Conveniently enough a conservative Christian sounded off this past week directly contradicting what I am going to say. James Dobson has encouraged Christians to not worry about the environment because it can demoralize and divide evangelicalism… interesting. (see this story)
Today’s little tidbit of change is this: That Christianity is not a single-issue faith; we are called to bring good news to the poor, bind the brokenhearted, free captives and prisoners and we don’t just do one or two of these things, we do them all. We combat injustice, and love and seek reconciliation between both the violated and the violator. Too often we tell ourselves that it is okay to limit actions to a few certain issues so that we can most effectively do them. Christ doesn’t call us to an effective ministry, He calls us to an holistic ministry. What we do is as much a working out of our faith to know Christ more as it is to do the work in the world. Christ is the only effective minister to the needs of this world, and we can only hope to imitate Him.
Some people box Jesus into a nice box, pro-family, pro-life, and pro-america – to this I add anti-poverty, pro-humanity, pro-peace, pro-justice, pro-righteousness, pro-holiness, pro-Jesus, pro-dustfromsandals, pro-anything that is as it will be in the world to come. We bring a foretaste of a great Kingdom, we don’t just bring breath-mints to to a rotting world, we bring a new world to it. When the Spirit works in my heart to make it ache I should listen, even if it makes my actions occur outside of the comfortable box of single-issue faith.