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I know that this is a long article but allow me to preface it with this: If you are seeking to understand God's will for you as a Christian in your community, you can not rest assured that you are following it until you are implementing the truths brought forth by this author.

EXPLORING A CONCEPT

Vinoth Ramachandra

The Micah Declaration and Beyond

The expression ‘integral mission’ has increased in popularity ever since several evangelical development agencies from around the world met in Oxford, England, in 2001 to form the Micah Network. The term, which follows the Spanish ‘mission integral’, was felt to be a less misleading expression of concern for the whole person than earlier language that spoke of ‘holistic mission’ or of ‘transformational development’. The Micah Network issued a ‘Declaration on Integral Mission’ which stated that:

Integral mission or holistic transformation is the proclamation and demonstration of the Gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace - of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world we betray the word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the word of God we have nothing to bring to the world.

This is often taken to mean that there can be no authentic Christian social action that is not accompanied at the same time by the verbal proclamation of the Gospel (‘evangelism’), just as there can be no authentic proclamation that is not accompanied at the same time by social action. This approach then tends to understand ‘integral mission’ as holistic practice, a strategy or methodology for our missionary outreach. The search then begins for ‘models’ of such ‘integral mission’ across the world for us to emulate. This creates tensions for those who work in situations of human suffering where the open proclamation of the gospel is not possible or where the latter is likely to be so misunderstood (perhaps because of a history of bad practice— so-called ‘unethical conversions’) as to lead to the suppression of all works of compassion initiated by Christians.

Whatever the intention of the framers of the Micah Declaration, can the lingering sense of ambiguity be dispelled if we understand ‘integral mission’ less in terms of the church’s activities and more in terms of what the Church is called to be (which, of course, includes its actions in the world)? Integral mission, in other words, has to do with the Church’s integrity. A man or woman of integrity is someone who is trustworthy, with no inconsistency between what he or she is in public and what he or she is in private. Integral mission is then a way of calling the church to keep together, in her theology as well as in her practice, what the Triune God of the Biblical narrative always brings together: ‘being’ and ‘doing’, the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘physical’, the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’, the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’,’ witness’ and ‘unity’, ‘preaching the ‘truth’ and ‘practicing the truth’, and so on.

The emphasis lies, then, not so much in the practical ‘balancing’ of our various activities, but rather in the firm refusal to draw unbiblical distinctions. When, for instance, Jesus voluntarily engaged a social •~ outcaste like the Samaritan woman (John 4) in face-to-face conversation, was he doing ‘evangelism’ or was he performing a ‘political action’ in challenging the political taboos of his society? When the early Church rescued infants left to die on the rubbish heaps outside cities in the Roman empire, or visited and fed enemy prisoners, or refused to join in the sacrificial cult of the emperor, were they political subversives or were they simply living out the Gospel in their world? When the Rev. Martin Luther King confronted the white racism of American society in the name of the living God of Scripture who had declared all human beings equal and reconciled them to each other through the death of Jesus, was he evangelizing the nation or engaged in political action?
Surely the answer to these questions must be: ‘both’. To raise these questions is to take the Micah Declaration in a direction that challenges the whole church of Jesus Christ, and not just those who are professionally involved with the poor. It is not only the case that Gospel proclamation has ‘social consequences’ and social involvement has ‘evangelistic consequences’, but also that all such actions can be narrated under other, alternative descriptions with more profound implications for our lives. When Jesus was asked to sum up what God required of us, he did not answer in terms of either a set of ‘projects’ to be performed or a set of ‘doctrines’ to believe. Instead we are called to love God with our whole being, and to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves.

I know of no Christian parents who do not love their children: they all desire for their children that they have a decent education, adequate nutrition, access to the best available health care, and a meaningful and well-paid job when they finish their schooling. Whatever we may say (in our particular church theology) about ‘saving souls’ as the most important work to which God has called us, or of Christians being ‘not of the world’ and so on, it is obvious that all of us spend the bulk of our time making sure that we and our children are safe, comfortable and secure in this world. But the moment we are asked, ‘Don’t you want to work for a world where all children have access to adequate nutrition, healthcare, education and a decent job later in life?’, many of us throw up our hands in pious horror, and exclaim, ‘Isn’t that the “social gospel”?’

This fundamental hypocrisy in many so-called ‘evangelical circles’ in South Asia (and beyond) needs to be exposed. The underlying anthropology also needs to be challenged. Every one of us is socially embedded. From the moment of our birth, if not before, we are social beings. We grow up in a family and ethnic network, learn a language not of our choosing, and practice a worldview and a set of customs that are shared with a wider social group. What we call ‘society’ is found not simply outside the ‘individual’ but within; indeed, the individual does not emerge without the society of which he or she is apart. This means that we cannot divorce the personal from the social, economic, ideological and political environments within which we live and move and have our being. Just as transformed individuals with a new vision of a better world transform their social environments through their political agency, so transformed social environments in turn help change individuals. As the example of apartheid in South Africa, or the caste-structure in India, have amply demonstrated: sometimes we need to change the society before the individual even becomes aware of the structural evil in which he or she is complicit.

The issue we all face then is not why we should be socially involved, but whether our present social involvements (the daily work that we do, where we have chosen to live, where we shop, how we earn and spend money, our voting habits, and so on) are Christian or unchristian — that is, whether they serve God’s purposes for the world, or actually run counter to them. Closely related to this question is another: not how we should preach the Gospel, but what Gospel are we preaching? Integral mission flows out of an integral Gospel.

In my pastoral experience, if people have been exposed to an understanding of the Gospel that is framed primarily in individualistic terms (‘justification by faith’), or of ‘salvation’ as basically life in another world after death and ‘faith’ as the insurance policy that gets us there, it is almost impossible to move them on to a position from where they see how their work and cultural involvements in the present world have anything at all to do with the Gospel. They will, at best, think that it is the special calling of a gifted few within the Church (‘the intellectuals’, perhaps) to work towards social and cultural transformation, while the ‘real calling’ of everybody else is to ‘preach the gospel’. If social action makes people open to the gospel, then well and good; if not, then it is dispensable.

I propose that the Gospel is not primarily about my needs and how God can satisfy those needs. It is about the world— what the Triune God has done, is doing and is going to do for the world he c. created and loves. The Gospel announces God’s intention, and the inauguration of that intention through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to renew, recreate and reconcile the world to himself. Well-known texts such as Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 present the Gospel’s redemptive scope as embracing persons, cultures and the entire cosmos. Furthermore, it is precisely because it is about the world that the gospel is for the world. It announces the world’s future. While Jam called to respond personally to that message, and so receive God’s gracious gifts of justification and reconciliation, the content of that message is far bigger than my response.

For whom is such a message Good News? For those who yearn for a different world, who have no stake at all in the present idolatrous and oppressive world-system. In Mary’s Song the mother of our Lord celebrates the coming of ‘God my Savior’ (Luke. 2:46) and spells out the implications of his saving rule: scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts, pulling down the powerful from their thrones, sending the rich empty away...(vv.51-53) Evidently, the

Lukan understanding of Messianic salvation was quite ‘this-worldly’; it was certainly more than social reversal, but, equally certainly, not less.

Little wonder, then, that those who opposed the coming of God’s saving rule in the ministry of Jesus were those who benefited from the status quo (for instance, the rich, the socially powerful, and the religious leadership), while those who received him, and for whom his message was Good News, were those excluded from salvation as defined by the former. It is interesting that Jesus never insists that such folk (for instance, tax-collectors, lepers, Samaritans, prostitutes) must first change before they can experience his salvation: not because they had no personal sin, but because they needed no reminders of their moral failures. To such people he simply opens his arms in forgiveness and unconditional acceptance. Tax-collectors such as Zacchaeus are so shocked by the generosity of Jesus that they respond spontaneously in repentance. To whom does Jesus directly preach repentance and the need for ‘new birth’ (or, alternatively, to ‘become like little children’) if they are to receive the kingdom of God? To the ‘pious’ who were assured that their seats in the kingdom were already booked, to the rich whose riches isolated them from God and their fellow men and women, and to the powerful to whom Jesus’ way of humble service towards those at the bottom of society was a threat to their own power-base and their privileged positions.

In the New Testament the church is central to the content of the Gospel, the church understood not as just another religious institution dispensing religious services to the faithful, but as a new community of those who have tasted the powers of the coming age and who live as signs of that ‘upside-down’ kingdom. The church is the place where social and economic barriers are being broken down in demonstration of the reconciling power of the Gospel. That is why the disunity of the church is a denial of the Gospel and a sign not of God’s grace but of God’s judgment. A fragmented and divided church has no message for a fragmented and divided world. Isn’t this perhaps the biggest blind-spot of the south Asian, if not the entire global, church today?

Grace, hope and love, then, are characteristics of the true church. The church has been entrusted with a Gospel, with good news. When we privatize and individualize the Gospel (a message only about my needs and my future), we betray the Gospel. When the church loses sight of its calling to be the bearer of the Gospel for the world, it turns into another religious club, simply looking after the needs and interests of its members. When the church loses the good news of grace, she turns her message into a religion of duty, a moralistic legalism that identifies middle-class respectability and charitable deeds with being a Christian. When she forgets the message of hope, she ends up sanctioning the status quo, instead of subverting it. Instead of living today in the light of what is to come, she idolizes the present, even identifying every oppressive system as not only necessary but God-given.

With such an understanding of the Good News, what we label ‘evangelism’ now becomes, in the words of the South African musicologist David Bosch, ‘enlisting people for the reign of God, liberating them from themselves, their sins, and their entanglements, so that they will be free for God and neighbor...To win people to Jesus is to win their allegiance to God’s priorities.’