an evangelistic way? Of course not. As Paul preached in Athens, God sets the times and places for people’s lives in order that they would encounter him, so I am comfortable seeing and celebrating the evangelistic fruit of any ministry initiative. No, the problem is more subtle than that.

One of evangelicalism’s fatal flaws is that we usually frame justice as an expression of the Great Commission. Jesus sent us into the world to make disciples of all nations, and this disciple-making work requires a wide variety of strategies and approaches. Outreach ministry is our catchall designation for this collection of strategies. Unfortunately, many, or most, evangelical congregations categorize justice as outreach—work we do “out there.” Seen as an application of the Great Commission, justice morphs into a strategy that helps us make disciples more efficiently. We wind up doing justice so we can win people to Jesus. On the face of it, it makes sense that justice would be framed this way. The problem is that framing justice as outreach is theologically inaccurate. The Scriptures do not frame the work of justice as a means to the end of evangelism. The commands to “loose the chains of injustice,” to “break the yoke of bondage,” and to see to it that widows, orphans, and immigrants flourish are rarely portrayed as a missional outreach strategy in that sense.

Framing justice as outreach is also practically problematic. In our normal ways of thinking about church ministry, we invite people to participate in outreach based on their personal preferences and passions. Folks passionate about youth ministry sign up for youth outreach. People fired up to serve others head to the park to distribute free water bottles. Evangelists head door-to-door to engage their neighbors in intentional spiritual conversations. There is something for everyone—in the work of making disciples everyone gets to play—and everyone gets to choose the outlet that suits them. When we frame justice as one of the options on the outreach menu of church life, church members sign up for opportunities to “do justice” by checking that box in the bulletin.

If justice is an option on the outreach menu, that means justice is optional for everyone. If you want to do justice, great! If not, we have other options better suited for you. A lot of churches operate this way, and it means we are shaping generations of Christians who feel free to opt in or out of the pursuit of God’s shalom.

GREAT COMMANDMENT, NOT GREAT COMMISSION

Justice is not at home in the Great Commission, but it thrives in the Great Commandment. It is essential to our understanding of what it means to love God and love our neighbors, the commands by which our allegiance, obedience, and faithfulness to God will ultimately be evaluated. When we allow justice to become a mere outreach strategy, we fail to grasp this reality in two ways. First, if justice is made to serve the ends of outreach and evangelism, it is rendered impotent to deal with actual injustice experienced by neighbors God calls us to lovingly lay down our lives for. Splitting our focus in this way will mean justice takes a back seat to the more urgent “outreach” priorities. Second, justice as outreach fails to engage us in a formational way. If justice is always “out there” and its purpose is to “lead people to Jesus,” it insulates us from the work God might want to do in our lives and in our congregation.1

Instead of compartmentalizing justice as outreach or evangelism, we need a fuller and more nuanced understanding of mission that sees God’s intent as larger (though surely not less) than the salvation of souls. God is, in Christ, reconciling all things and renewing all of creation back to God’s original intent. The story of what God is doing in the world through Jesus is bigger, better, and more beautiful than personal salvation, and we benefit from this enlarged view of God’s salvific purposes. This worldview that sees the gospel of the kingdom of God as the ultimate renewal and restoration of all things gives shape to our understanding of the role of justice in the life of the church.

David Fitch contends that the vocation of the church is to embody “faithful presence” to God and neighbor in the world.2 This is helpful language because it points us to the reality that the extent to which a church is faithfully present to God and neighbor in the world is the extent to which that church is participating in mission. This is the imaginative shift we need to employ to the work of justice as well. Justice must be more than an outreach strategy because it is both a matter of the character of our community (faithful) and our posture and practice in the world (presence).

Justice isn’t an outreach strategy; it’s a way of life for the people of God.

A WAY OF LIFE FOR THE PEOPLE OF GOD

The pursuit of justice is, first, about becoming a particular kind of people in the world. David Fitch is again helpful in noting that the pursuit of God’s shalom requires a “new kind of formation.” But rather than perpetuating discipleship and formation systems that focus primarily on individuals, we need to hear Fitch’s call to see the church as a “social reality witnessing to God’s kingdom in the world.” Because of this, cultivating “faithful presence . . . must therefore be a communal reality before it can infect the world.”3 This is a critical reminder that the formation of a people, more than the formation of persons, is the baseline work of the church, including justice.

If we are to see new ways of pursuing justice in the world, we must see the work of extending God’s shalom into the world intertwined with becoming a just people ourselves. Overwhelmingly, Scripture speaks of justice as a matter for the people of God, not to merely engage “out there” but to engage internally because the character of the people of God is measured by the extent to which they embody the justice of God in their way of life together.

This stresses the importance of cultivating a communal way of life—an ecclesiology that lives out the justice of God’s kingdom. Cultivating an embodied way of life as a local church requires a dedication to communal discipleship that gives source and depth to the discipleship of individual believers. If justice is ever going to flourish in and through the local church, it will do so because evangelicals embrace the notion that becoming a just people is central to the formative work God wants to do in our midst. This is one reason why justice is so ill at home in evangelical churches. We have never really conceived of justice as an expression of faithful ecclesiology and formation.

MOVING AWAY FROM COMFY INDIVIDUALISM

There is a lie hidden in our belief that justice is but an option on the menu of church life, and it is wrapped up in our belief that we can live our lives inconsequentially. It seems we believe that our actions, choices, values, voting patterns, and so on do not impact people outside of our spheres of relationships. We have come to insulate ourselves from those who live outside our spheres and who experience the world in a manner much differently than we do.

That insulation works just like insulation is supposed to. It makes us comfortable. When I am cozily inside the warmth of my own home, I am unconcerned about the elements battering those who are walking on the sidewalk out front. The great tragedy of that way of life is that a comfortable life renders us indifferent to the discomfort of others. As Dorothy Day said, “People insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.” I no longer feel compelled to act with purpose and intentionality. It’s not so much that I disagree with the notion that God intends everyone to experience shalom and flourishing but that I am warm and comfy where I am.

When Dr. King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he wrote it to pastors and religious leaders who could not see the world through the lens of his faith tradition. They were unable to understand the perspective of faith communities who were used to, and forced to, work out their faith “from below.” So, when Dr. King asserts that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” it would have been as obvious to him and his church as the notion that Jesus is Lord.4 And yet this notion of a mutuality between oppressed and oppressor, between those on the margins and those onlookers from the sidelines, would have seemed foreign to the mainstream white audience Dr. King was attempting to reason with.

Melba Padilla Maggay, writing from her context in the Philippines, shares similar sentiments. “We live in the presence of one another. Human solidarity is such that we all suffer together. . . . Whether we like it or not, one person’s deprivation is an indication of the guilt and humiliation of all.”5

The notion that we somehow share in one another’s reality because of our common humanity, and also because of our shared participation in a society with broken, unjust systems is nearly incomprehensible within the modern white evangelical imagination. American evangelicalism operates by an internal logic built on the primacy of the individual, and everything from our theological systems (think, penal substitutionary atonement) to our ministry strategies (think, four spiritual laws) is rooted in the foundational belief that faith is ultimately an individualist enterprise, a series of transactions between a human person and God.

A church full of people who are taught that faith is between them and God is perfectly positioned to assume that justice is not something that concerns them or their congregation. We can also fool ourselves into thinking that God’s shalom is attained incrementally through the progress made possible by, say, hard work or good financial management. This makes an intentional pursuit of justice totally optional. Tragically, this approach to faith and the subsequent deprioritization of justice is precisely the kind of moderation that compelled Dr. King to write his letter from the jail in Birmingham in the first place.

The church suffers from a kind of atrophy of the muscles of shalom in the world. Maggay contends that our “inertia of indifference springs from the notion that we can live our inner lives with integrity without having to concern ourselves with the poor.”6 Sadly, to be a church who leaves the pursuit of shalom to others who are “more strategically positioned” reveals that we have fallen prey to the lie that we can live with integrity without a concern for the poor and marginalized neighbors in our midst.

My experience growing up and working within the white evangelical context has served to reinforce this observation. It is not something we left behind in the civil rights movement as though we had some great awakening with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These are current problems. These are choices we are making today, choices that are shaped, informed, and codified through decades of indifference and generations of insulating ourselves from the injustice experienced by those at the margins of American society. This dynamic has accelerated the exodus of justice-seeking evangelicals from the daily life and ministry of the local church, folks who have opted to create alternative communities of support for the work of justice in the nonprofit and parachurch world.

Of course there is a fatal flaw in this plan. Despite the good work happening on the ground by those who find themselves at the margins of congregational life, this supposedly tidy division of duties is ultimately settling for something less than what God intends. God’s intentions for shalom and justice will invite us to reconsider the divide and our way of being the church in the world.

GOD’S SHALOM IS EXPRESSED AND EXTENDED IN THE PEOPLE OF GOD

God’s shalom cannot be expressed fully (to the extent that we can experience it before the new Jerusalem) apart from the people of God embodied and rooted in local contex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Dennis Edwards
• Introduction
• PART 1: AN ECCLESIOLOGY FOR JUSTICE
• PART 2: JUSTICE IN OUR CONGREGATIONAL LIFE
• PART 3: WHAT'S NEXT?
• Epilogue: Commence Justice
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Praise for Becoming a Just Church
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright