WHEN PEOPLE HEAR or read arguments like the ones we have presented here, they have often responded with something like, “But I think good deeds are important. We are supposed to be doing good things for the people around us, even the non-Christians around us.”
Please underline, circle, or put a star beside this: We agree! Fully, wholeheartedly, unreservedly, and without the slightest contrary shiver in the liver, we agree! We are of the strong opinion that the Bible teaches that we Christians are to be a people of both declaration and demonstration, and that our churches are to be communities of both declaration and demonstration. God has redeemed us from all lawlessness and made us a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works (Titus 2:14). Our hope in this book, in fact, has not been in any way to discourage good works, but rather to encourage them in the long run by being crystal clear about where and how good works fit into Christian theology and into the Christian life.
So why do we do good? If “building for the kingdom,” “proclaiming the gospel without words,” and “joining God in his work of making all things new” are not the correct motivations for good works, what are? Why should we do good works at all if those motivations are not biblically sustainable? Actually, the Bible gives us plenty of reasons to do good works, and they are not small ones, either. We don’t want to leave anyone with the sinking feeling that we’ve pulled the rug out from under the Christian’s duty and desire to “not grow weary of doing good” (Gal. 6:9), so here are just a few of the motivations that Scripture does give us for living a life that is filled with good works.
Of course there’s more to say, but the foundation of it all is obeying God out of love. At the end of the day, God commands us in his Word to do good works and to live good lives. “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). After all, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Jesus said that the greatest commandment of all is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second, he said, is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:36–40). Not only so, but he also blew the walls out of the narrow strictures the Pharisees had placed on the definition of a “neighbor.”
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matt. 5:43–45)
If the definition of “loving our neighbors” includes praying even for our enemies, then it includes everyone! Part of the reason is that each of us, from the least to the greatest, is a person created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Therefore, in loving our neighbors we are showing that we value the fact that they, too, are works of our God and fellow creatures. So we Christians are to be a people characterized and marked by love—not just for those who are like us, or those who are in our churches, or those who are in our particular social groups, but for everyone.
We’ve argued elsewhere in this book that precisely how that love is expressed is a matter that requires much wisdom and a sensitivity to the fact that we can’t do everything. We are finite creatures, and therefore it’s important for us not to flog ourselves with undue guilt because we cannot show full, unbounded, active, suffering-relieving love to all seven billion people on the planet. But neither can we use our finitude to build walls around ourselves and excuse a lack of love toward those who are in a close “moral proximity” to us. We as Christians should be marked by a posture of love and generosity toward our neighbors, and that includes everyone, according to Jesus, from our best friends to our worst enemies.
Jesus told his followers, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). When we approach the world with a posture of love and generosity, our good works provide a powerful confirmation of our declaration that “God is love.” They show the world that we really mean what we say, and they make it just that much more plausible that God really is there and that his influence in our lives is real, powerful, and different from anything else in the world.
That is at least part of what Jesus was saying when he told his followers, “You are the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13). Salt was known for doing many things. It preserved, it cleaned, and it enhanced taste. But figuring out what exactly salt did is not the point—probably all those things are evoked by Jesus’s words. The point is that the salt does all those things precisely because there is something about it that makes it different from the thing onto which it is sprinkled. If you sprinkle broccoli bits on broccoli, you haven’t accomplished much. Salt is useful, Jesus was saying, exactly because it is salty, and if it loses its saltiness—if it becomes no different from what it is sprinkled on—then it’s of no use at all. The same is true of light; its use comes in the fact that it is not darkness. It is different, and if you take away its “lightness” by hiding it under a basket, it’s no good for anything.
Do you see the point here? We Christians are to be conspicuous in our following of our King Jesus. We are to do good works as a testimony that God has made us into something different from what we once were, and from the unredeemed world around us. As people of the kingdom, we are to be salt and light in a fallen world. That is, we are to be different, and by those good deeds together with our true words, we are to testify to God’s character.
Simply put, apples grow on apple trees, oranges grow on orange trees, and good works grow on Christians. It’s just the way the world works. Jesus is as clear about this as he can be:
You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matt. 7:16–20)
It’s not that good works are in the root of the tree; they’re not the thing that makes the tree what it is. They’re not the ground or the basis of our standing with God. But if we truly are redeemed through the blood of Christ, if the Holy Spirit truly dwells in us, then we will be people who bear fruit in good works. Our lives will be marked by what Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). And if those fruits are not present in us, Jesus says, we have reason to question whether the tree was ever really healthy at all.
James is perhaps evoking this image of a tree bearing fruit when he says that “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). What he means is that a living faith, one that has the sap of the Spirit’s life running through it, will inevitably bear fruit. It will produce a life that is marked by good works. Abraham’s faith was that kind of living faith: it issued in the good fruit of obedience to God, even when God’s command was that he should kill his own son. Rahab’s faith, too, was a living one: it issued in obedience to God through her protection of the Israelite spies, even when the cost of her obedience could have been her very life (James 2:21–25).
“Every healthy tree bears good fruit,” Jesus says (Matt. 7:17). If we claim to be Christians, then we are claiming to be “healthy trees,” and therefore we should be bearing “good fruit.” For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works (Eph. 2:10).
Sometimes the argument is made that when Christians do good things for other people and then share the gospel with them, they’ve pulled a bait-and-switch trick. That could be the case, especially if the Christian is thinking of his evangelism as a way to put notches in his religious belt. Then neither his good works nor his evangelism would be founded on care for the other person. His good works would be grounded on a desire to get to the evangelism, and the evangelism would be grounded in a desire to make himself look good. Love doesn’t figure in there at all.
But that’s really a terrible way to think about evangelism. Evangelism is the act of telling other people about the plight they are in and how they can be saved from it. Sharing the good news of Jesus Christ is an act of deep love and compassion for that person. So the argument that one act of love and compassion (evangelism) can’t legitimately be accompanied by other, less important, acts of love and compassion doesn’t hold water. Christians, as we’ve seen, are to love the whole person, and therefore it makes perfect sense to love someone by giving him food and at the same time to love him in a different, higher way by giving him the gospel. There’s no bait-and-switch there; that’s simply holistic compassion—compassion for the whole person, not just part of him.1
Understanding that, we can also see an opposite danger for those who buy the bait-and-switch argument. It’s that they will compassionately meet physical and even emotional needs, but out of fear of falling into a bait-and-switch scenario, they’ll neglect to compassionately meet the other person’s spiritual needs by sharing the gospel with them. In other words, they’ll show compassion to people only at the basest levels—and one could legitimately question whether that is real compassion at all. The reality is that people who make that mistake see evangelism as no more an act of compassion than the person who sees it as a way to put a notch in his belt; it’s just that they see the gospel as something they are trying to sell, and therefore they don’t want to “corrupt” their compassion by moving into the sales pitch.
If we understand evangelism itself, though, as a deep and profound act of love for another person, we will do it more often (because we won’t have the awkward feeling that we’re just giving a sales pitch), and we’ll do it with the right motives, too (love for people, instead of regard for ourselves). In fact, if we are Christians whose love and compassion is aroused not just by physical and emotional needs, but also by spiritual needs, then sharing the gospel will always be in the forefronts of our minds. We will naturally and readily move toward it as we are loving other people.
Does this, by the way, mean that good deeds that aren’t followed by the sharing of the gospel are somehow illegitimate or not worth doing? Of course not! They are worth doing! You can give a donation to Toys for Tots, or pick up a piece of litter in the street, or plant a tree when no one’s watching, or buy someone a sandwich when you’re already late to work and not say a word to them. And when you do, you will be doing a good thing, something that is motivated by your status both as a human being and, more particularly, as a Christian bearing fruit under the loving rule of Jesus Christ. But when you do those things, you also need to know and admit that you are not fulfilling part of the church’s mission, you are not “expanding the borders of the kingdom,” and you are not “sharing the gospel without words.” You are simply doing things that redeemed human beings do. You are living as a human being who has been saved and regenerated by the grace of God. And who knows? Maybe the next time you buy the guy a sandwich, you’ll have time to explain why you’re doing it in the first place!
Our generation tends to think about motivation in two speeds and two speeds only—there are things that are of the utmost importance, and things that are of no importance. There’s no in-between. That’s one of the reasons this whole conversation about the mission of the church is so difficult. The minute you start arguing that good works are not of the utmost importance, people accuse you of saying that they are of no importance at all. The thinking seems to be that good works have to be motivated by the highest imaginable reasons—We’re building for the kingdom! We’re doing the gospel! We’re joining God in his mission! We’re spreading shalom!—or else people will think they’re not important at all.
We need another speed. We need a speed that’s somewhere between of the utmost importance and of no importance. Something like really, really important might do the trick. The fact is, we as Christians have a lot of things on our plate. There are many things that the Lord calls us to do that are not of the utmost importance, in the sense that they are earth-shattering, kingdom-building, eternity-making things. And yet they are really, really important, and we are called to be faithful in doing them. If we’re honest with ourselves, we already have this speed, and we use it all the time. Think about our marriages, for example. Our marriages are not going to make it into eternity; they’re not of the utmost importance (Matt. 22:30). And yet they are really, really important, and we give much of our lives and our love and our energy to them. We don’t default to saying that because they’re not of the utmost importance, they must be of no importance at all.
So why must those be our only two options when it comes to good works and social ministry and culture building and our occupations and all the rest? Why can’t we be content with saying simply that we do those things, and we do them well, out of love for people and obedience and love to God? It seems to us that such an understanding, such a set of motivations, would not only be more faithful to Scripture, but also be better at motivating good works for the long haul because we won’t be discouraged from doing them even when our cities don’t change over a decade or two. We will be sufficiently motivated by loving God, loving people, and being “faithfully present” as we wait on the Lord Jesus to return.
We’ve been arguing in this book that the mission of the church is best defined not by a charge to engage the world’s social structures in an effort to build the kingdom or join God in his work of remaking the world, but rather by the Great Commission that Jesus gave to his followers just before his ascension—that is, verbal witness to him and the making of disciples. But while we’ve argued that tasks like disciple making, proclamation, church planting, and church establishment constitute the mission of the church, we’ve tried to walk a fine line so as not to insinuate that any other kind of work—say, humanitarian work or justice work or love work—is somehow un-Christian. Please, please, please know that is not what we are saying. Any book that comes across as suggesting that loving our neighbors is somehow sub-Christian is a very poor book indeed.
In order to walk this tightrope, we’ve described the disciple-making mission of the church with words like central, priority, focus, and emphasis. As Tim Keller has argued, even if “more broadly conceived, it is the work of Christians in the world to minister in word and deed and to gather together to do justice,” it is still “best to speak of the ‘mission of the church,’ strictly conceived, as being the proclamation of the Word.”2 But, you may ask, what does this really mean? If blessing nonbelievers in our communities by meeting physical needs is not a bad thing, and indeed a good thing, what difference does it make that the Great Commission is the church’s mission or focus or priority or whatever you want to call it?
Is There a Difference between a Church and a Bunch of Christians?
For starters, it means we need to bear in mind that there is a difference between the church considered as a bunch of individual Christians and the church understood as an institution—as an organization of Christians that can and indeed must do some things that individual Christians cannot and indeed should not do. Perhaps we can talk about these two different entities as “the church organic” and “the church institutional.”
When a group of Christians decides to become a church, they covenant together to take on certain responsibilities. They take on the responsibility, for example, to make sure the Word is preached regularly among them, to make sure the ordinances—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are regularly practiced, and to make sure that discipline is practiced among them, even to the point of delivering one of their number over to Satan by excommunicating them (1 Cor. 5:5).
Not only so, but you can see the difference between the church and an individual Christian just by looking at the way Scripture talks to each—that is, by looking at the commands it gives. Think about it. There are some commands given to the local church that an individual Christian just should not undertake to obey on his own. An individual Christian, for example, can’t excommunicate another Christian; but the local church is commanded to do so in certain situations. Nor should an individual Christian take the Lord’s Supper on his own; that’s an activity the local church is to do “when you come together” (1 Cor. 11:17–18, 20, 33–34). In the same way, there are commands given to individual Christians that are clearly not meant for the local church as an organized group. A Christian man is commanded to “give to his wife her conjugal rights,” but the church institutional better not try that! (Roll your eyes—but it makes the point!) There is a difference between the individual Christian and the local church, and therefore we can’t just say that whatever we see commanded of the individual Christian is also commanded of the local church.
To put perhaps a finer point on it: If I am commanded to do justice, does that mean ipso facto that it is the church’s mission to do justice? By the same token, if I am commanded to love my wife as my own body, does that mean it is the church’s mission to love my wife as it loves its own body? What sense would that even make? Our point is simply to say that defining the mission of the church institutional is just not as simple as identifying all the Bible’s commands to individual Christians and saying, “There, that’s the church’s mission.” The mission of the church, as we’ve been arguing throughout this book, seems to be something narrower than the set of all commands given to individual Christians—it’s proclamation, witness, and disciple making (which includes teaching everything that Jesus commanded). This is simply another way of saying that bearing witness to Christ is the church’s unique responsibility in a way that film making or auto repair or tree planting is not, though all of these may be examples of ways in which an individual Christian follows Jesus.
So What Should We Do, as Churches?
If that’s true, what do we say about the church institutional when it comes to things like justice ministries and social action? It seems to us that there are two questions to think through: Can the church institutional spend its time and resources doing those things? And must the church institutional spend its time and resources doing those things?
Let’s take the second question first. Should the church institutional do social ministries? Must it do so? Really, the answer to that question comes down to how you understand the church’s mission, doesn’t it? If you think the church’s mission is to build a better, more just world, then of course the church must be involved, in some way or another, in increasing the social, economic, and political well-being of its city’s citizens (and also of its nation’s citizens and the world’s inhabitants). If that’s what you believe, then you’re actually defaulting on the mission if you’re not doing things that work toward that goal. But if you understand (as we’ve argued) that the church’s mission is actually the proclamation of the gospel and making disciples, then bettering the city’s and the world’s social condition becomes, at best, a less direct way of furthering that mission, and therefore it falls somewhat short of being a universal obligation for the local church.
But that brings us back to the first question: Can the local church do such things? Might it not be good for the local church to do such things? Of course this question is moot for those who understand the mission of the church to be the social transformation of the world. For those Christians, the answer is that of course the church can, precisely because it must. But for those who understand the church’s mission to be proclamation and disciple making, this is a real question. Is it illegitimate for the church to do anything other than evangelism? We don’t think so.
Imagine a company whose mission is to make and sell widgets. Would it be illegitimate for that company to spend some of its resources holding a company picnic for its employees? No. Actually, the company’s leaders may well decide that a picnic will further the company’s mission of selling widgets by raising corporate morale, fostering teamwork, and so on. Of course the picnic furthers that mission more indirectly than buying airtime for a widget commercial, but it still furthers the mission. In the same way, we believe that a local church could very well decide that adopting a local school and spending time and resources improving that school is actually a good way—though an indirect one—of furthering their mission of bearing witness to Jesus and making disciples. Maybe it raises the profile of the church or wins a hearing for the gospel among the people of the town. Another local church could decide to support a local soup kitchen, even one that doesn’t present the gospel at every meal, for the same reasons. It’s a display of love that may help to break down misconceptions of the church, circumvent people’s defense mechanisms against Christians, and open the way for the gospel to be heard. Yet another local church may decide that it can support and further the mission by giving money to and taking trips with a group that digs clean wells in impoverished countries—not because they necessarily think they’re bringing in the kingdom or building for the kingdom or participating in God’s work of remaking the world, but rather because, over time, they are making friends and breaking down barriers to the good news of Jesus being heard and accepted.
To put this in terms of a principle, generally speaking we would suggest that a local church should tend toward doing those activities and spending its resources on those projects that more directly, rather than less directly, further its central mission. Again, that doesn’t mean that the church will only ever do activities that are a direct fulfillment of its mission. (Think again about the widget company and its picnic.) The point is simply that there is in fact a mission given to the church by its Lord that is narrower than “everything we could do,” and therefore church leaders have to be thinking in these categories all the time: What is our mission, and what will further that mission?
Even more, church leaders have to be asking, What will best further our mission? That’s because our resources are not unlimited. We don’t have an infinite amount of money and time and energy to spend on all the good things we could think of, so we have to make decisions about which ideas will best further the church’s mission. One of the troubles with this whole discussion about what the church can and must do is that it far too often stays in the abstract. The questions run along the lines of, Would it be wrong for a church to do this or that? Or could a church do this or that? And in the abstract, the answer to those questions is usually going to be “of course a church can do those things!” But any church leader with more than a budget cycle of experience is not going to want to answer those questions in the abstract; he’s going to be thinking about the fact that the church can’t do everything. Decisions have to be made; trade-offs have to be done. You have to decide not just if something will further the mission, but also how directly it will do so, and therefore whether it is worth doing that thing when there are five other good ideas on the table.
Of course there’s no way we could ever tell you, in a book like this, what decisions you should and shouldn’t make as a church. We don’t pretend to have a formula for what keeps disciple making properly in focus. Nor can we give you an ironclad set of priorities, as if supporting a missionary is always a better decision than improving a school. What we can say, though, is that in general we think the best way for church leaders to think through these things is to lean toward supporting those things that more directly support the mission of the church that the Lord Jesus has given it, over those things that less directly support it.
How that works out in any particular church will depend on the wisdom of the leadership of the local church. Some churches may decide to support only those missionaries and ministries who explicitly focus on Great Commission kinds of activities. Other churches may support medical or agricultural missions with an aim toward evangelism and disciple making wherever possible. Other churches may commit some resources to disaster relief simply because it shows the love of Christ. But even here it is often best to partner with local churches in the area that can follow up with the contacts we make through serving. The point, though, is that when discipleship is central, we’ll always be asking how the good deeds we undertake can give us an opportunity to bear witness to Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the most important point we want to make is that we should not be, as one new missional book puts it, “changing the scorecard for the church.”3 That book closes with a final example of “missional renaissance in full flower.” The author’s example is the “Souper Bowl of Caring,” a charity that raises money to fight local poverty and hunger. “All [necessary missional] elements are present,” he says. “You have a movement that involves cross-domain collaboration for tackling a huge social issue. Not only do the efforts of the participants benefit others, but the participants themselves also grow by fulfilling their own fundamental needs as human beings to serve others.” Moreover, the event is led by “a true kingdom-oriented leader who raises his own support.”4 This, then, is a model for the missional church. It’s this sort of work that counts on the missional scorecard.
Again, who is against fighting poverty and hunger? Nobody. But this model is not just a statement of kudos for fighting hunger. It is supposed to be one of the best examples of being the missional church. Yet there’s no mention in the example of making disciples, no mention of sin or the gospel, no talk even of Christ. To be fair, we know this author wants these things too, but this is the climactic example he chooses. If “missional renaissance in full flower” doesn’t have to include discipleship or proclamation or gospel categories, then this is not the right kind of plant. Neglect or tamper with the root issues—the cross of Christ, justification of sinners, the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, the need for repentance—and the fruits will surely wither.
The image of a scorecard, however, is a good one. If you are playing football, good blocking on offense is important, playing your gaps on defense is important, getting the snap down on special teams is important—but if you do all these things well and don’t get the ball in the end zone or through the uprights, you won’t win any games. The scorecard reminds the team what matters most. The analogy is appropriate for the church too. If we improve our schools, get people off welfare, clean up the park, and plant trees in the neighborhood, but aren’t seeking to make disciples, we may “bless” our communities, but we’re not accomplishing the church’s mission.
Ultimately, if the church does not preach Christ and him crucified, if the church does not plant, nurture, and establish more churches, if the church does not teach the nations to obey Christ, no one else and nothing else will. And yet, many others will meet physical needs. As Christopher Little writes in his provocative article “What Makes Mission Christian?,” “There is nothing particularly Christian about humanitarian work in the first place. For example, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, the United Nations, USAID, Oxfam, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, etc., are all striving to alleviate the ailments of humanity for basically philanthropic reasons.”5
In today’s cultural climate, where the accolades come quickly to those with humanitarian strategies and the opprobrium falls fast on those with evangelistic concerns, it is even more imperative that we keep the main thing the main thing. The danger is real. If we do not share the gospel—with words!—the story will not be told. Just as bad, if our priorities mirror the Millennium Development goals, we will be redundant. Gilbert Meilaender puts it well: “The church risks irrelevance, in fact, when it makes central in its vocation God’s preference for the poor and not his universal favor toward the poor in spirit.”6 Our scorecard is still the same as it ever was. The One who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth calls us to make disciples of all nations.
1If this were a different kind of book, this would be a good place to talk about the dilemmas many missionaries face relative to helping the poor. For example, they don't want the people they serve to become "rice Christians," those who profess Christ because they know they'll get food if they do or they feel obligated to profess Christ after having been fed. There are also the dynamics of creating dependencies with our Western money that need to be considered. See Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself (Chicago: Moody, 2009), especially 161–218, for practical suggestions on how to help without hurting.
2Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just (New York: Dutton, 2010), 216n128. Likewise, Keller states (approvingly it seems): "In the end, Strange ["Evangelical Public Theology"], Carson [Christ and Culture Revisited], and Hunter [To Change the World] all recommend a chastened approach that engages culture but without the triumphalism of transformationism. All of them also insist that the priority of the institutional church must be to preach the Word, rather than to 'change culture' " (223n153).
3See Reggie McNeal, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
4Ibid., 178.
5International Journal of Frontier Missions 25, no. 2 (2008): 68. See also, in the same issue, "Responses to Christopher Little's 'What Makes Mission Christian?,' " 75–85.
6Gilbert Meilaender, "To Throw Oneself into the Wave: The Problem of Possessions," in The Preferential Option for the Poor, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 74.