How to Reach Non-Whites

Michael Horton makes a great point about context-ualization in his recent article "Does Anybody Really know What Time It Is?" He writes:

If we are going to understand our times--and how the gospel addresses us in them--con-textualization itself will have to be "context-ualized." In other words, we have to realize that this concept too belongs a particular pattern of thinking and web of assumptions we have inherited as denizens of a certain time and place.

"The gospel," adds Horton, "has been around a lot longer than has the doctrine of contextualizing."

I can hear the objection as I type: "But doesn't Paul claim to have become 'all things to all men'? Doesn't this prove that contextualizing has been around since the very beginning?" The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes, without attempting to prove, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between Paul's "becoming a Gentile" in his own day and a church planter's attempt to pull out all stops to relate to his target audience in our own.

The reason these dots don't connect is simple: The division between Jews and Gentiles was not primarily racial, but theological. In other words, it wasn't merely that Jews hated non-Jews and Paul decided to break those illegitimate barriers down. Rather, the wall of division was erected by God himself under the Mosaic covenant, with a whole bunch of rules and rituals bequeathed from on high to reinforce it. The purpose of this separation was so that God could illustrate what holiness and privilege looked like, and ultimately, to illustrate the weakness and inability of his privileged people to retain their unique, set-apart status.

Turning to today, there simply is no demographic category that even comes close to mirroring Paul's concern in I Corinthians 9. Whether we're talking about race, gender, or socioeconomic status, the fact is that in Christ Jesus there is no longer male or female, Jew or Gentile, bond or free, for we are all one in Christ. To put it simply, the gospel makes these categories irrelevant. The new covenant is catholic in the truest sense of that word, for it opens up God's promises to all tribes, tongues, peoples, and nations.

Furthermore, do we really want to mirror the apostle's supposed demographic sensitivity? What if I taught a seminar at a missions conference titled, "How to Reach Non-Whites"? After all, since Paul lumped all non-Jews into one catch-all category, why can't I do the same? Asian? African? Hispanic? Arab? Oh, I totally understand all those people. They are non-white, after all.

To be honest, if my vast experience at being both an earthling and Adamic cannot qualify me to relate to other Adamic earthlings without also having to learn about monster trucks, fine cigars, or teenage vampires, then I may as well quit now, because I just don't have the time.

.

For two of those pursuits, anyway....

Some Questions Concerning Contextualization

Mike Horton wrote a great piece for Modern Reformation recently critiquing the dogma of contextualization with which I hope to interact in subse-quent posts.

(For those of you unfamiliar with contextualization, it refers to the practice of presenting the message of God’s Word in such a way that it will be intelligible to those who are listening. There’s much more to it, of course. Included is the idea that we need to take demographics into account when preaching so as to understand our audience and meet them where they’re at, as the saying goes.)

To kick things off, I thought I’d ask a couple questions to get the conversation flowing:

Can we not say that the categories that contextualizers consider so important—such as socioeconomics, race, and gender—are the very categories Paul insists are now irrelevant under the New Covenant (Gal. 3:28)?

Is there really a one-to-one correspondence between Paul’s becoming all things to all men on the one hand, and our incarnating the gospel to our hearers on the other? In other words, are Jew/Gentile relations analogous to Black/White ones?

Discuss.

Trickle-Down Missionomics

In Carl Trueman’s recent post on the seeming obsession that many Christians have with popular culture, he lists a number of areas of caution, beginning with what he calls a “coincidence of concerns of the cultural Christian types and those of the middle class chatterati.” He writes:

Plenty of talk about Christian approaches to art, music, literature, sex, even international politics. All very interesting subjects, I'm sure, and the topics of many a chardonnay-fuelled discussion after a hearty dinner party. But what about subjects that aren't quite so interesting? Take street sweepers, for example; or hotel lavatory attendants; or workers on an umbrella manufacturing line. Why no conference on the Christian philosophy underlying these vital callings and trades? After all, imagine how gruesome a Christian conference on international poverty would be if it was held in the pouring rain in the Ritz Carlton hotel in some big city, but there were no road sweepers, lavatory attendants, and umbrella makers. Wet, dirty and unhygienic, I would guess.

Amen and Amen.

I have been observing for years how that the market-driven Catholicity that fuels much of the missional movement is concerned primarily with all things artsy and fartsy rather than nitty and gritty. To state it differently, if you want a write-up in the latest issue of Authentic Church Planting magazine, your target audience should be Hunter the Poet rather than Joe the Plumber.

It is sad that the modus operandi of the market also fuels so much of the American church. Just as prime real estate would never be given to build low-income housing, so neither would prime missions funding be given to reach the people who live in low-income housing.

Three cheers, therefore, for those who follow the footsteps of Jesus and spend themselves for the poor and unnoticed. And for those who insist that God has a special place in his redemptive plan for (the hip, edgy, bohemian parts of) “the city,” well, it may be the case that this approach to missions is the ecclesiastical equivalent of trickle-down economics: Sure, the blue-collar proletariat will get a morsel here and there, but only if it happens to fall from the table of the cultural bourgeoisie.

Cultural Catholicity Versus Divine Demographics

Concerning the various rival catholicities that jostle for recognition in the world of Protestant missionalism, Michael Horton argues that what we really need is to jettison our incarnational attempts to force God to fit into the soap operas of our own lives and instead see ourselves as characters in his drama of redemption: "It is the church's responsibility to stage local performances of God's 'community theater' through concrete practices."

The biggest impediment to this, Horton points out, is the fact that so many ministers are better social critics than they are pastoral theologians and exegetes.

It is remarkable how confidently pastors and theologians address the social, moral, economic, and political issues of the day in comparison with the false humility often displayed in proclaiming the doctrines of Christianity.... However, catholicity is an essential element of the community that any genuinely Christian mission serves. When the gospel unites us, there are no Republicans or Democrats, youth or elderly, rich or poor, healthy or sick, devotees of hip-hop or classical music, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or other, but fellow sinners absolved by the one who has all authority in heaven and earth to create his own demographic.

I think Horton is spot-on here. After all, the passage so often cited for cultural sensitivity (the one about Paul "being all things to all men") goes on to demonstrate how culturally insensitive the apostle actually was. Unless, of course, categorizing the entire world as either "Jew" or "Greek" counts as having one's ear to the ground and finger on the pulse.

Sun City, Saddleback, and Ecclesial Apartheid

I am preaching through Genesis on Sunday evenings (and having a good time doing it I might add), and we just looked at the Tower of Babel episode the other night. As many commentators point out, the confusion of languages visited upon the Babelites in Genesis 11 is reversed in Acts 2 as “devout men from every nation under heaven” are given to hear the mighty works of God supernaturally proclaimed in their own tongues.

In People and Place, Michael Horton highlights the fact that the now-united multitude still retained their distinctive tongues, the significance being that those who believed in Christ that day “were more perfectly one than any society, yet in a harmony of difference.... They were one because they shared the same things, not because they became fused into the same thing.” He continues:

As we survey the contemporary ecclesial landscape, however, this account of catholicity seems to be reversed. Whereas an almost infinite diversity of doctrine and practice is tolerated, even celebrated, churches are becoming more hegemonic than ever with respect to politics, socioeconomic position, age, gender, and cultural tastes. [He then makes a veiled reference to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church to illustrate his point.]

Horton’s term for the so-called “missional” obsession with target demographics is ecclesial apartheid, which is the very antithesis of the catholicity that was inaugurated at Pentecost and will become fully visible at the end-time harvest of sinners from all nations, tongues, tribes, and peoples. But “wherever Christ is the focus of catholicity and Word-and-sacrament ministry is the means, a genuinely multicultural and multigenerational community is generated.”

In the place of a “catholicity of the market”—which seeks to reverse cultural divisions with cultural commonalities—the church needs the kind of catholicity that arises not from the culture but from the cultus. This alone can prevent the church from becoming “a collection of consumers or tourists rather than a communion of saints and pilgrims.”

Contrary to the ecclesial apartheid of the missional movement, therefore, genuine catholicity is a necessarily churchly and supernatural phenomenon which secures for God’s people the ability to be one, but not the same.

(Am I bugging you? Don't mean to bug ya....)

Aristocratic Missionalism

The second of Niebuhr's five options regarding the relationship of Christ to culture is dubbed "The Christ of Culture." This position, Niebuhr argues, is adopted by those who hail Jesus as the Messiah of their society, and has been represented by the early Gnostics, Abelard, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and the various "culture-Protestants" who have dominated the religious scene since the eighteenth century.

Advocates of "The Christ of Culture" are to be congratulated, Niebuhr maintains, for making Jesus appear less alien than he does in the "Christ Against Culture" mindset.

"The cultural Christians tend to speak to the cultured among the despisers of religion.... They are missionaries to the aristocracy and the middle class, or to the groups rising to power in a civilization. "

The main difficulty with this view, argues Niebuhr, is that its watered-down flavor is so diluted that it fails to win the respect of true pagans or the truly pious. Carson remarks that:

"[Pagan writers] suspect that what is to them a compromised position will weaken the purity of their paganism, or of their liberalism, or of their Marxism—just as, from the other side, the orthodox suspect that these cultural Christians have sacrificed too much of what is essential to Christianity. "

From where I sit, I see a disturbingly fair amount of this "aristocratic missionalism" in my own circles. The main difference, though, is that the much-coveted prize is not so much the respect of politicians or scientists as it was in Niebuhr’s day, but the props of the bohemian, soul-patched Gen X-er (the well-inked Gen Y-er works, too, but he doesn’t tithe).

The way this plays out in the contemporary scene is in our obsession with "the arts" and "the city," and our palpable disinterest in anything that likes NASCAR, wears a blue collar, and rocks a John Deere cap unironically.

In biblical terms, these are the same people who would have bragged to Jesus about how impressively ornate their temple was, right before he pronounced that not one of its edgy, postmodern stones would be left upon another.

Art: Take It, Leave It, But Don't Redeem It

Continuing our look at the relationship of the Christian to popular culture and media, I now turn to those who insist that the "missional" believer (or church) must embrace the genres of film, television, and music in order to "speak the language of the culture."

Appeal for this position is often made to I Cor. 9:19-23 where Paul claims to "become all things to all men in order to save some." Unfortunately for the "contextualists," Paul's demographic sensitivity is rather wanting, as seen in his placing all of humanity in one of two broad categories (Jew or Greek). It's kind of the equivalent of a missions conference holding a seminar called "Ministry to Non-Whites."

More damaging to the "incarnational" approach is the incarnation (the one of Christ I mean). One would think that something like, say, God becoming a human would be sufficiently accomodating without my quoting Panic! At the Disco in my sermons in order to "connect with the kids."

To our point, then, I would argue that it is a tad ironic that those who laud "authenticity" would advocate the believer's consuming pop media simply in order to build a bridge to people that wouldn't otherwise exist (anyone remember Mr. Rosso?). Just admit it: if you thought your dad was lame for saying "like, totally" to you when you were a kid, then it's a pretty safe bet that when we say "mos' def'" to ours the response is a similar rolling of the eyes. What... ever.

And finally, I often wonder why it's just white culture whose art is co-opted for missional purposes (either in its bourgeoisie, high-brow, wine-and-cheese expressions, or in its bohemian, arthouse, po-mo variety). I could be wrong, but if there are hip hop- or flamenco-inspired worship services in the PCA, I've never run across them.

Maybe Oscar Wilde was right, and "all art is useless." If art could talk, perhaps it would say, "Take me or leave me, but please don't redeem me."

Stop Serving God

Dr. Michael Horton's lecture at Westminster Seminary's recent conference was quite interesting and the occasion for plenty of questions during the Q&A time that closed the conference. His basic thesis was that God doesn't need our service, but our neighbor does.

The reason many Christians rarely engage in evangelism, he complained, is that they are so busy with the myriad of programs and "service opportunities" their churches provide. The tremendous pressure to get involved in various church ministries stems from a rather novel interpretation of Ephesians 4:11-12, a passage that in versions other than the KJV seems to teach what has been called "every-member ministry" (the entire argument hangs on the presence or absense of the comma after "saints" in v. 12).

Horton argued that a proper view of the ordained ministry (which insists that it is God, through the officers he has ordained, who serves his people on the Lord's Day) will revolutionize our expectations concerning what church is all about. In a word, we don't come to church to serve God, but for him to serve us. When we do serve God throughout the week, it is not by means of offering him something he lacks, but by means of loving our neighbors.

This does seem to comport with Jesus' own insistence that "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve..." (Matt. 20:28).

So if this position is correct, we would be justified in saying that we should stop serving the Lord precisely so that we may begin serving our neighbors. The way we are prepared to do this is by being served by Christ through his minister on the Lord's Day, during which our entire existence is re-oriented according to the story that God is telling in Christ.

It is only when the marks of the church are given their proper attention that the mission of the church will flourish in the world.

Post-Graduate Ecclesiology?

I'm down in Southern California for Westminster Seminary's conference on the importance of being both missional and Reformed.

This topic's got me a-thinking....

There is no small amount of suppressed guilt among pastors of confessional churches about the fact that our main source of growth, besides babies being born, comes from burned-out ex-evangelicals. The way things seem to work is that the megachurches get 'em saved, and then in a few years they graduate from them to us.

On the one hand, I think that Reformed churches can take a page or two from someone like Mark Driscoll's playbook, for despite his rough edges and various inconsistencies, he really does do a superb job of training his people in what he calls "the ground war," by which he means being very purposeful and engaged in the life of our neighborhoods and communities.

But still, I must also point out that any church that insists upon a confessional identity and reverent liturgy will automatically have serious liabilities when it comes to attracting non-believers. I mean, if I were a pagan, I'd go to Mars Hill Church in Seattle. It's got lots of young people, loud music, and a really funny pastor.

I'm curious, therefore, to hear what the faculty of Westminster have to say about what seems to be an inescapable condundrum for Reformed ministers and church planters: Must we be willing to completely re-tool your philosophy of ministry and make worship about evangelizing the non-churched? And if not, must we be content with the scraps that fall from the megachurch's table?

The Federal Vision and Global Christendom

The third affirmation/denial of the Federal Vision's Joint Statement reads, in part:

"We affirm that the Christian faith is a public faith, encompassing every realm of human endeavor. The fulfillment of the Great Commission therefore requires the establishment of a global Christendom. We deny that neutrality is possible in any realm, and this includes the realm of 'secular' politics. We believe that the lordship of Jesus Christ has authoritative ramifications for every aspect of human existence, and that growth up into a godly maturity requires us to discover what those ramifications are in order to implement them."

It's late, so I'll offer a few thoughts and we'll further the discussion in the comments section.

1. If Christianity is such a "public faith," why the instruction by Jesus to perform our acts of devotion and mercy privately, to the point that the works of the right hand are not even known by the left?

2. If the Great Commision is a charge to strive for "global Christendom," then why didn't Paul or Peter issue this clarion call when they specifically addressed the role of the believer in society (Rom. 13; I Pet. 2)? "Living a quiet life" and "minding our own business" is hardly the stuff of societal transformation.

3. Is the denial of "neutrality" also a denial of "common" endeavors? If there's a specifically Christian position on, say, economics or health care, I've not found it in the Bible.

What I find ironic in much of the transformationist rhetoric is that, to me at least, it always seems like it's those people's culture over there that needs redeeming (black culture, for example), but not our own. So for the sake of argument I'll agree, the ghetto could do with less drugs and crime, but is it not also true that the suburbs of Atlanta would be more "redeemed" if there were no shopping malls, or that Fallujah would have seemed more "heavenly" if hundreds of its civilian women and children hadn't been killed?

Or is the concern for America's greed and Iraq's dead not the right kind of sanctified politics?

Creed, Deed, and "True Christianity"

Rick Warren's call for "a reformation of deeds and not creeds" notwithstanding, neither the Bible nor the reformers seem to recognize many of the distinctions upon which the edifice of "evangeliberal" pietism is built (head vs. heart, Paul vs. Jesus, physical vs. spiritual, and doctrine vs. practice).

As I argued in my last post, the divorce of "true Christianity" from its corporate practice is dangerous and unwarranted, particularly when the so-called "essence" of the faith is so mystical, personal, and romantic that it defies definition. To be sure, "I Wanna Know What Love Is" may still be the heart's cry of many Jr. High kids today, but the love that Jesus demonstrated toward his people, and the love they return to him, is more concrete than what is evoked by much of the "Jesus is my Boyfriend" Christianity that is advocated these days.

My point, then, is that the faith-once-delivered is also the faith-corporately-practiced. To identify the locus of "real Christianity" in some internal experience or "religious affection," or in the practice of an extra-canonical sacrament such as quiet times or afterglows, is to remove the faith from its objective, historical context and place it in a realm that we can only hope to understand by playing God (and he hates it when his creatures do that...).

Does the old Jesus of History/Christ of Faith dichotomy ring a bell for anyone?

Confessionalism, no less than evangeliberal pietism, desires to see faith demonstrated in its professors. But rather than the litmus test being one's devotional life, voting record, or collection of Left Behind novels, it should be sought in the fact that those who profess Christ gather together each Lord's Day around Word and Sacrament, confessing their sins, singing his praises, and hearing, eating, and drinking the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In a word: Until we learn otherwise, a "real Christian" is an observant one.

Of Tulips and Altar Calls: How Does One "Get Religion"?

The comments on our last thread have been interesting, particularly those concerning the relationship of Reformed theology to evangelicalism.

When we consider the relationship between these two branches of Protestantism by posing such questions as: 1). How do we "get religion"? 2). What does it look like once it is acquired? 3). How is religion cultivated? 4). How is it passed on?, the two systems appear quite distinct and even antithetical to one another.

In answering the first question, for example, the evangelical response to how religion is acquired (if such terminology would even be granted in the first place) would center around the extra-curricular evangelistic activities of Christians, while the Reformed believer would focus more upon the local church's official mandate to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments.

Do both sides have a valid point? Does Christ's Great Commission have a broad application to all believers, or is it intended solely for the church's ordained officers?

One Market, Under God – Part Four: Christian CEOs, Rise Up!

The final section in Dick Doster’s article “The Kingdom Work of the Corporate World” (byFaith Magazine, October 2006) is called “Transforming Business for the Kingdom.” In it Doster highlights various Christian artists—such as Suzy Shultz, Bret Lott, Bach, and U2—who have created some of the world’s best art, and then asks, “Where are their business counterparts—the entrepreneurs and corporate executives who, with the same passion, reshape the world through business?” He continues:

“God’s people can, as agents of his redemptive plan, transform business, stripping it of selfish ambition and pursuing instead what’s best for their neighbors. Through business, God’s people can harness mankind’s creative activity, and with it nurture his creation, developing products that make life better.”

I’ll list the unspoken and unproven assumptions for you, just in case you missed them all: 1. Business is supposed to be “transformed”; 2. The transformation of business is something Christians are responsible to do “as agents of God’s redemptive plan”; 3. Business and “selfish ambition” are things that the corporate executive can and should separate; 4. What is “best” for our neighbors is business (and everything that goes with it); 5. The products that business creates “make life better.”

Doster then ends his article with the incredible statement that many regretful Christians, on their deathbeds, may (rightly) gasp: “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”

I will exercise Herculean self-restraint here and merely point out that such confusion of kingdoms is alarming to say the least. When God’s redemptive plan is equated with what The Gap does, or conversely, when the latter’s vision statement begins to resemble the church’s Great Commission, then what we are left with is a Social Gospel that may be relevant, but only at the expense of its holiness.

In short, when Christ's kingdom is trivialized and the culture sacralized, what we are left with is earth instead of heaven....

Transformers and Decepticons

(Forgive the Eighties reference; unless you were or had a kid during that decade, you'll just scratch your head at the title of this post, so if you don't get it, just forget it and move on....)

All the language concerning the "transformation of culture" that we hear in ecclesiastical circles today gives rise to the question, "Just where did this idea come from?" According to Hart, it is part and parcel of pietist Christianity. He writes:

"Throughout the twentieth century, evangelical and mainline Protestants have assumed, thanks to their pietist heritage, that religion has immediate relevance to all walks of life.... [T]he legacy of pietism is a this-wordly form of devotion that... manifests 'the passion to hammer down history, to touch the transcendental, to earth the supernatural in the mundane.'" (Hart, Lost Soul, xxx).

The intended result of pietism, whether liberal or evangelical, is results. When the poor are fed, abortion is criminalized, and X amount of souls are converted, then the gospel has done its (tangible and utilitarian) work.

Biblially speaking, where does this idea that the ministry of the gospel must produce a visibly better society come from? And if this is not the point, then what is?

Trickle-Down Missionomics

Does the emphasis upon (or infatuation with) "the city" that men like Tim Keller display strike any of you as odd? The city, so the argument goes, is the hub of culture, and if the city can be won, the ripple effects will reach the towns and villages.

It reminds me of President Reagan's "trickle-down economics," according to which the opulence of the wealthy will eventually benefit everyone else.

What should we make of this? Is our goal to transform society, and if so, is the city integral to reaching that goal? Why does the Bible use so much agrarian imagery if it's the city that is central to God's redemptive plan?

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part Five: An Overlooked Passage

Though the two most oft-quoted passages relating to mercy ministry are Luke 10:30-37 and Galatians 6:9-10, it would be a difficult task to prove their direct relevance by demonstrating that they provide instruction to the church, as such, for developing diaconal ministry.

But interestingly, there is one particular passage in the New Testament that explicitly addresses the issue of the church officially giving financial aid to those in need. In this passage we not only learn that the church is responsible for mercy ministry, but we also are provided with a checklist telling us exactly who qualifies. Ironically, however, this passage rarely finds its way into discussions of mercy ministries (due either to neglect, or the fact that we don't like its conclusions).

In I Timothy 5:3-16 we encounter the Apostle Paul giving specific instructions to his disciple regarding the financial aid that the church gives to widows. Paul begins with the less-than-sensitive statement that Timothy, as an overseer of the church, is to "honor widows who are truly widows" (v. 3). The obvious inference here is that there is more to a woman’s being a "widow" than her husband dying. According to the apostle, to qualify as a widow in need of financial assistance from the church, a woman must be thus described:

"[She has] set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day… having a reputation for good works … she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work" (vv. 5, 10).

And this is not all. If she meets all of these requirements, but is either young enough to remarry or has children old enough to support her, she is not be given aid:

"But if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God. She who is truly a widow, [is] left all alone...."

In fact, Paul is blunt enough to write:

"Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband.... But refuse to enroll younger widows.... If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them" (vv. 9, 11, 16).

Paul’s reasoning behind these strict instructions is clear: "Let the church not be burdened, so that it may care for those who are really widows" (v. 16).

OK, will someone please explain to me how this passage—undoubtedly the most relevant to the issue in the New Testament—is only NOW finding its way into our discussion of mercy ministry?

Why has all our talk about whether the church is "an agent of common grace" completely ignored the only text in the New Testament that actually addresses what we’ve been discussing?

And in the light of this pericope, can anyone still insist that a local church's diaconate is responsible for the needy outside the bounds of its immediate care?

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part Four: The Christian Individual

Another important qualification to the (undisputed) notion that churches should have ministries of mercy concerns the role of the Christian as an individual. The position that many adopt (but rarely attempt to prove) is that passages like the parable of the Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37 or Paul’s instruction to “do good to everyone” in Galatians 6:9-10 apply to the institutional Church as such, rather than to the individual believer.

Indeed, this distinction has not even occurred to many Christians.

But it must be admitted that there are countless activities in which individual believers may feel called to engage, yet which do not fall under the purview of the Church’s mandate, properly understood. For example, if the majority of the members of a local congregation believe that a particular political candidate promotes a more healthy vision for his constituents than his opponent, those believers, as citizens of the civil kingdom, are perfectly free to do whatever is in their power to trumpet his cause. But then to assume that the local church to which they belong should cast its vote accordingly is to make a huge—and illegitimate—leap. One Christian’s hero may be another Christian’s villain. Therefore for a church to align itself with a political party is to assume that the Bible favors a particular ideology which it never intended to address.

In short, the Church’s Great Commission (the preaching of the Word and administration of the Sacraments) is more limited than the various spiritual, social, and political causes in which individual believers are free to engage.

With respect to mercy ministries, it would be naïve to think that the issues of who should be the recipients of church-sponsored financial assistance, and what form that assistance should take, are cut and dry. What may appear as compassion for the disenfranchised in the eyes of one could easily look like an irresponsible handout to the lazy in the eyes of another. The age-old debate about whether it is better, in the long run, to give a hungry man a basket of fish or a pole and bait remains unsettled, with sincere believers on both sides of the issue.

My point, then, is simply that there is a place for the believer to act according to his own individual conscience without those actions becoming the official ministry of the Church. And if you think about it, for the Church to commandeer benevolence and trademark mercy is somewhat insulting to all the kind, caring Muslims, Catholics, and atheists out there.

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part Three: The State

Though it is difficult to argue with the conclusions already reached that fallen creatures stand in need of mercy and that believers ought to play a role in alleviating people’s burdens, this does not really answer the question concerning the extent of the local church’s involvement in ministries of mercy. Many Christians and church leaders assume that the mere presentation of the need for mercy, coupled with some scattered proof-texts like those already cited, gives us all we need to develop a model for mercy ministry. But as I have been arguing, some qualifications are in order.

One of these concerns the divine institution of the State.

Due to man's fall and the massive upheaval and restructuring of the world and how he relates to it, the kingdom of man is now distinct from the kingdom of God, and the State is now distinct from the Church (the establishment of the State is hinted at in Genesis 4:15, in which the existence of the common grace city serves to reassure Cain that he would be protected by a divinely sponsored administration of justice after his killing of Abel. The State’s role is described explicitly in Romans 13:1ff).

The State, therefore, exists alongside the Church as a divinely ordained institution that administers the blessings of God to humanity. Their respective jurisdictions are distinct, of course, as are the blessings they provide, but the fact remains that they both serve to protect the interests of their subjects.

How does this apply to mercy ministries? One way is that it reminds us that the Church is not the only vehicle that God has created for the alleviation of mankind’s burdens. To place the entire responsibility for societal reform upon the shoulders of the Church, therefore, is not only asking too much, it is ignoring the existence and function of common grace city.

Furthermore, when churches such as Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City state that their vision is “to bring about personal changes, social healing, and cultural renewal through a movement of churches and ministries that change New York City and through it, the world,” one may reasonably inquire whether this is an example of the Church biting off more than she can—or was ever intended to—chew.

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part Two: Mercy's Mandate

We have seen that, upon man’s fall, God’s one, all-encompassing kingdom was divided, and a new set of categories was introduced. Holy activity (worship and sacrifice) was now distinguished from common activity (sowing and reaping), and the sacred realm (the covenant community) became distinct from the secular realm (the common grace city). In a word, after man’s fall his world was divinely re-ordered, the spiritual kingdom of God and the temporal city of man being separated. And with the exception of the typological Jewish theocracy under the Mosaic covenant, this situation has continued ever since.

Due to his woeful and self-inflicted condition, man now stands in need of mercy, of pity, and of compassionate aid. Both the Old and New Testaments provide ample warrant for the ministry of mercy toward those in need. In Deuteronomy 24:19-22 we read:

“When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over them again. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not strip it afterward. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this.”

Likewise in the New Testament, our Lord’s parable about the Samaritan—whom we call “the Good Samaritan,” though he was only doing what the law commanded—teaches us that being one’s neighbor entails more than mere geographical proximity, it means showing mercy. “You go,” Jesus told the crowd, “and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). This principle is also found in the writings of Paul: “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:9-10).

There is no question, therefore, that the generous showing of mercy is commanded in both the Old and New Testaments, and ought to characterize the lives of all those who have been the beneficiaries of the bountiful mercy of God.

But a few qualifications are in order; Don't touch that dial....

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part One: Pick a Sphere, Any Sphere

The idea that the Church's mandate includes alleviating the woes of the world's poor is axiomatic for many. Part of Bono's appeal for Africa, for example, includes the fact that the Old Testament is replete with references to the poor and Israel's responsibility to care for the disenfranchised within her borders.

But as with most discussions about cult and culture, the issue is rarely as simple as our prooftexts suggest.

Crucial to a proper understanding of this topic is the recognition of the various spheres that God has ordained to meet the manifold needs of his creatures -- these spheres being the Family, the State, and the Church. But it is also important to note that these spheres reflect a "divine reordering" that necessarily took place after Adam’s fall. As Meredith Kline writes, "[From the beginning] the originally mandated temple-city of Adam encompassed the totality of life and activity of humanity within its assigned jurisdiction." Or to de-Klineanize it a little, before Adam's fall, there was one holy kingdom and one holy sphere.

In the postlapsum situation, however, "the… aspects and functions of the original city were distributed among several nonconcentric authority structures that replaced the one original universal kingdom." Thus "along with the institution of the State in this common grace realignment stands the institution of the Family, with its own share of the redistributed functions and its own sphere of authority" (Kingdom Prologue, p. 172).

In short, after the fall the holy aspects of life are consigned to the spiritual kingdom of Christ, while the institutions of the Family and the State are the vehicles for the furtherance of God's temporal, common grace agenda.

So the questions that remain include: Is material aid for the poor a common or redemptive errand? Which sphere(s) -- Church, Family, or State -- bear(s) responsibility for the poor? Is the poor's claim upon the Church only valid if those in need are believing members?

What think ye?