Several of us at 9Marks recently spent a long afternoon with a wise old friend talking about the conversation evangelicals are having about the mission of the church. There are two basic mistakes people keep making in this conversation, said our friendly sage. On the one hand, some people pit good things against one another—bodies versus souls, this world versus the next, and so forth. This group needs to view human beings whole cloth.
On the other hand, some people fail to hold up eternal and temporal realities next to one another and ask which is more important. Everything is crammed under the label “equally important.” But that doesn’t make sense. We need to treat the weighty things as weighty, and the weightiest things as the weightiest.
Notice then what our friend was doing: he was avoiding the “either/or” as well as a simplistic “both/and.” He was instead going for what Tim Keller, referring to the relationship between evangelism and social justice, calls an “inseparable asymmetry.” Things can be stuck together, but still differ greatly in their importance.
Whatever you might think about our friend’s counsel, the conversation about the church’s mission is difficult, which is why we are devoting this eJournal to reviewing the books on the topic. That way, you don’t have to just hear from us, but from people who have thought about these issues longer and more carefully than we have.
You can access the whole issue here—with review on books by Christopher Wright, David VanDrunen, James Davison Hunter, Tim Keller, and others.
It also includes some excerpts from Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s truly excellent forthcoming book, What Is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Crossway, 2011).