02-This one Thing I do

II. “THIS ONE THING I DO!”

IF OUR TASK WAS ONLY as simple as that! There is not one thing; there are a hundred things to do. Anything as comprehensive as the Christian ministry could not fail to be a demanding task. Our work deals with life, and is as wide as life itself. Other professions are by their nature limited. The doctor deals with the body, the lawyer with legal matters, the merchant with trade, the teacher with education, the politician with public affairs. Not one of these, of course, is wholly confined to his own particular sphere, but neither does his task include quite so much as the task of the minister. His work reaches out to include something of almost everybody’s task. It seems as if he would be the last person who could rightly say, “This one thing I do.” But he had better learn to say it. If not, he may find himself doing so many things that he is not really doing even one thing.

First, it will be necessary for us to come to some sort of decision about the relation of our life and work to the community about us. Our church is not a thing apart. Participation in community efforts is inevitable. Community agencies will expect our assistance, and ought to have it. In rural centers 4-H Clubs, Granges, schools, cooperative movements, and in the city Y.M.C.A, civic organizations, Boy Scouts, welfare agencies, etc, will all seek our help, and afford an opportunity for a wide ministry.

Active participation in public affairs often becomes more acute for a minister in a small community, just as it is more difficult for a minister in a small church to regulate his activities within his church than it is for a minister in a large church. In a large church there is more lay leadership to share and lighten the minister’s responsibilities. In a small church, if the pastor does not do certain things they will remain undone. In a small town this is true too about community activities. In a situation in which a city minister may readily say ’’No” as to community activity, the small-town minister may have to say “Yes,” or a necessary community service will go undone.

I know a minister in a small town who has for several years been county chairman of the Bed Cross. He has a small church, well organized, its membership faithful and loyal. There is not much prospect for denominational growth. He has time for wider service. This he wisely undertook to render. He tripled the county membership in the Bed Cross, and broadened his own ministry immeasurably. He is the best-known and best-loved minister in the county. There seemed no one else to do this work. This minister did it, and somehow managed to make a pastoral task out of it too, for many more than those of his own little group.

Always our community relationships require some co-operation with others in community movements. Some of these movements may not be religious other than in their effects. It would seem to be plain that a minister can have no part in partisanship action, and that he should be particularly on guard against activities in politics.

One of the greatest dangers in community participation is in the tendency to become a community dissenter. A far greater influence in civic affairs is wielded by seeking to commend rather than to condemn. Condemnation in public affairs helps not at all, while constructive criticism is hard to shake off. I was once a member of a ministerial association which met each Monday morning, and whose first consideration each week seemed to be, “What can we protest against this morning?” I cannot recall that anybody ever listened to anything we had to say. The matter of community activity is a vexing question. It is my personal observation and experience, through years of sharing in many activities outside of my own church, that all of one’s community relationships are only auxiliary to the task that centers on the corner where one’s church is located. Whatever I do, I must enrich my ministry there. There I have a fold and a flock. I am first of all their shepherd. It is beyond all doubt a help to be respected and favorably known by many throughout the community. The pastures are broad and there are “other sheep.” But too often, when we leave our “ninety and nine,” it is not that we are truly seeking the wandering sheep. And I trust that it remains just a ministerial secret as to how many times our public activity is a matter of our unworthy and unprofitable bowing before the false gods of personal popularity.

If there is to be a narrowing down of our ministry in the face of the many demands upon our time and energy, it is likewise true in regard to the content of our message and work. For we must come to some clear decision too as to how much of our ministry shall apply itself to the social structure of the life about us. We are prone to characterize our time in generalizing words. So we speak of it as a materialistic, a scientific, or a machine age. Certainly no such characterizing word can be wholly inclusive. But to say that our age is a social age would indicate, at least, one of the chief developments of the past century, and one that has left its mark upon the work and message of the Christian church. Is the gospel a social or an individual gospel?

There are, of course, extremes of emphasis here.

There are those for whom anything that smacks of a social gospel is anathema. They are afraid of the very term as of a plague. They do not countenance any mention of Christian social action from the pulpit or in the councils of the church.

There are others who have no other text whatever. For them the pulpit is often merely a forum for the discussion of social action, and the church an agency of social reform. An average minister, however, finds himself somewhere between these two extremes. He is aware that the redemption of the individual is essential, but that society must be redeemed too.

One thing is certain that our task is to be a challenge to life. We are to declare unto men that they must be born again. But what for? That they may be new creatures; that they may live a new life. And a new life must necessarily change the conditions under which it is lived. In Thessalonica they said of Paul and Silas, “ These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. ’ ’ Our gospel has lost some of its first meaning if it is not revolutionary. It changes things.

Everything needed changing in Jesus ’ day. And Jesus was aware of it. He wept over Jerusalem.

He said that its leadership was rotten at the core, that the poor were in rags and want, that hunger and disease stalked through the hovels of the wretched. He approved of charity. The disciples had a treasury for the poor. He healed the sick.

He denounced the practices of the rich, the selfcentered, and the hard of heart. Neither his hands nor his heart were closed to the wretchedness of men about him. He believed in a better world. He pictured the kind of world God wants. He called it the Kingdom of God. He prayed for,it. We cannot doubt that Jesus would approve of every modern social organization for the betterment of life, and every bit of legislation for the restraint of social evils. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation, as we know, changed the basis of religious authority from the church to the Bible. As Protestants we stake our faith on the revelation of the Book, not on the councils of Eome. That being true, the immediate task of the sixteenth century in Protestant circles was some clear statement of what the Bible taught. So there followed the years of the forming of theological creeds and systematized statements of faith. The church naturally became theologically minded. Now, no fault can be found with that. We must know, in an ordered, systematic way, what the Book tells us about God.

Every branch of the Protestant church has a creed; if not a written one, there is necessarily some inner agreement as to a common truth binding that group together as a denomination. Theological formulas are imperative.

Accompanying this emphasis upon faith was the abandonment of everything in practice and form that had been a part of the Roman church. And for more than three centuries we have been under that Reformation influence. It is only recently that there has been an appreciable recovery, in Protestant circles in America, at least, from the blighting effect of the sweeping aside of everything formal and liturgical in worship. For long years the church was just a “meeting house.”

Every formalism of worship was taboo. My own Dutch forebears put a rooster on their church steeples as a substitute for the cross. We abandoned even the central symbol of our faith. All that is happily changing. But the sixteenth-century influence of allegiance to a creed and a theological system lingered long too. The immediate necessity for a theological system turned out to be a limiting purpose in Protestantism, so that quite generally our emphasis has always been on correct statement of belief. The effect of this emphasis is seen in the presence of many denominations. They were the inevitable outcome of a stress upon theological formula. And beyond all doubt one of the present weaknesses of Protestantism is in the average church member’s conception that he is a Christian when he has given his assent to a certain form of Christian belief. The effect of this, moreover, is seen in a long-delayed following out of the implications of our faith on our social structure. Martin Luther first neglected to follow out the implications of his faith when he turned against the peasants asking him to demand with them some of the elementary human rights and social privileges implied in the new religious freedom he proclaimed. What had his new form of faith to do with these! Luther’s primary interest apparently was the acceptance of his theological system. To a great degree this lias been one of the determining influences of the Reformation movement, and has shaped the thought and the purpose of the Protestant church. In its preoccupation with systems of faith it has strongly emphasized the redemption of the individual and neglected the social redemption of society.

Current history reveals a widespread revolt against the church where it has wrapped about itself a cloak of oblivion to human misery; The Roman church has suffered thus in Spain and Mexico. Finding no fellowship, no sympathy, no intelligent guidance in facing the real problems of life, finding the church not only wrapped up in its own interests, but associated in their minds will those exploiting them, the people turned against it. The church in Russia brought about its own doom through a complete indifference to the common life of the Russian people. They saw no power or life in the church; so they brushed it aside. In Germany, where the church suffers under heavy civic disabilities, that very fact goes back to the surrender by the church itself of many social activities to the State. The church was concerned primarily with the formulas of Christian truth. All the social implications of the gospel it left to the government. How natural for the State when it becomes totalitarian to enlarge upon what the church has already left to it and to seek to include the entire church within its province! Our modern day has ample illustration of the fact that institutionalism, formalism, sectarianism, vested interests, and even a well-meaning otherworldliness are ways to separateness from the lives of people whom the church is destined to serve, and that when the church fails to bring to hear its spiritual resources upon the pressing daily problems of life, it sows the seeds of its own decay.

Life does not exist for the sake of religion. It is religion that exists for the sake of life. We must believe that whatever touches life touches the church. The church cannot ignore the life and the conditions of life about it as if these are things apart. And they are wrong who would keep the church a private enterprise when it was meant to be the advance guard of the “Kingdom of G-od in this world. There is no excuse for the church if it is organized just for itself. How can there be a gospel that ends with the individual? No man lives in this world as an individual. The gospel that has no social implications is not a gospel, for the gospel began with One who said, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. ’ ’ No man is long a minister before he is aware in Ms own heart of wrongs that must be righted and evils that must be attacked. He sees that legislation must be enacted, common action must be aroused, moral safeguards must be erected, character-forming agencies must be supported, and philanthropic work must be done, or much of his preaching is in vain. There is a constant inner urge to do something about it. Just to preach seems not to be enough. The structure of life about liim lies heavy in his heart. From within his own soul there is no contentment with things as they are. If there is, he had better question his call to be a minister of Jesus Christ. And with the inner promptings of our own spirits, there are the many demands from without for definite social action. Every agency and movement for betterment looks to the minister. Civic officials seek his help. Reform movements want his leadership. Almost every mail brings some appeal for support and for action. Everybody else seems convinced that the church and the minister are in the business of social action. The minister is besieged to do something about things as they are, that they may be better than they are. But what are we to do? We cannot do everything that is demanded of us. Granted that we must do something, what is that we are to do, and how much of our ministry must be concerned with social betterment?

It must be noted that the Book of our religion gives no details for social action. Jesus, instead of giving a program of restraint against privilege and power, says, “ Beware of covetousness. “ Our responsibility for the distressed and needy he covers with the story of the good Samaritan and the simple injunction, “Go, and do thou likewise.” When he touches the question of the woman of the streets, we hear him say, “Go, and sin no more.” Jesus meets a grafting ward heeler like Zacchaeus and visits with him in his own home. When we come to the prophets of the Old Testament, we find them preachers of righteousness, denouncing corruption, and putting their finger upon community sores and declaring that God would not have it so. But neither the prophets, nor He who was more than a prophet, ever offer a detailed program of social action.

There is, however, in the Bible every motive for social action; and we would do better to add some method than, in stifling literalism, to abandon all method and program, and with it the very spirit of him “who went about doing good.” Our danger here is one of confusion as to what to do and how to do it, unless we face a few fundamental considerations. Some men have gone “all out” for social action, and have identified themselves with movements that.absorbed too much of their time. Others have gotten so far in the lead in socialistic endeavor that they have ended in a final retreat from the ministry altogether.

It will be helpful to remember that we are not experts in the field of social action. We are not economists, nor lawmakers, nor businessmen, nor welfare workers, nor politicians, nor judges, nor even reformers. We are ministers, and where leadership is necessary for needed social changes, others are technically better equipped than we are. If the present economic setup is wrong, it will take an economist to do something about it.

Most of us cannot manage our own finances any too well. What the social leadership needs is Christian motivation. Every social program to be effective must be motivated by the Christian spirit and undergirded by a Christian faith. That is sitask great enough to engage all our energies.

Furthermore, every social movement needs Christian public opinion behind it. Strong moral principles must be behind a new social order. The Prohibition experiment failed because it lacked a Christianized social conviction even among Christian people. No legislation or law is worth more than the public opinion behind it. A professor of political science, speaking to our Men’s Club, affirmed that the only task of a politician is to follow public opinion. He said that it mattered little after all who was in office, as the officeholder is only the man to do what the people have decided they want done. And that is not belittling the politician. So little gets done because the people do not know what they want.. Someone is needed to quicken a moral social consciousness, to challenge men and women to want, and to work for, the kind of world God means us to have. Our best contribution is to be a prophet of the new order, to create a new motive, to insist upon I the pattern that Grod has laid down for the best life of men living together. “We have a textbook as rich in socialized truth as it is in theological truth. Its gospel proclaims the service of the weak by the strong, of the poor by the rich, that the brotherhood of man is a parallel truth to the fatherhood of Grod, and that to be a pagan toward the one is to be a pagan toward the other. What bedrock convictions the average man has about those things will make or break any social effort. Who better than the minister can help to formulate Christian social opinion? What he can best do, if would seem, he ought to concentrate on doing. We are not experts in social leadership, but the experts are impotent without the Christianized convictions behind them which it is our business to create.

Furthermore, many efforts fail because of a blind faith in the sufficiency of external conditions and changes. It needs to be said by someone that better hours of work and wages will not provide a millennium, that material abundance has,not led to the mastery of all human problems. A physically hungry man may not have much appetite for spiritual food, but a man with a full stomach is not any nearer the Kingdom for that. No new world is going to be built out of any of the ingeniously devised prefabricated materials of our machine age. It still needs the bricks and the straw of the age-old Sermon on the Mount. Who ought to be certain of that if not we? The social gospel must claim our attention. But there are limitations for us. There is one thing we must do. And perhaps the whole situation for us can be most adequately met if we will remember that the one thing for us is, by God’s help, to seek to develop a social consciousness, not to create a social system.