Roots and Fruit
Jubilee+’s Chris Duerden recently spoke at Grace Church, Bolton. With the background of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew chapter 25, Chris related her story of coming - more recently - to truly understand Jesus’ calling for every believer to exercise grace and mercy in practical ways. Before you read further you might like to hear her clear and helpful testimony here.
I suspect Chris’s background - becoming a Christian at age 18, with a long and distinguished c.v. of positive serving and a sound theology behind an active Christian life, but never quite understanding the call on every believer to care for those in poverty, the outsider, the widow and the orphan - is not uncommon. Indeed, those involved in social action ministries will probably be familiar with brothers and sisters who don’t get why some of us are more convinced on the mercy and justice issues!
But as I listened to Chris’s story I reflected on my own background as I had come to understand God’s heart for justice and mercy from a very different direction. My background had no good theological undergirding. In my teenage years I was attracted to a lot of justice issues (more politically). And while, from my upbringing, I would somehow understand that Christianity might point to these concerns I did not want to own the whole of Jesus’ teaching, and especially his call to repentance and faith! It was only later when I began to follow Jesus as my Lord and Saviour that my passion for justice and mercy was realigned and given strong theological roots.
One of the areas of work in which Jubilee+ is currently engaged is sharpening up its theological positions on the areas in which it has been called to minister and help local churches. Thinking more theologically about what we do might challenge people on both ends of the spectrum. Faith without works is dead, but neither do we preach a works-based salvation.
I write this in the same way as Chris; not as a theologian but simply as one who wants to be better at incarnating the Gospel in my everyday life, however falteringly or imperfectly. But I suspect both Chris and I want to be both as Biblical and as consistent as we can be.
There are challenges here for Christians on the two extremes. First those who (like Chris) have sat for many years under sound evangelical teaching but not joined the dots on grace and mercy. But also for those (like me) who always had an urge for justice and mercy but initially without any sound Biblical understanding of personal salvation from where everything else is ultimately worked out - through the Church.
The footnote to this - and what flows for Jubilee+’s present work - is the joining (or re-joining) social action ministries (every believers’ calling to justice and mercy) to evangelism.
Faith and works; roots and fruit!