The Mission of the Church is not to serve cocktails on the Titanic.
The world loves a church that gets involved in ‘social action’; running youth clubs, food banks, charity shops, homeless shelters etc. Indeed Christians in the UK have been filling the gaps in the states provision for hundreds of years; creating a free education system in the 18th century, and providing care to homeless children: George Meuller opened his first orphanage in 1836 and ran the biggest orphange in Britain with over 2000 children. Unlike then that love shown to the church is now almost always given only on the condition that ‘you keep your Christianity to yourself’.
Proselytising, or sharing the Gospel as we normally say is a big ‘no-no’ in this current culture. For the last 40 years or more we have been in an era where Christianity was accepted as long as you kept your beliefs to yourself. In this decade we have found ourselves in increasingly murkier waters where to be a committed Bible following Christian means to hold views that are deemed anti-social, unloving, and dangerous. That should worry the Western world because the current trajectory on freedom of speech and thought is not good, in fact it’s a bloody dangerous one (just for all you Jordan Peterson fans).
‘True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear. (She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children!
Thankfully a quote from the Gulag Archipeligo by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn about the evils of the old Soviet Union, and not from the UK but you can already see the parellels. Our ability to share God’s truth with people is becoming much more challenging, and nowhere greater than in our interactions with the world in social action projects.
Let’s use an anology of a coffee shop. The customers love the taste of the coffee, and find the service and ambience fantastic. However whenever the staff add sugar, the complaint comes back, ‘we didn't ask for sugar!’ The staff members soon stop offering sugar for fear of frightening off the customers and hope that the lovely coffee and service will be enough to convince people that they too would love to become a staff member. The problem is the coffee shop is run on a cancer ward and the sugar they have is the cure for the very cancer dooming their customers.
When we get involved in social actions projects that is the reality. We are surrounded by dying people and have the one thing they need more than food, lodging, health or wealth; Jesus, the only one who can give them eternal life.
I’m not decrying general church involvement in social action projects, far from it, but they should never be the primary mission of the Church, rather an overflow of God’s love for the broken world. They should be an enhancement of our gospel message not a replacement. Therefore to go into any social action project and agree not to be openly evangelically in our work may be what the world wants but it should be anthema to us.
We are called to be Salt and Light to the world, but if we willingly cover our light or make the salt tasteless then we are useless for the Lord. Luke 14:34 is clear:
“Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land nor for the dunghill, but men throw it out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
Ouch ! We really can be so useless that it’s not even good enough for manure! So any deeds that we do may look impressive but without them clearly gloryfying God they have no impact. I’ve recently discussed this here:
That quote that we should mainly preach the gospel through our actions is a favourite with Christians, not because it’s true but because to live like it’s true allows our gospel to be a much more comfortable one; of love, acceptance and service but no challenge, no repentance, no narrow path and no sacrifice. It sadly doesn't surprise me that the 2nd best selling Christian book after the Bible is Rick Warren’s ‘Purpose Driven Life’ selling over 33 million copies which offers a very soft gospel of belief without repentance being sufficient for salvation.
For sure our daily walk needs to be in line with our beliefs otherwise we are the worst of hypocrites. A much better quote attributed to St Francis is:
‘It’s no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching’.
The mistake we make is in assuming that it’s other people that are called to preach. We are all sent out to take the good news to the world as Jesus made clear to the disciples in Matthew 28 (Yes, he really did mean us as well). We can only do that with a clear verbal explanation of the gospel. As it says in 2 Peter 3:15–17:
‘but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong’.
Our calling is that of Isaiah 61:1–3
‘To preach good tidings to the poor, He has sent me to lead the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives’.
We must get into the habit of actually proclaiming the Kingdom both in word and deed. I am not saying that we should close the foodbanks, youth clubs and stop campaigning against abortion, but what we mustn't do is let these tasks be a distraction from our mission or take them on in any way that would stop us explicitly declaring the gospel or require us to temper it. The world will throw money and opportunities at the church as long as it compromises, but taking on government contracts or getting involved in multi-faith partnerships almost always harms our ability to witness. Additionally, Multi-faith initiatives risk us sending out either an ‘all ways lead to heaven’, or that ‘religious folk are nice people’ message. Not surprisingly if we start declaring the truth of the gospel these same ‘nice’ people tend to get angry very quickly.
The global church has sufficient resources to end poverty (the Catholic Church could do it alone without the Protestants: a shocking statistic), but even if it did and the world was fat and happy there would be no point if these same people are dead in their sins and doomed to miss out on eternity with Christ.
We are called to demonstrate the love of Jesus to people in our walk but then tell them what this hope is that we have, There is no point in freeing people from one prison only to release them into another. The freedom that we have is from death to life and that only comes from the proclamation, acceptance and faith in the good news of Jesus; that he died to save us from the penalty of death that we deserve for our sins. That through faith in him and turning away from living a sinful life we are saved. As De Young and Gilbert state in their book ‘What is the mission of the Church’:
“The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples in churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father”
This is the primary mission of the church and to focus on anything else is sin; falling short of what we have been called for and sent out to do. We are lifeguards on the Titanic and should be madly ringing the bell shouting ‘Iceberg!’ while handing out lifejackets — let’s not get lost in serving cocktails.
Notes: If you want to think this through in more detail I would commend the D&C (Defend and Confirm) Podcast which has recently done a 3 part series on this subject and my thanks go to hosts Russell Berger and Sean DeMars who helped sharpen the content of this article.