If the church has as its chief mission to witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ, then it should certainly be more concerned with this business than it now seems to be. If, on the other hand, its chief mission is to transform society through social engineering, then it is being increasingly diligent in its calling—but woefully ineffective.
Is the Church in the world to conquer the world for righteousness? Or is it in the world to bear testimony that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, has opened the way to God by his death and resurrection? Is the Church supposed to be a conquering organization or a witnessing organism? The way that question is answered determines the course of the Church and its success or failure in the eyes of God.
The idea of the Church may easily be perverted so that it becomes the agency through which man, not God, works. It is to this danger that I speak.
Analysis of many of the major concerns and activities of the church today leads to this somber conclusion: Even if every objective were to be realized, unless at the same time there were added the spiritual dimension of the Gospel’s call to individuals to repent of their sins and accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord, the world would still be populated with lost souls.
For the Church to give top priority to the secular and material problems of mankind can only mean that there are those in places of leadership who have lost, or never had, a realization of man’s desperate spiritual needs.
This is not an appeal to preserve the status quo. It is not an attempt to project “seventeenth-century theology into the twentieth.” And it is not a conviction based on an insensitivity to the dire needs of people living in an advanced technological age, or on lack of concern for the pressing social problems of poverty, discrimination, and the inequities that produce internal strife and external warfare.1Editor’s note: Let it be pointed out that Dr. Bell, far more than most men, has responded to social needs. For twenty-five years he was chief surgeon in a 380-bed mission hospital in China where the healing of the body and earnest witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ went hand in hand. We once asked Dr. Bell what the monetary value of his services in China would have been by American standards. After a moment he replied, “Perhaps half a million dollars; but that never once entered my mind.” We know also that during the additional fifteen years in which he practiced surgery in Asheville, North Carolina, his services were always available without charge if patients were unable to pay, and that he and his wife continue to this day to minister to the material needs of those who come their way. It is just possible that Dr. Bell is more keenly conscious of human need, and compassionate in trying to meet it, than some who speak so glibly of having an acute “social consciousness.”
In looking over the advertisements of major theological seminaries in America, one that observes that with few exceptions, theological education today might be said to major on the world’s secular and material ills. The question that must be asked, then, is: Who will enter in to help meet the spiritual needs of the people? Man does not live by bread alone, though some seem to think so. Man can gain all the world has to offer and still lose his soul. And when the Kingdom of God and his righteousness are put first, then material needs are mysteriously met. Shall we allow the people of this generation to join with David in saying, “No man cared for my soul” (Ps. 142:4b)?
I am not discounting the fact of desperate human need and the necessity that every Christian play the role of the Samaritan. We need to pray earnestly for greater compassion and love and an ever increasing sensitivity to the plight of the needy, wherever they may be found. But I am pleading for the Church and the individual Christian to endeavor to see in those we try to serve souls for whom Christ died.
I am concerned about this matter because I see “social concern” being used as a substitute for the Gospel of redemption. I see many operating within the context of the Church who no longer accept the biblical doctrine of man and sin, who no longer proclaim the Bible-revealed Son of God as man’s one hope of forgiveness and spiritual healing. Because I see social engineering replacing the preaching of the simple Gospel, I am concerned for the Church lest it find “Ichabod” written across its portals.
Take as an example the problem of grinding poverty. Let us grant, first, that “affluence” and “poverty” are relative terms, and, second, that the Christian is responsible for implementing his faith with works of generosity and compassion; still the fact remains that while immediate need must be met by immediate action, the long-range solution, which it is the Church’s obligation to preach, is that when God is put first in our lives we have the word of our Lord that material sufficiency follows.
By exalting Christ as the answer to man’s greatest need, and his promises as man’s greatest asset, the Church would ultimately do far more to alleviate poverty than a dozen governmental programs.
Furthermore, through the centuries the church has performed its mightiest service to society as a whole when, working in the power of the Spirit, it has led men to Jesus Christ and turned them loose on the world. By neglecting its calling to give top priority to the things of the spirit, it becomes derelict in its duty and vulnerable to the siren calls of a godless society.
In meeting immediate need, wherever it may be found (which is the Christian’s duty), the Church has no right to claim for an unbelieving world those benefits that God has promised solely to those who put him first in their lives. Nor has it a mandate to enlist the government to carry out what it considers to be its obligations to society.
Today we see church agencies contributing to secular projects such as low-cost housing, poverty programs, civil-rights movements, and the like. It is one thing if the allocated funds were given for such projects; it is quite another if they come from budgets raised to preach the Gospel at home or abroad.
Acutely aware of a social order out of kilter, the Church is in grave danger of failing to rise to its God-ordained task of seeking to make new creatures in Christ. It is new hearts that men need, and it is men with new hearts who alone can change the desperate conditions of our day.
The process of conversion one by one seems too slow to many. But it is God’s way, and he has offered to the Church the power of the Gospel, the power of the Cross, the power of a resurrected Christ, and the power of his Spirit.
Can man find a better way?
L. NELSON BELL
