In Christianity Today, Sophia Lee has written a 5,000-word essay, simultaneously inspiring and illuminating, on the migration crisis in Colombia. She describes the Simón Bolívar International Bridge from Venezuela and the thousands of migrants making their way into Colombia since 2015, and she reports on how churches have responded to the humanitarian needs at their doorstep.
Lee’s report focuses on a pastor who sensed the Lord telling him to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, and who did just that while also renting a bus to bring them to church. In spite of their financial hardship, the pastor and his wife followed the Lord’s prompting, and they’ve seen a thriving ministry of compassion at the border, where they meet physical needs and share the gospel.
C. René Padilla and Holistic Mission
What makes Lee’s article compelling isn’t just the firsthand stories of churches meeting the needs of neighbors in distress but also the additional context she provides. The dominant perspective on the breadth of the church’s mission among evangelicals worldwide (what’s often called holistic or integral mission, encompassing both evangelism and social ministry and justice) is due in large part to the influence of Ecuadorian theologian C. René Padilla, who argued that evangelism and social responsibility are “inseparable” and “essential” to the Christian mission.
Padilla came of age as a migrant in Colombia, and in an era of social unrest, he urged evangelicals worldwide to develop a social ethic that would neither compromise with Marxist solutions nor accept a dichotomy between “spiritual” and “earthly” mission that leaves pressing political and cultural questions unanswered.
Although the holistic understanding of the church’s mission, as expressed by the Lausanne Movement, has become dominant, tensions remain among evangelicals globally. John Stott and Billy Graham, though disagreeing at one point about what the focus should be for Lausanne, believed Christians were called to both evangelism and social action, with the priority given to evangelism.
David Hesselgrave describes this position as “restrained holism” because it attempts to preserve the traditional priority for evangelism while elevating social action. Evangelism and social action are made to be more or less equal partners, although a certain priority is reserved for evangelism.
Other analogies and words have been adopted to describe the relationship between evangelism and social work. If the right word for evangelism isn’t “priority,” then “ultimate” might be best to describe the aim for personal conversion. Or we might say evangelism is like the hub of a wheel, with the spokes representing the different ways gospel faithfulness is worked out in compassion and justice as the church engages with the world. Shift the frame in a temporal/eternal direction and you see why, in Cape Town in 2010, there was discussion at Lausanne about Christians working to alleviate all human suffering and especially eternal suffering (thereby putting weight on the need for evangelism with eternal stakes).
Maintaining Emphasis on Evangelism
The worldwide evangelical consensus on holistic mission differentiates the movement from the dichotomies and dualism of fundamentalists who, in response to the “social gospel” of modernism, gave nearly exclusive attention to Word-based evangelism and saw social ministry as a possible distraction from the church’s true mission. But the evangelical view of holistic mission also stands out from the World Council of Churches and other mission movements that eventually baptized humanitarian aid and sociopolitical agendas with Christian lingo and a quasi-universalist or inclusivist position that displaced evangelism altogether.
Yet the tension remains. At times, some evangelical churches fail to address the situation of neighbors in need, thinking their only task is to speak to spiritual maladies. To this, in the 1970s, Padilla said, “There is no place for statistics on how many souls die without Christ every minute if they do not take into account how many of those who die are victims of hunger.” Meanwhile, other evangelical churches devote themselves to ministry among the needy but eventually lose sight of proclaiming the cross and urging people to trust in Jesus and follow him.
Some thinkers wish the differentiation could be done away with altogether, with the Christian responsibility to evangelize and do works of mercy being seen as equally vital, with no distinction between obedience in meeting spiritual versus physical needs. In his essay “Evangelism and Social Responsibility: The Making a Transformational Vision,” Al Tizon laments the tendency among some evangelicals to affirm social ministry “with a caveat.” He thinks prioritizing spiritual needs or qualifying our call to meet physical needs only perpetuates a dichotomy that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
I disagree. While we should take care not to set forth a reductionist understanding of humanity by splitting up “body” and “soul,” as if the needs of one could be divorced from the other, we find biblical warrant for prioritizing the eternal over the temporal. In Jesus’s ministry, we see him meeting needs both physical and spiritual. He feeds people in the wilderness yet then delivers the Bread of Life discourse and distinguishes between the bread that perishes and the bread that lasts (John 6). We see him healing a paralytic yet then forgiving sins (Mark 2:1–12). We hear him warn about gaining the world while losing our souls (8:34–38).
We Can’t Assume Evangelism
Sophia Lee’s article is commendable in how it shows Christians meeting needs. The latter two-thirds of her report shows churches getting more involved in compassion and relief work and thus rejecting the dualistic tendency to focus only on “saving souls.” Yet most of Lee’s report covers the economic uplift for migrants and the personal sense of spiritual transformation and purpose that believers experience when they get involved in social ministry.
I’ve seen this happen before: a Christian or church that failed to serve the community well gets a vision for making a difference, discovers a newfound spiritual enthusiasm for serving in Jesus’s name, yet over time loses the earlier emphasis on calling people to personal faith. It’s as if once the holistic vision is embraced, the “saving souls” part of Christian mission gets assumed while the social ministry aspect gets attention.
This is an ongoing concern I have for evangelicals (like myself) who agree with the evangelical consensus and espouse a holistic vision of mission, even if it’s the restrained type that prioritizes evangelism. Unless we continue to give weight to gospel proclamation in our understanding of the church’s mission, we’re likely to lose our prophetic and evangelistic urgency.
Padilla was right. If we fail to meet the physical needs of neighbors in distress in favor of keeping a spiritual-only mission of gospel proclamation, we run the risk of being like the priest and the Levite who passed on the other side of the wounded man left for dead. But Padilla’s critics had a point too when they warned about the possibility—as demonstrated throughout Christian history in multiple churches and movements—of social work and action sidelining personal evangelism and urgent calls to repentance and faith.
We’ve been given a holistic mission that secures our eternity and frees us to invest in the temporal world. But we can never allow our attention to temporal compassion ministry to supplant our concern for the eternity-focused ministry of gospel proclamation.
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