For its entire life, most of the Christian church has understood its mission as attending to both the material and spiritual needs of the world. But in the past one hundred years or so there is has been a tendency in churches to set these two things—the material and the spiritual—in opposition to one another when it comes to thinking about the church’s work in the world. 

On the one hand, there are churches that emphasize the social mission of the church and they give creative thought to the question of what it means for a congregation to address the physical, social, and economic needs of its neighbours. To see physical needs and to ask, “What can we do to show the love of Christ?” The Scriptures not only support, but compel the church to think through these kind of questions and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

But at times this attention to the material needs of our neighbours is not accompanied by adequate attention to their spiritual needs. We are eager to talk about justice, but not to talk about justification. We’re quick to acknowledge the social sins of the world, but slow to acknowledge our personal sin against God. And so over time the message of the gospel is reduced to becoming merely social or corporate in nature. 

But on the other hand, there are churches that tend to emphasize the spiritual mission of the church and they give deep thought to the nature of personal sin and personal salvation and to what it might mean to work together as a congregation to see spiritual needs met. Indeed, the greatest love we can show to someone else is to share the good news of how they can be reconciled with God. The Scriptures not only support, but in fact commission us to this work.

But at times this concern with the spiritual needs of neighbours is not accompanied by adequate attention to their physical, social, and economic needs. We’re eager to talk about personal sin, but we’re not going to talk about social justice because that’s what liberal churches do. We’re quick to address our estrangement from God, but we’re less interested in talking about the brokenness in ourselves, in our community, and in the world. Sometimes there’s a tendency to say that only the spiritual matters. But this reflects a diminished world, a diminished mission, and in the end a diminished gospel.

To the extent that we see ourselves minimizing either calling—the call to care both for people’s tangible and spiritual needs—we need to repent and renew ourselves to embrace the full mission of the church. We want to be a church that imitates Jesus in his mission in the world. That means we want to work together to figure out what it might mean for us to help heal that which is broken in our city and beyond. And we also want to be a church that faithfully proclaims Jesus Christ as the only hope for the world.

I believe this vision of holding those two things together is incredibly exciting.  It will call on all of our creatively and energy to work together as a congregation to prayerfully ask what God would have us do for his glory and the good of Ladner.