As a pastor, I’ve led our church to care deeply about not only the lost, but the least. In the mind and teaching of Jesus, the twin imperatives of the mission of the Church were to share the gospel with those far from God and to care for those in need. With the Great Commission (Matthew 28) came the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25). When Paul passionately made his case to take the gospel to the Gentiles, the only instruction from his fellow apostles was to not forget to care for the poor (Galatians 2). As one of my seminary professors once told our class: “In one hand we give the bread of life; with the other the bread needed for life. It’s not an ‘either-or.’”
He was right.
Yet we continually make it a pendulum swing, veering in one direction or the other at the expense of whatever way we tilt. Few churches are truly balanced. It is either mega-evangelism and lite-social ministry, or lite-evangelism and mega-social ministry. In recent…
