Credo
21 April 2025
Do you know what I want?
I want justice—oceans of it.
I want fairness—rivers of it.
(Amos 5:23–24, The Message Translation)
As the above quote from the prophet Amos illustrates, God is deeply concerned about social justice. Indeed, even a casual read through of the Bible reminds us that God’s heart beats for the alienated and the marginalised.
Unfortunately, churches today often do not engage well with social justice. In my experience, such poor engagement is underpinned by two common but deficient ways in which churches view social justice. This short article describes these two problematic perspectives and suggests how they can be addressed by churches, in order that we can be more faithful to our God who loves justice.
- The Conflict View
The first deficient way of viewing social justice is to see it as irrelevant to Christian discipleship, or even worse, to see it as being in conflict with discipleship.
Such a perspective has developed in many churches as a response against the social gospel movement. This movement gained prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Church due to the teachings of Walter Rauschenbusch and others.
In the excesses of the social gospel movement, Christians prioritised social activism at the expense of spiritual transformation. Addressing social sin was favoured over addressing personal sin. Redemption and salvation were reduced to simply humanitarian work and politics. Such excesses are rightly rejected by churches.
However, just like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another, some responses to the social gospel movement have been an over-correction. This has the unfortunate result of churches rejecting social justice as in conflict with Christian discipleship. However, orthodox Christianity views social justice and Christian discipleship as partners.
Truly: changed hearts change societies. This is why the early Christians – the first Christians – were known for their social concern and for providing public healthcare.
One of my favourite quotes from the ancient world is from Julian the Apostate, the pagan Roman Emperor who was hostile to Christianity. In one of his letters, he complained about Christians in his empire in the following way:
Why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism?
Here Julian is referring to Christianity as “atheism” since Christians did not worship Roman gods. He remarks that Christian good works have attracted many Christian converts. He then continues to say:
it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.\
“Jews” and “Galileans” again refer to Christians. In other words, Julian was complaining because Christians were doing so much to care for his fellow countrymen that it made him look bad!
These early Christians knew that faith without works is dead (James 2:17). They saw that social concern is a natural outworking of the gospel. They knew it was indispensable to Christian discipleship.
Thus, instead of keeping social justice at an arm’s length, churches today ought to incorporate elements of social justice into their discipleship programmes. In so doing, they will develop disciples more fully in the ways of Jesus.
Let me illustrate this. Some time ago, I was chatting with a lead pastor of a church. His church knew that people with disabilities were a marginalised group in Singaporean society. And so, they committed to include children with disabilities into their Sunday school classroom.
The pastor told me that, after starting this ministry, his Sunday school teachers self-reported growing a lot in their discipleship. The reason: these teachers were inspired by how children with disabilities persevered in their faith despite their challenges.
Something the pastor said stuck with me. He said, “This is a lesson that they could not have learned merely through Bible study or a sermon. They needed to be walking alongside people with disabilities to learn it.”
Amen! Indeed, exercising social concern is a God-ordained way through which we develop as disciples. Or to put it in a Scriptural idiom: we must recognise that doing justice and loving mercy is a way that we walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).
- The Uncritical Acceptance View
There is a second deficient way of viewing social justice, namely, to uncritically accept secular ideologies on social justice, e.g., wokeism. It is dangerous to jump on ideological bandwagons without first thoroughly checking the horse that pulls them.
To be clear, I am not saying that secular approaches to social justice have absolutely no merit to them. However, I am cautioning that truth and falsehood are muddled together in secular approaches towards social justice.
This is why churches must learn to exercise discernment. Such a process of discernment needs to be nuanced – it does not mean a wholesale rejection of secular ideologies. Instead, discernment means learning to separate sheep from wolves by reclaiming what is biblical, while rejecting unbiblical elements.
This is easier to learn through an example, so let me illustrate this from my own ministry in the disability sector.
In secular social justice circles, a popular idea is inclusion of minority groups. Thus, many companies today champion “D.E.I.” – diversity, equity, and inclusion.
On one hand, such emphasis on inclusion has taught us many things that are good and godly. For example, it has taught us to treasure the lived experience of persons with disabilities and honour them. It has taught us to value their gifts and ensure they are involved in decision-making and leadership.
On the other hand, there are also aspects of secular approaches to inclusion that we must reject. Let me illustrate my point through a real story told by the theologian Thomas Reynolds.
Reynolds recounts a Sunday service where a pastor sees a man coming up to the altar to take communion. But the man speaks in a slurred way and walks unsteadily. And so, the pastor exclaims with disgust: “We don’t serve drunks here!” But the pastor did not realise that the man had cerebral palsy, a disability that affected his movement and speech.
How do you feel about this story?
I’m sure that many of us would reject the pastor’s actions as presumptuous and arrogant.
But at the same time, our response to the pastor teaches us about ourselves. Did we rush to judge the pastor, without knowing anything about him? Did we reject the pastor with disgust, in the same way that the pastor rejected the disabled man with disgust? And in so doing, how are we different?
This is the problem with secular approaches to inclusion. In our attempt to stand alongside the marginalised, we demonise the oppressors. In our rush to include people with disabilities, we rush to exclude others as evil. We feel justified to cancel them because we feel they have done wrong. But we ourselves perpetuate another cycle of exclusion. And so, inclusion become exclusion – and thus self-defeating!
But this is not how we have learned Christ! True inclusion, as modelled by Jesus, means that we seek to include everyone, even those who have wronged us. As Romans 5:10 teaches us, Christ died for us while we were still His enemies! Jesus died for us on the cross even while we were throwing rocks at him!
Christianity teaches us that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace (Romans 3:23–24). And so, true inclusion gets no joy in cancelling anyone. Instead, true inclusion involves sinners offering God’s grace to sinners. We call all to repentance, and we stand together equally in repentance. That is biblical inclusion.
As the above example has shown, while there is much that churches could learn from secular approaches to inclusion, churches should still subject such approaches to a biblical-theological critique. Such nuanced critique will allow churches to avoid worldly compromise and—even better—to live out social justice more richly than secular approaches allow.
Conclusion
In this brief article, I have pointed out two deficient views of social justice that churches often have. I have also suggested how to correct these wrong views. May this short reflection help us respond more faithfully to God’s call to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:23-24)!
Postscript: This article was adapted from an address delivered at the IDMC Conference 2024. Should the reader be interested to learn more about social justice, I recommend an insightful book written by a sister-in-Christ, Dr Suzanne Choo, entitled When Woke Goes Broke: Redeeming Social Justice for the Church.
Ps Leow Wen Pin is the Associate Pastor of Bethany Evangelical Free Church. He is also Board Chairman of the Koinonia Inclusion Network, a mission organisation that enables churches to welcome and disciple people of all abilities. He also often teaches in local seminaries, and has written several books on Christian topics. See leowwenpin.com for more information.