social justice

I am still reading the book on injustice by Gary Haugen. It kills my soul that so many people like myself grew up under the tutelage of those who counted prayers and miracles as the only worthy avenues for God’s expression to the worst situations on earth. We were taught that seeking solutions to health and justice outside this avenue was to lean on “the arm of flesh” (i.e., participate in a sort of rebellion against the spiritual). Well, this is going to change, and I cannot offer enough thanks to the people who put me on to this book as I was seeking direction.

A report came to me recently from China rightly criticizing American Christians saying that we accomplish a great deal without God. This is too often true. And then there is the downside (which I grew up under) — that is, leaning so much on prayer that we cannot see the tools that God has actually empowered us with. That means you remain in abuse or you suffer with minor medical conditions that grow serious. Come to think of it, what is the point of this commandment then?

Deu 6:5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

This means that we are to love God with our inner judgments, feelings, things that the mind dwells on and with our ability in all measure to do His will. Why should we not strike this balance between action and prayer? We are not talking about creating dependency situations and ongoing bids for more, more, and more — as our homegrown social causes tend to do. We are talking about the life and liberty of human beings and creating ways in which they may meet their own needs.

This excerpt from the Haugen’s book caught my eye last night:

…(1) Ours is a God of justice, a God who hates injustice and wants it to stop; (2) God desires to use his people as his instruments for seeking justice and rescuing the oppressed; and (3) God does not give his people a ministry that he won’t empower. Like you, perhaps, I am encouraged by the first promise — the knowledge that God is a God of justice. But frankly, when I look at the brutal and pervasive injustice in our world, the second promise — that he is prepared to use me to seek justice — strikes me as rather overwhelming. Perhaps it does for you as well. But then I consider this third promise, and it changes everything. God does not call us to a ministry that he will not empower. Period. And here is where we find real hope.

How pathetic it would be if God said, “Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow — and good luck to you out there!” But sometimes we act as if that’s precisely the way he works, suspecting that he calls us to a grand, godly, utterly impossible work in the world and then doesn’t bother to show up. But of course this is not true. As John Perkins explained at a justice forum sponsored by the International Justice Mission, Jesus promised that when he left the Holy Spirit would come and we would have “power” to be his witnesses — witnesses to his gospel, his love, his mercy and his justice (Acts 1:8).

Acting by God’s empowerment doesn’t mean that we will always be safe, that we will find the task before us easy or that we will triumph in ways we can always understand or measure. But from the bottom of my soul I believe that God has indescribable mysteries and miracles stored up for his people who seek justice in his name — miracles of a kind and quality that Western Christians, anyway, have not experienced in generations…

We will not see heaven come to earth or the world purged of injustice. But we will see that God of justice being faithful. We will see him “rescue the poor from those too strong for them” (Psalm 35:10). We will see that he “secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy” (Psalm 140:12-13). If we simply and courageously make ourselves available to him, Jesus Christ himself will “release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18) — and we will know the extraordinary joy of watching him do it through us.

We will meet with risks and defeats and disappointments, and we will see how deeply fallen the world truly is. We will be “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:7-9). [Haugen, Good News About Injustice, pp. 103-104]

As I consider anew the sacredness of my aspirations to express “church” out of my home and consider the kind of a spiritual powerhouse I would like that home to become, I’m starting to see the benefits of engaging in cross-cultural church. By that, I am not referring strictly to ethnic groups here, but places of gathering and spiritual engagement among those who do not find their sacred soil in home as I do. Some of these have different giftings and abilities than myself. The difficulty of fitting into a larger culture that often militates against my understanding of God’s purpose in my life has been a source of deep consternation to me for many years. But what if, I can plug into moments of fellowship in already existing ministries without compromising the integrity of how I believe I should live? This could have real possibilities for everyone.

The word I believe I have heard from the Lord lately is, “Live out of me.” There is no magic “key” for living that says we should all jump on board a cause and go to the far ends of the earth at once. But I do believe that not living out of Christ creates the vacuum in which so much evil develops unchecked. Why wait to learn this lesson until we find ourselves counted among the poor, the starving, the desolate and the abused? Why wait until an “incident” reminds us that we are to live out of the Vine? We already have no life but His, so why are we living as though we have?

I am disturbed. Something about the topic of social justice always divides me within myself. When I was a child, it was often a topic of conversation but not something to personally involve oneself in. After all, social justice pertains to the physical world — the here and now — and we were to concern ourselves with eternity. That always seemed kind of odd to me since we had to live everything else in the here and now. I might add that to get too heavily in things very far removed from us was thought to meddle in things not one’s own business. We were assured that if God wanted us to get involved in something that demanded courage, He would bring it to us — we should not go out looking for it.

We have living proof of well-meaning fools who try to change the whole world, and they never stop after they get the basics of human dignity squared away. They go on to more sophisticated things that are more difficult to justify. For instance, we all know — in theory at least — that we ought to attend to the poor of this world. Do we do that governmentally by forcing people to pay higher taxes to support the poor? I find a lot of modern dependency on government peculiar. It makes for bigger government and more ways to hide vice and corruption. Doesn’t that work counter to justice in the end?

I know of two social justice categories that God is most interested in, though — life and liberty — which He gave each of us because He wanted us to have them. That doesn’t even get into issues like equality. In ancient Israel people sometimes paid off debts by entering into servitude — sometimes the whole family was enslaved — but even that didn’t rob them forever of life and liberty. During every Jubilee year, lands and peoples were restored and debts forgiven. Until that time, the very basics of human dignity had to be observed for those in servitude.

I have thought of one really good reason to involve ourselves in matters of social justice. No, it doesn’t further the gospel in and of itself. But it does bring the love of God a bit closer to those who have never encountered it. Who knows but maybe He will turn their hearts if we will respond?

I am reading a book, Good News About Injustice, by Gary Haugen and would like to share an excerpt so you may get a taste for yourself and give it a think.

The Bible declares that the world is fallen, sinful. Often I am ill-prepared for action in a dark world of injustice because I have gotten used to a little lie within my mind. I have gotten used to the idea that the fair garden that I have worked so hard to carve out myself and my family is normal. I have gradually adjusted to the idea that “the world” into which Christ has sent his disciples is actually a reasonably pleasant backyard patio. Certainly it is no Garden of Eden — there are unruly shrubs, unpleasant neighbors, rainy days, tearful nights and even vandals. But in my garden the Fall is being managed. Gradually in my mind “the world” referred to in the Bible is defined more and more by the boundary hedges I share with my neighbors. Accordingly, I hone my Christian witness for engagement in this domesticated garden. I come to see the full armor of God as battle dress for fighting weeds, backyard pests and trespassers.

Having strayed in my mind so far from the truth of Scripture, I am caught totally off guard when the true nature of “the world” passes before my eyes. When confronted with the massive, violent opposition in our world, I feel that something has gone wrong and that things are out of control. I feel like I’ve made a wrong turn and I’m out of place. Even in moments when I am feeling most earnest about my faith and convinced of God’s power and presence in my life and in the world, when I am forced to consider the millions of men, women and children who suffer the great brutalities of injustice in this world, I feel disoriented. I may have assembled something of a Christian worldview, but when the evening news shows the weak of the world being beaten up so badly on such a massive scale, I feel vaguely like I’m not where I’m supposed to be.

“Oh, but you are!” says Jesus. And this is the point. Preparing our mind for action means coming to grips with the true nature of the world into which Christ has cast us, his disciples. It means coming to grips with how the Fall is playing itself out around the world in the present day. When humanity rejected its Maker — the very God of love, mercy, justice, goodness and compassion — it set on the throne the human will to power. The outcome in the twentieth century would be described in various ways, but I would just call it an open-mouthed grave: an entire generation of European youth composting the World War I battlefields of Verdun and the Somme, Hitler’s six million Jews, Stalin’s twenty million Soviet citizens, Mao’s tens of millions of political enemies and peasant famine victims, Pol Pot’s two million Cambodians, the Interhamwe’s million Tutsi Rwandans, and the millions of lives wasted away during apartheid’s forty-year reign.

We can easily forget that the same spirit of darkness rules our present age. In the affluent West it manifests itself in a spiritual barreness that made non-Western Christians like Mother Theresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gasp and grieve. For these Eastern Christians, Western brokenness and deathlike alienation from the sacred evoke a guttural reaction not unlike that experienced by Americans and Europeans at the sight of starving children. Outside the affluent West, however, in the Two-Thirds World where most of the children God created actually live, the Fall is being played out in ways more familiar to the biblical writers: it is manifest in a world of brutal injustice. As the apostle Paul wrote about the fallen world, quoting the prophet Isaiah and King David: “Their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:15-18).

I have to admit that often the image I have of Western do-gooders is that of a people who place their idealism on an imaginary world that they really do not understand. On the other hand, what if this is the reason God placed us in the position we are in today? When do we really have enough and why shouldn’t we put our resources to something besides preparing for retirement?

Isa 58:6 [Is] not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

We hear a lot about the widow and the orphan, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked. Few of us are prepared to take the extra step and defend the oppressed where danger is involved. I must confess here my own reluctance to involve myself in such, partly due to my upbringing. The topic has often crossed my mind, though, and I’ve wondered how to handle the problems of human trafficking and abuses in the light of the kingdom.

Most of the discussion I have heard in my life on oppression involved persecuted Christians. The Western Church has generally viewed attacks against missionaries and members of underground churches with shock and outrage even though scriptures tell us that persecution will come. But what about our role in the larger society? What if a whole society viewed Christians as caring about them, for Jesus’ sake?

A few days ago, I attended a chapel service in the university where I work. The guest speaker spoke about human trafficking around the world. For the first time, I heard a speaker lay out our kingdom role in pursuing social justice rather than try to enlist us in a social gospel to make the world fat and happy. I wish someone had laid this out for me years ago.

After I saw something of what an indigenous church could look like in the previous posts, I also saw what such a church could accomplish as salt and light in a dark and rotting world. What a long way we have come from when I was in institutional church 25 years ago! If they could help their own out-of-work members even a teensy bit, that was noteworthy. Since then I have seen more concern for the poor, and now we are moving into defending the oppressed –because “God so loved the world…” Best of all, it’s not just another cause guided by people’s opinions. It’s about two gifts that God gave each of us because He wanted us to have them — life and liberty!

I picked up a very good paperback from the chapel service, Good News About Injustice, by Gary Haugen. Please, please if you can, read this book or search inside the book icon at Amazon.com. Haugen’s own words tell it best:

As one who has with his own hands sorted through the remains of thousands of slaughtered Tutsi corpses, as one who has heard with his own ears the screams of boys being beaten like dogs by South African police, as one who has looked with his own eyes into the dull, blank stares of Asian girls abused in subhuman ways, I hope in the Word of God. For in the Scriptures and in the light of Jesus Christ, I have come to know God — my Maker, the Creator of heaven and earth, the sovereign Lord of the nations. It is through his Word that God reveals his character, and it is God’s character, and God’s character alone, that gives me hope to seek justice amid the brutality I witness. [Haugen, 68]

The website is a little less overtly “Christian” than the book, but you can learn more by going to the site for International Justice Mission. So impressed was I that this site is now linked on my home page.