The Engagement Agenda
By Foy Valentine
- Who We Are
- What We are Doing
- Are social issues any of our business?
- Theological Presuppositions for the Engagement Agenda
- Effecting Social Change
- Conclusion
For Christians from the beginning, there have been many crosses, many struggles, many conflicts, many battles, many confrontations. These are never won. Not really. For Christians committed to practicing and preaching the whole gospel of God in Christ, they are not even supposed to be. The people of God just have to live with the conviction that God has put fire in our bones and that He has given us the stomach for the battle. If we couldn`t stand the heat, we wouldn`t stay in the kitchen. Our agenda is engagement. And in this agenda, "It is required of stewards that a man be found faithful" (1 Cor. 4:2).
Let us then consider our calling.
Who We Are
Who are the Christians committed to this agenda of engagement?
We are God`s. Jesus loves us; this we know, for the Bible tells us so; and surprisingly, even some of our fellow Christians tell us so. We are God`s people through Jesus Christ. We are not interested in becoming Unitarians and in just singing hymns to race relations, preaching sermons on sewage disposal, and bearing witness to sex education. We are just interested in being God`s people and in doing His thing in the world. Sometimes we head for Spain but God stops us off in Rome. We seek to preach the gospel of God in Christ, but sometimes are forced to have "fought with beasts at Ephesus" (1 Cor. 15:32). We undertake an emphasis on Christian morality but it is sometimes our lot to deal with misunderstanding among our fellow believers. So be it. We are not mad at anybody. We are especially not mad at God. And God, we believe, is not mad at us. In the Rome where we find ourselves now, we find sufficient strength in the overwhelming conviction that we are God`s. Thank God! We remember that, despondent, Tchaikovsky waded into the ice filled Moskva River, hoping for disaster to follow, but that Providence chose for him to survive to write his last three symphonies.
We are Bible-believing Christians. With a commitment to an agenda of engagement, we are sometimes forced to do battle with other Bible-believing Christians. Within our own fellowships there are treasons which must be challenged. We can announce God`s judgments on these treasons only from within. For our kind to withdraw from our respective fellowships or to renounce the reality of our particular Christian heritage and the specificity of our peculiar Christian calling would be even less intelligent than if we were to take our own lives. So, we are neither proud nor ashamed. This is just who we are.
We are ordained. We understand ourselves to be called, ordered, elected, set apart. We are prophetic people brought, we have come to think, to the kingdom for such a time as this. We believe that our Christian faith has profound social consequences and that we are "ordained a lamp" for God`s people (Psalm 132:17). We are ordered to carry this torch. We would joust with no windmills; but in a real, not an imagined, moral solvency, we seek to lead other Christians to apply Christian principles in every area and relationship of life. We view our calling, our ordainment, our election, as an easy yoke, a light burden, a chosen cross which we bear not only resolutely but also joyously for Christ`s sake.
We are sinners. We understand not only that our churches are running a fever but also that we ourselves run a fever. There are serpents in our gardens; and too often we heed their counsel. There are important marks for us to hit; and too frequently we miss those marks, more grievously, no doubt, by omission than by commission. There is a world of good to do; and too often, like Brother Paul, we do it not. Commitment to effecting change among Christians has not "come of age," and we know this full well. We are remembering daily Paul`s admonition, "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Cor. 10:12); and we are trying hard not to be like the poor piano player who practices his mistakes.
We are pilgrims. We count not ourselves to have apprehended (Phil. 3:13); we seek a city whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:10). We seek a better world. Our horse must stay always saddled; our motor must be always running; we must be always leaving on some jet plane.
What We are Doing
Christians committed to the engagement agenda are seeking to effect social change for God`s glory and humanity`s good.
The task is formidable. Many Christians are angry at those who agitate for action and press for social change. These believe there is no place in the church or in the society for social concern. They want the Bible preached in the abbreviated form to which they have become accustomed in the culture religion of most of our established churches. They would abolish this agenda. They would obliterate this emphasis. They view social concern as "a vermiform appendix in the church`s body politic," to use the telling phrase of a learned elder churchman I once knew, and insist that it would be a great service to God, to the church , and to humanity to rid the body of the obnoxious organ. In the most social era of human history they are obsessed with the radical individualism that in some measure is harbored in the heart of most Americans and most especially most believers in the free church tradition. That rugged individualism which has made us strong in the past may, in today`s world, now prevent us from claiming our share of the future. What has pushed us forward could now hold us back. These radical individualists view religion as purely personal and the church`s task as that of providing preaching, Bible study, choruses focused on sweet Jesus and pie in the sky by and by, and a soul-saving service. They hold that on their own initiative saved souls may then find whatever avenues they can stumble on to do what God may want done in the world.
Our task is to convert these modernists who have turned away from Moses and the prophets and Paul and John and Peter and James, and from Jesus, to embrace the false and misleading dualism which seems everlastingly to plague the Christian church.
Our task is to convince these alienated brothers and sisters who seek to turn the church away from the great moral and social issues of our time that if, indeed, we did turn away, the world would be impoverished and the church`s whole life and work would be invalidated, for if God`s people cannot confront the issues that affect the lives of real, live, flesh-and-blood human beings with the reconciling gospel of Christ in such a way as to effect genuine change, then evangelism is empty and missions is mockery.
Our task is to so represent Jesus Christ and preach His gospel that the church may capture, or recapture, the young, the poor, the educated, the active, and the socially concerned who have about given up on the church and to convince them that God needs them and that integrity requires them to stay in the church, to support the church, to give to the church, and to be the church.
Our task is to help Christians to understand that God`s basic concern is not religion but life and to see that there can be no turning away from responsible involvement in the world and responsible commitment to bring about social change for God`s glory and humanity`s good. A continued rejection of social fads, unbaptized humanism, unbiblical quietism, and moral posturing-Yes. But disengagement-No. Uninvolvement in this age is not a live option for the people of God. Our task is to help Christians to understand that sin is both personal and social and that we cannot be true to God and wink at the great social sins of gambling, addiction to nicotine, abuse of alcohol and other drugs, the sexual exploitation of human beings by sleazy media moguls, ecological rape, militarism, white racism, male chauvinism, poverty in the midst of plenty, hunger, crime, consumer exploitation by business, inflation, unemployment, overpopulation, political corruption, and a knock-three-times-on-the-ceiling-if-you-love-me-oh-my-darling morality, which is closer to the barnyard than to mature humanity.
In the escalating battle for the soul of the church between those who in the name of Christ and purely personal religion would retreat from these issues and those who in the name of Christ and His full gospel with its social imperative seek to confront the issues and solve them, our task is to help today`s Christians work out our salvation with fear and trembling and to do the work of God in the world regarding social change.
Are social issues any of our business?
Contrary to what today`s humanistic activists are saying, Christ cannot be Lord without also being Savior. And contrary to what today`s pietistic fundamentalists are saying, Christ cannot be Savior without also being Lord. Our task is to help Christians see that withdrawal and involvement, conservatism and radicalism, worship and work, reflection and action, practicing and preaching, the personal and the social-these all must be everlastingly linked in the life and work of the church or else the church goes off into grievous heresy and crippling escapism.
Theological Presuppositions for the Engagement Agenda
There are at least three theological presuppositions for an agenda of engagement to effect social change: things need changing; Christians are obligated to change them; and God`s people can do it.
1. Things need changing. The given of our world is that human beings are degenerate; our communities are corrupt; the race is fallen; society is sick; the world is not as it ought to be; things need changing. Let us not always decry change, running through the streets like Chicken Little, crying that the sky is falling when an acorn drops, going about wringing our hands and looking back longingly like Lot`s wife; speaking and acting in direct contradiction to the Bible`s clear injunction, "Say not `why were the former days better than these?` for it is not from wisdom that you ask this" (Eccl. 7:20). Multitudes regularly make their beds in hell. War is a kind of hell. Poverty is a kind of hell. Drug addiction is a kind of hell. Alcohol addiction is a kind of hell. Nicotine addiction is a kind of hell. (Have you watched anybody die of emphysema lately?) Overpopulation is a kind of hell. Overcrowding is a kind of hell. Loneliness is a kind of hell. Rats are a kind of hell. Flies are a kind of hell. Worms are a kind of hell. Sickness is a kind of hell. Hate is a kind of hell. Despair is a kind of hell. Crime is a kind of hell. Oppression is a kind of hell. Injustice is a kind of hell. Unemployment is a kind of hell. Underemployment is a kind of hell. Inflation is a kind of hell. Insanity is a kind of hell. Prisons are a kind of hell. Psychological addiction to gambling is a kind of hell.
Today`s world in which Christian are called to a responsible use of church power is a disfigured, hurting world. Human beings are sinners. And our institutions are massively infected with our sin. Almost by definition, institutions resist social change, culture resists criticism, and the organized church cultivates conformity. But things need changing.
2. The divine imperative is that Christians are obligated to change things. Engagement is the corollary of Incarnation for God. The divine discontent that led God to Bethlehem, to Nazareth, and to Golgotha, leads Christians today to redemptive involvement in the human situation where we find ourselves, not denying our humanity but reveling in it in the assurance that in its weakness, God`s strength is made perfect.
In The Divine Imperative, subtitled "A Protestant Ethic," Emil Brunner wrote in 1936, "What ought we to do, is the great question of humanity. It is the entrance to the Christian Faith; none can evade it who wish[es] to enter the sanctuary. But it is also the gate through which one passes out of the sanctuary again, back into life." We properly concern ourselves with the question, "What ought we to do?" to effect social change.
The Bible`s teachings concerning this Divine Imperative to change the world are clear.
"Do justly," "love mercy, and" "walk humbly with they God" (Micah 6:8).
"Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it" (Psalm 34:14).
"Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream" (Amos 5:24 R.S.V.).
"Follow after righteousness…" (1 Timothy 6:11).
"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction…" (James 1:27).
"Faith without works is dead…" (James 2:20).
"Thy kingdom come. They will be done in earth…" (Matthew 6:10).
"Thou shalt love the Lord…and thy neighbor…" (Luke 10:27).
"You are the salt of the earth…" (Matthew 5:13).
"You are the light of the world…" (Matthew 5:14).
3. Human beings have it in us, by God`s grace to do better: we can change our communities and we can change the world. Many in recent years have been so hostile to the central institutions of society that they could never abandon their posture of alienation; but Christians know "a more excellent way," a way of reconciliation, a way of renewal, a way of redemption, a way of right relationships. God has something better for the world than it has yet known. Through the church, spiritual Israel, shall all the nations of the earth yet be blessed. With eyes of faith we see renewal for "whosoever will." With eyes of hope we see renewal for society in general and for our communities in particular. With eyes of love we see renewal for the world.
The goals for the engagement agenda are neither hidden nor complex. Essentially they are righteousness, justice, freedom, peace, and the good life.
1. Righteousness. This is one of the most basic concepts in the Bible. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of right relationships. Order and right relations among people are overwhelmingly important to the health of society, and Christians concerned about this agenda of involvement to bring about social change are necessarily concerned about righteousness which is right-way-ness.
2. Justice. Nothing so upsets us as injustice. Is not this a universal phenomenon? Moses killed the Egyptian because of an overwhelming sense of injustice that drove him to this shameful act of passion. The American Revolution began over an infinitesimal tax on tea as the colonists became incensed over the injustice of taxation without representation. The civil rights revolution began when one black woman in Montgomery, Alabama decided she would not go to the back of the bus. Justice simply has to be a major target for Christians concerned about social action.
3. Freedom. It is not in dramatic acts but in small failures that freedom`s light burns out. Christians cannot believe that human destiny is externally determined by economics, sex, education, or environment. One of God`s great gifts to humanity is freedom; but it is a gift that must be constantly claimed lest it be lost. God means for all people to know the truth and to be made free by the truth. Some who profess commitment to the great American heritage of freedom are now reaching out a misguided hand to steady a tottering ark and keep the truth safe. What a travesty! God, who alone is free, will not suffer His truth to fall or to fail. Personal Christian freedom is a corollary of God`s freedom. Freedom for all humanity is the ideal and an important, appropriate goal of social change. And eternal vigilance is everlastingly the price of liberty.
4. Peace. No scene in the life of Christ is packed with more pathos than that where Jesus stands weeping over Jerusalem and cries, "Would God that even now you knew the things that make for peace" (Luke 19:42). In Jesus Christ, God has shown Himself to be not merely a peace lover staying at home out of trouble, hoping to avoid conflict with the status quo; but being a peace maker, He stirred things up like crazy and lived His life in a running battle with the establishment until His enemies finally nailed Him. Christians` commitment to work for the things that make for peace like sobriety, justice, and righteousness must be a strong and disciplined and continuing commitment, for peace is one of the major goals of social change.
5. The good life. This is a term that has come to be used to catch up a number of universally treasured human values. Health, fulfillment, education, service, satisfying work, and rewarding relationships are all qualities which Christians seek not only for ourselves but also for others.
Effecting Social Change
"Thy kingdom come. They will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10). Christians universally pray this prayer which the Lord taught His disciples to pray. The kingdom ought to come; it needs to come; humanity`s highest hope is that it will come. But how? How shall we implement that prayer? How shall changed people change the world? What methods shall we use in this ministry of redemption and renewal and reconciliation?
In Christian social concern, we could easily be preoccupied with such vital concerns as the theology of social change and the goals of social change to the neglect of methods of social change. It would be possible, of course, to turn our attention too exclusively to methods while neglecting theology and goals; but the more common failure of Christians today may very well be the failure to develop and exercise those methods of social change which will enable the church actually to be God`s reconciling agents in what Tennessee Williams called in the closing lines of "The Glass Menagerie," "a world lit by lightning."
There is danger in methods. They are utterly inadequate as gods; but they are absolutely indispensable as tools in service for God. Without valid methods for social change, any group is compelled to start all over again with every generation in any worthy undertaking for social change, not learning from God`s revelation, from His dealings with others in days gone by, or from the church`s past experience. Without biblically validated, authentically Christian methods, the Christian cause will remain essentially immobilized in the vast arena of social change; and it is on this arena where the eyes of modern man particularly the hundreds of millions in the so-called under-developed nations of earth, are now focused.
Karl Marx in his thesis on Feuerbach observed that while philosophers have explained the world, the thing necessary was to change the world. We do find it easy to describe the world but hard to change it. It is easy to diagnose the world`s ills but hard to cure them. It is easy to resolve about the world`s problems but hard actually to resolve them. It is easy to reflect on social change but inordinately hard to effect it.
Christians are ordained by God to be in the world-changing business. We believe that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). This is our task: to change people for God and for good, to change economic systems for God and for good, to change the structures of society for God and for good, to change the world for God and for good-this is our task, and this is our high calling in Christ Jesus. Our business is to turn "the world upside down" (Acts 17:6) for God, extending God`s kingdom until "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:10-11).
At various times and in different circumstances many methods of social change have been employed by Christians. Two primary methods, however, commend themselves to Christians everywhere and at all times: First, regeneration-transformation and second, penetration-permeation. A third method, organization, commends itself especially to Christians today with numerical and financial strength and with technological tools such as radio and television never before available for the work of Christ in the world.
1. Regeneration and Transformation. Social change for Christians is in some real sense wrapped up in regeneration, and regeneration is the grace of God personally apprehended through personal repentance and personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. True Christian repentance and true Christian faith are, at once the genesis, the environment, the habitat, the method and the goal of the social change for which Christians work and pray.
Repentance, the keynote of the New Testament, the complete change of mental outlook, life design, and social relationships characterizing Christian conversion, is not to try harder but rather to accept God`s way of looking at things and working in the world. Its social consequences are gloriously attested to in the Bible and throughout history. Without repentance, a stuttering, stumbling, stalling church would remain forever powerless to cast out the devils of racism, sexism, war, poverty, exploitation, injustice, and all the other evils that dog the feet of humanity.
Faith, for the Christian, is standing always at attention in the presence of God to say, "Lord, what would you have me to do?" Faith is the apprehending of the power to become all that God wants His people to be in the world today. As faith`s revolutionary power lays hold of God`s grace to change believers, so faith`s revolutionary power is capable of laying hold of God`s grace to change the world.
Regeneration, God`s work of grace, laid hold of through repentance and faith, is both personal and social for "the word of God is not bound" (2 Timothy 2:9), and God`s word will not be bound.
It is important to bear in mind that there are both socially conservative and socially radical dimensions in the Christian gospel and in Christian regeneration. Both dimensions are necessary if Christians are to avoid social anarchy on the one hand and social stagnation on the other. Both are necessary if we are to avoid the absurdity of calling for the achievement of an absolute ideal in a sinful world.
For Christians, moral progress is rightly brought about through love and self-sacrifice, characterized by the principle of the Cross, self-giving love. The task of changing attitudes in regeneration and transformation is a task for which the people of God, however, are uniquely, peculiarly singularly qualified.
2. Penetration and Permeation. The early Christians made great headway against overwhelming odds because they confronted the world not with a superior system of speculative philosophy but with a consistently and uniformly better way of life-better family life, better community life, better business life, better human relations, better citizenship, better social life, and better moral life. In the early church, ordinary men and women were themselves changed and then motivated by the Lord Christ to change the world. Their primary method was one of penetration and permeation in a spirit of self-giving love, bearing in mind whose they were and who they were.
Under God, they understood themselves to be salt ("Ye are the salt of the earth," Jesus said (Matt. 5:13). They understood themselves to be light. ("Ye are the light of the world," Jesus said (Matt. 5:14). They understood themselves to be seed. ("Unto what is the kingdom of God like?…It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and cast into his garden; and it grew and waxed a great tree`" Jesus said (Luke 13:18-19). They understood themselves to be leaven ("Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened," Jesus said (Luke 13:20-21).
How far into the world shall Christians penetrate? How much of society shall we permeate? How many knees shall bow? God puts absolutely no limit on Christians in our ministry of penetration and permeation. "The field is the world" (Matthew 13:38).
3. Organization. As it is the Christian thing to do to bind up the wounds and pay the hospital bills for any person who has fallen among thieves on any Jericho Road, so it is the Christian thing to do to organize and act to effect social change. "It is God who works in you inspiring both the will and the deed for his own chosen purpose" (Philippians 5:13 N.E.B.). Culbert G. Rutenber has spoken discerningly to this point: "Suppose the Good Samaritan, later, had formed a committee-The Committee for Making the Jericho Road a Safe Highway. Suppose the committee had put on a big publicity campaign and had forced City Hall to string lights along the Jericho Road, to remove the shrubbery in which the thieves were accustomed to hide before pouncing, and to increase the number of policemen who patrolled the road? Why…would not this too be a form of neighbor love? And if City Hall refused because it was in cahoots with the thieves, who regularly `paid off` the politicians, would it not be an act of kindness to all potential future victims for the committee to agitate for the removal of the grafters in the next election and the installation of an administration which would do these things? If the motive were the same-for the love of Christ and the neighbor-would not this, too, be a form of Christian good deeds? True, this involves corporate action rather than individual action and therefore is a kind of love-at-a-distance (as someone has defined justice), being more indirect. But what of that? How many kinds of good works are exempted from the injunction to perform `all good works`?" [Culbert G. Rutenber, The Reconciling Gospel (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1969), pp. 101-102].
By virtue of our current Christian strength in numbers, money, power, and influence, Christians have responsibilities to society which are proportionately much greater than those incumbent on the early Christians. God has given much to the church today; and of the church today shall much be required.
How is Christ incarnate today? Where is the Church? How are Christians to be the church in today`s world?
Believing that the revealed religion of the Bible requires the correlation of religion and life, we must insist on confronting the world with the gospel. This technique is itself a kind of action.
We must speak directly and critically, prophetically, and reconciling to social issues, for the pretense of neutrality is even more transparent in our day than it was in Pilate`s day. It is the eternal relevance of Christ Jesus our Lord, God`s living Word, that has prevented Christianity from following Zoroastrainism and Shintoism into the oblivion reserved for religions that have no word from the Lord for their cultures. Christians are obligated to preach the word in season and out of season. We must conduct conferences, organize committees, subscribe budgets, enlist workers, exercise power, confront evil, challenge the principalities and powers, and do the word, carrying the good news of God in Christ out into every area and relationship of life.
Conclusion
This emphasis on Christian social concern is no call for a newly militant church to place itself at the disposition of every new humanitarian venture, seeking social change just for the sake of change. It is rather a call for Christians newly infused with commitment to being the church in the world, to bring His specifically Christian, specifically redemptive, specifically reconciling good news to all people, to all our communities, and to all the world.
It is a call for changed people to change the world.
