Doing Justice as a spiritual discipline

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? 

Micah 6:8 (NRSV)

As I have participated in the streetwalking effort in Norristown for most of the summer, I have given great thought to what faith-based public engagement ought to look like?

What can people guided by religious beliefs do in the public square, and do as explicitly guided by their beliefs?

As I have shared, consistently and clearly, we are not out to witness in a manner that seeks to proselytize or convert people to our Christian faith. Rather, as Christians, we are seeking to live out our faith in how we serve young people caught in a cycle of violence and lack of opportunity in Norristown, regardless of if they believe like or as we do or not.

It's a fundamentally different understanding of the role of faith in my personal life and public engagement in this community.

And it is also one that leads to some division among Christians who are citizens and residents in Norristown and beyond.

There are Christians, mainly Evangelical, who believe this work requires saving, rather than serving.

Let's be honest about church here people. Anybody involved in any church knows that there are LOTS of things that go on in churches that have nothing to do with SAVING people. Chicken dinners, Fish fries, car washes, Gospel concerts, outlet mall trips, and church anniversaries have little or nothing to do with SAVING people. But they are very important activities in the lives of many local churches.

Those activities also rarely serve anyone other than the members of a local church, who are personally edified by and enjoy participating in such activities.

However, when many churches clearly and explicitly start talking about serving people -- the homeless, the hungry, the prisoner, the drug addict, anyone really, many churches start with a disclaimer that they can't serve anyone they can't save.

I have already shared how I believe the actual proclamation of the Gospel -- the good news -- is about establishing who Jesus is precisely by proclaiming what Jesus did. And Jesus actions -- the saving of our sins -- was done in very concrete terms like feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and sacrificing his life in a death by crucifixion. These concrete acts in the lives of human beings make any Christian claims about God intimately bound up in the cultures of human existence. We all know something about hunger, illness and death.

However, most people want others to be saved, or that is to know something about who Jesus is, and by extension who we as Christians are, by what we say, rather than by what we do, which is to serve people.

This dichotomy simply must be overcome if churches in Norristown are going to have an effective witness in our community through Season of Peace. Streetwalking is primarily about serving. If you want to hand out tracts, and talk about Jesus, but not really listen to people describe, and help meet their material needs, the same needs you and your kids have, then I must say, you are probably not serious about your WWJD bracelet, since you don't want to do what Jesus did, but rather just talk about what he did.

So, I won't dwell on that argument. There is a time and a place for pure proclamation of the acts of Jesus. And there is a time and place where we let our actions be our best proclamation of Jesus.

And that's what I think is the point in the verse in Micah here. And it is why I bring it up related to how can we move past Evangelical proclamation of words as the sole type of public engagement churches have.

Micah here challenges us by saying God wants to see something out of us. And first and foremost it is to do justice.

I wonder how many Christians think about doing justice? Again, when we talk about things like love your neighbor as yourself, we are talking about justice. How do we love our neighbors? By babysitting their kids when their parents are sick? Perhaps. But we can also love our neighbor by advocating for youth services in a community to provide more recreational, educational, cultural and employment opportunities for youth who need them. Maybe we challenge churches, even churches who do best at telling the story of Jesus, to do some acts of justice, by providing these activities to youth themselves.

To do this and to sustain this, we must begin to think of doing justice as a spiritual discipline. A spiritual discipline is a habit or exercise intentionally maintained and sustained in order to grow in one's love of God and love of neighbor, which I believe is front and center of what it means to claim to be saved, born again, filled with the Holy Sprit or a Christian, a follower of Jesus.

However, most people narrowly define spiritual disciplines as acts that only help us grow in our relationship to God. And we have a heretical view of God as purely immaterial, because we don't take the incarnation, that God took on flesh, and became human in Jesus Christ, seriously. We are not orthodox or Evangelical on that point.

If we were, if we truly believe He who was truly divine was truly human, we would be more comfortable engaging in concrete acts of service as ways to build our faith in the One who redeemed our humanity.

That said, I like the work of the Christian ministry Renovare. Renovare is led by a Quaker, Richard Foster, who believes practicing disciplines are basically about becoming more like Jesus, and becoming means doing what Jesus did.

Here is what he says:

Jesus gave us a complete picture of God, and demonstrated how we can experience vitality and fullness in our life with God (Col. 2:9, Jn. 10:10).  The historical Church (Christians), despite its divisions and differences, has upheld the core characteristics of Christ’s life through what we now call traditions.


Taken together, these traditions help us envision a balanced spiritual life.  They serve as a guide to help us take on the life of Jesus.

Foster's ministry outlines several types of disciplines, and approaches to the life of Jesus, with which people would be familiar and comfortable. He talks about the virtuous life of holiness, the Spirit-filled life of the power of the Holy Spirit, and the Word-Centered life of studying the Bible. But these aren't the only practices or avenues to the life of Jesus. He also talks about the compassionate life, a life focused on bringing justice, as Jesus did. He describes this justice, this compassion, as service to others.

Richard Foster specifically lists service as a spiritual discipline, along with worship and prayer.

It seems to me a life of worship, a life of Bible study, must be put into action with concrete acts of service in the world.

And taken a step further, these acts cannot be defined simply as personal acts of charity, or compassion, but must also be viewed as public acts of justice, not to just individuals, but to neighborhoods, towns and even nations. In the words of Foster, "true service builds community."

In parlance that might be better accessible for churches in Norristown, it's what Pastor Alyn Waller of Philadelphia's Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church called moving from ministries of mercy to "substantive help."

And to build community, to provide substantive help, you cannot engage in a one-time act of service. You must develop the discipline of serving over a long period of time.

It is moving from what Evangelical theologian Miroslav Volf calls "idle faith," a faith focused solely on the personal needs and identity of the individual who evacuates him or herself from engaging systems and structures that affect people, to an engaged faith, one that acknowledges the plural environment of beliefs (or non-beliefs) in our world, and yet realizes as Christians in such a world, we can probably show people better than we can tell them.

And when it comes to saving our youth, if we can't build the capacity to serve them, to keep them safe, to keep them involved in school, to help them find employment, to provide opportunities for recreation. If we cannot do that -- as a Christian act of justice -- if we can't serve this present world, it's unlikely we will save them.

My hope that our zeal for evangelism will be translated into our commitment, or engagement for justice, for one without the other creates an imbalance in the Christian life, and prevents Christians from living with full integrity in a world, where even if people don't believe you for what you say, they may come to faith because of what you do, and certainly recognize those concrete acts as sustaining the common good.