(All of my posts from Renov8 can be found here)
After the day’s events ended I spent a lot of time talking to a number of people about yesterday’s session by Stuart Murray & Julie Kilpin.
In this short piece (posted this morning at The Resurgence), Jonathan Dodson articulates with a bit more clarity (and brevity) what I was attempting to say yesterday. The post is part of a series called “How NOT To Be A Missional Church” examining common errors of overemphasis in missional churches.
Dodson makes three points, the second of which is the meat of the post:
Social action doesn’t create new community
Although social action mission creates community, it doesn’t create new community. Regenerated, new creation is the unique work of God the Spirit (Tit. 2.11; Gal. 6:15) through faith in the Son (Tit. 3:6-7; 2 Cor. 5:17). If we convert people to community and social mission alone, and not to Christ, we offer a very incomplete gospel. Regeneration is both social (Matt. 19:28) and spiritual (Tit. 3:5). The Spirit, not social mission, makes men new.
Dodson’s third point is also worth reading, although he falls into the trap of flinging the word “liberal” as a universal derogative (we can explore the validity of such a tactic in another post perhaps). When he gets past that, he says this:
When missional communities focus on social mission alone, they disregard their evangelistic identity, gifting, and responsibility as the church of Jesus Christ, the Jesus who died and rose to make all things new—people and products, souls and society.
Dodson shows good balance in this post. For too long now social action hasn’t been very high on the Evangelical agenda. We have created a new pejorative out of the word combination “social gospel” – which is sometimes inappropriately applied to those who are actually more balanced in word and deed than we are. This is unfortunate, since the effects of the gospel certainly have vast implications for the social structures of our world.
By my observation, both “sides” have a tendency to adjust their practice in reaction not to scripture, but to the practice of those they perceive as foes and therefore seek to avoid affiliation with. So when some engage in an almost exclusively action-oriented form of “social gospel”, others react by avoiding social action altogether.
These are equal errors.
