If you live in or around San Antonio, TX you’re within a few minutes drive of these realities:

Dropout rates at 50+% in urban schools.

Teenage pregnancy rates nearly twice the national average citywide and 3-4 times the national average in some zip codes.

Unbroken multi-generational cycles of dependency on government programs such as public housing and food stamps.

Rates of incarceration higher than rates of college enrollment in some groups.

Fatherless households seen as the norm in some neighborhoods.

There’s no doubt that these and other social problems facing San Antonio and other major metropolitan areas are interrelated and overlap at many points. My own experience working for 6+ years as a caseworker with federal prisoners and public housing residents (and 20+ years in local church ministry) demonstrated more than anecdotal evidence to prove those points.

That recognition begs questions like, “Where do we start? What are the root causes of these problems? Which one deserves more attention?”

But, as believing practicing Christians, we have a more important question to ask – What is the Church’s responsibility in these matters?

Notice, the question isn’t “Does the Church have a responsibility in these matters?” That responsibility is inherent in Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. In Luke’s account of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, we see Jesus going to his hometown of Nazareth and there, in the synagogue on the Sabbath, he set the template for his ministry with these words from the Prophet Isaiah,

God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” (Luke 4:18-19, The Message)

When interpreting this text, the Church has tended to either relegate these words of Jesus to his public ministry – saying they only have a spiritual application for us today; to the future – saying that they only apply to a yet to be realized Kingdom Age – or, they’re used as motivation for a host of benevolence and charity enterprises that too often encourage cynicism on the part of the givers and dependency on the part of the recipients.

Thank God for anyone who will respond to human need, who feels a sense of compassion and wants to do what they can to help those in need.

But, a century after the unveiling of The Social Gospel and nearly half a century after the birth of The Great Society, the social problems both ideologies sought to address have only worsened and given birth to other, more complex societal wounds.

It is time for a new vision, a new approach to urban ministry.

In his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Edwin Friedman states,

Leadership in America is stuck in the rut of trying harder and harder without obtaining significantly new results. The rut runs deep, affecting all the institutions of our society irrespective of size or purpose. It even affects those institutions that try to tackle the problem … These institutions are “stuck”…

In terms of how we are responding to the ongoing crises in the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio, the Church is just as “stuck” as any government bureaucracy.

One of the reasons this impasse exists is that the Church, when responding to the most basic of human needs – food, shelter, education and dignity – tends to imitate secular social service agencies.

Not long ago I was part of a group that was trying to organize a basketball league for inner city youth here in San Antonio. One of the more vocal members of our group, a member of one of the most conservative Evangelical megachurches in San Antonio, stated that the ultimate goal of such and endeavor wasn’t to just introduce kids to Jesus, it was to get them into therapy, because the problems they face in the inner city can’t be addressed just by the leading them to Christ.

In his mind, Jesus could save their souls, but it would take something more significant to actually transform their lives here in the real world. Of course, he did have a point, only it wasn’t the one he was trying to make.

The real problem is that for too long the Church has proclaimed a compartmentalized Gospel – one that segregates the spiritual from the physical – one that either dismisses works of justice and acts of mercy as divorced from the Gospel or sees them only as a lure to lead people to faith in Christ.

As a result, the only template the church can find when it does decide to feed the hungry and clothe the naked is that offered by failed private and government agencies still using 19th Century-style charity models of benevolence or 20th Century rights-based approaches.

Part of the irony in the proclamation of a compartmentalized Gospel is that every great social justice movement of the 19th Century – the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, etc. were initiatives championed by the majority of churches. There was, at one time, a seamless relationship between saving souls and saving lives. From Wilberforce’s cries to outlaw the slave trade to Charles G. Finney’s staunch support of the abolitionist movement to William Booth’s founding of The Salvation Army, Evangelical Christians were at the epicenter of societal reform.

But, by the middle of the 20th Century, it was obvious that things had changed. The Civil Rights Movement lead by Dr. Martin Luther King had some of its most vocal opponents in American Evangelical Churches. For some, that disparity was seen as motivation for Evangelicals to reengage the culture through political activism.

But, nearly 30 years after the emergence of the Religious Right, it’s obvious that we have lost our way. No one’s brand of political correctness - liberal or conservative - is the voice with which the Church must speak.

Every day the dreamers die, we need new dreams tonight – so wrote one artist/activist over 20 years ago – and those words are still true today. Unless we can dream new dreams – new ways of proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom – we will continue to be as stuck as any of the other dysfunctional bureaucracies that are part of the status quo and by default, part of the problem.

One of the root causes of the failure to dream those kinds of new dreams can be laid at the feet of the false dichotomy that separates the physical from the spiritual and the secular from the sacred.

The Evangelical world is filled with newer, better, hipper, more relevant and tingly ways to present God’s word. From praise choruses on the big screen to the sermon outline in PowerPoint to NOOMA videos – we’re all about getting the word out in ways that relate and connect.

But, when it comes to preaching the Gospel in deed (action), we’re practicing bloodletting and using blistering cups to treat terminal illnesses. The new wine may be flowing from the worship center, but we’re using vinegar out in the streets.

It all depends on where our priorities are.

As well intentioned as they usually are, food pantries, clothes closets, turkey baskets at Thanksgiving and Elf Louise at Christmas have not and will not achieve the radical transformation of individuals, families and communities that are the signs of the Kingdom of God that Jesus went to the cross for.

It’s time for the Church to embrace and proclaim the same Holistic Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed at the synagogue in Nazareth – to tear down the artificial walls that imply the soul is more valuable than the body, to debunk the notion that the goal of Christian faith is primarily getting your ticket punched for the rapture bus and enjoying the security of a lifestyle enclave in the interim.

In his book Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor, Robert Lupton warns,

To do for others what they can do for themselves is to make recipients the objects of our pity and deprive them of human dignity … This is not to say, of course, that those caught in dire straights – burned out of their home or starving from famine – should not be given aid. It does mean, however, that to provide free handouts to passive recipients without reasonable bootstrap expectations is to foster unhealthy dependency and promote an entitlement mentality.

My prayer is that we as a group can be part of something new that God is already doing in the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio. If you’re not in the San Antonio area, I hope this discussion can help you be a part of a new vision in your community. That new work is already happening in our ministries and in the ministries of brothers and sisters we have yet to meet.

I pray that we can leave behind the overly individualized concept of salvation that has seen the body as inferior to the soul and reduced salvation to intellectual ascent with little or no expectation of a radical transformation in the body, soul and spirit of the converted.

I pray that we can recover the Holistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by the same Jesus we call Lord, that we will embrace social and economic justice for everyone in our city as central to our own journeys of discipleship and sanctification through the power of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that this will be your prayer as well.

Tim Adams

Ps – There is much more to say about these matters, but this is enough with which to start. Feel free to add your own thoughts, questions, suggestions, comments or criticisms below.