Gospel Living IS Integral Mission

It is a joy to examine the many aspects and all there may be of the scope of life on this planet. Hence too the goal of our Christ-following involvement in mission-shaped living and ministry in introducing people to it, showing and telling, and looking to the Gospel and to God’s Spirit to enable people to live it, giving them the original and the new potential to be free, whole and fully human again, as is God’s intent.

We may call it “word/deed” or “integral mission.” We may stress the call of the Gospel and the inherent need for many, many mission-shapes in its introduction and expression in our world. We may witness to the need of all persons for a balance of the demands of the inner life (of soul and spirit) with those of the outer person (health, food, community). But the fact that we have to talk clearly about balancing humanity’s social needs and spiritual needs arises out of the Church’s failure, historically and often still, to hold it all together – to think and act holistically and integrally in all of life.

We have had to recover and/or rediscover the biblical mandates and many balances (including paradoxes) inherent in the Gospel. The split that developed into the fundamentalism of both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ (making it into ‘either / or’ rather than a biblical ‘both / and’) at least in its most recent historical manifestations, began to take shape after the US Civil War, towards the end of the 19th century. Prior to that separation between the social and the spiritual was not as much evidenced in the West.

A certain eschatological escapism beginning to be popularized at that time held that it was more important to feed the soul than to feed the body, for instance, for even if the person receiving such ministry died of starvation, at least they’d get to Heaven. One popular evangelist put it: I do not have time to polish the lamps on a sinking ship; the ship is sinking and God has given me a life-boat, and I intend to save all of the sinking souls I can before the end comes. (That same evangelist, wonderfully inconsistent, visited wounded soldiers in Civil War camps and hospitals, caring for their whole persons as well as sharing the way of Love and Salvation of Christ.

But we have indeed had to rediscover biblical balance – what John Stott called the two wings of the airplane – the necessity of the social AND the spiritual, if the message of the Gospel is to fly in each generation. I prefer terms that don’t allow for either/or distinctions but, rather, that explore and enter intothe ways in which each area of life may take shape and be lived out under Biblical guidance and Gospel influence. This includes each and all of the 360 degrees of the fully-human existence and potential that surrounds us – all aspects and spheres of creaturely life on this planet.