C 08 - The Salvation of Society

    THE SALVATION or SOCIETY

8. The ministry has the attraction of being a much broader work than the salvation of the individual soul and building the individual church: it widens beyond the church walls into the salvation of society. The individual is the unit of society, and personal salvation is the primary work of the minister.

All life starts with a cell, and the soul is the cell of society and of the world. But life also builds its cells into an organism and out of the organism generates cells. The two aspects of salvation, the individual and the social, are never to be put into competition, as though either were antagonistic to the other. The two are complementary and must go together as must the center and the circle, the seed and the fruit, the leaven and the whole lump. The minister, while placing the center of his circle in the individual soul, also from this center sweeps the whole horizon and encircles the globe. He is. not simply saving- individual units but organized units, he is building the Kingdom of God in the world.

Formerly the Church was too individualistic and self-contained, largely shut up within its own walls and saving its own members and children, conserving its orthodoxy and respectability, with little conscience or consciousness as to the great world with all its social problems and perils surging around its doors.

Jesus, while he preached and applied an individualistic gospel, as to Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria, also preached and applied a broadly social gospel. He was transfigured on the mountain until he was steeped in splendor and the disciples were entranced and wanted to stay. But that was no place to stay. Jesus quickly hurried down to the plain where was a poor demoniac boy to be healed and many troubled folk to be helped and much work to be done. He turned that great white splendor on the mountain top, that was not for the private delectation of his disciples or for his own exaltation, into a shining stream of mercy to heal and bless the social world, even as mountains transmute the great glaciers and dazzling snowdrifts on their summits into rivulets and rivers that sow wheat fields and orchards out over the plain and make them blossom as the rose.

Jesus applied his principles and spirit to all the social problems of his day: to politics and taxes, poverty and wealth, to employer and employee, to strikes and lockouts, to public and private morals. The parable of the Good Samaritan is the social gospel and so is The Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. The whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is full of the social gospel. The prophets were great preachers of it and dealt with the very same problems in Judea that we have to-day in America and Europe. The minister of to-day is called to the same work in his community, and this field is now opening out before him in many ways. He no longer stands in his pulpit preaching a denominational theology and self -regarding message to his people: he is a minister or servant of the community and his pulpit is only a vantage ground and point of outlook whence he surveys the whole social complex, and mystic chords connect him like sensitive feelers and vital nerves with every aspect and problem and peril of this field. He sees whether the young people in his community have adequate and proper places and means of social recreation and companionship; whether there are dens of iniquity with their bottom in hell that are luring them to danger and destruction; whether the streets are sanitary, and the jails decent, and the schools well housed and equipped with proper appliances and competent teachers, and the hospitals in good condition and amply sustained. Of course he is not only on friendly terms but in active cooperation with all other Christian churches. He is a friend and helper of the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. and the Salvation Army and of every worthy means of social welfare. He may found and build a community house or club or public library or men’s or boys organization that will be a new center of social life in the community.

Many a minister has thus revolutionized his town and neighborhood. He knows the police man on his beat and the letter carrier on his route. He is hand in hand with business men on the one side and equally so with laboring men on the other, having the confidence and good will of both and seeking in every practical way to mediate between these classes and to secure and maintain mutual justice and brotherhood among them. He is a citizen as well as a minister, interested in politics without being a partisan and preaching its essential principles and duties. Without being an offensive agitator he is yet in the foreground or at least in the background of every work and movement of reform in his community. At times he may boldly attack social evils in low or in high places and drive men out of iniquitous business as Jesus drove the thieves and robbers out of the Temple.

Perhaps lie must even lake his ministerial life in his hands and be crucified on a cross as the price of his devotion to civic duty. He is to be preeminently the salt and the light of his community, a living gospel bound up in flesh and blood, read and known of all men. The minister is no longer an isolated and peculiar man, shut up within his own narrow calling or monkish cell, separated and aloof from his fellow men by his clerical garb and odor of sanctity, but he is emphatically a man among men, a man’s man, being all things to all men, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, an altogether human being of good fellowship and humor, sweetness and light, binding himself by ties of kindly interest and sympathy to everyone in his community of what ever class or condition and endeavoring to lead all into the common life of the Kingdom of God.

John saw the golden city coming down out of heaven to earth with its twelve gates, open on every side day and night, opening inward to the vision and fellowship of the glorified Christ and then swinging outward into paths of service that run in every direction to the ends of the earth. We have been thinking too exclusively of that city as being located in the glory land above; but we are also building a copy of it down on this earth. Already its jeweled walls and gates are rising around our horizon and we are laying its golden pavements right under our feet. This is the meaning of all worship and work, sanitation, education, social and civic reform, home missions and foreign missions, national and international affairs. This is the minister’s mission and program, and no grander call and opportunity now appeals to men. It should draw young men with a great attraction.