There is the church of Jesus Christ and then there is God’s kingdom. The church is about worshipping the Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit; the kingdom is about fostering a world of righteousness and justice as God defines it. Many Christians see that as two very different things.

The church doesn’t tell you how to vote, and political-social activity doesn’t tell you what to believe, just how to get things done. It’s been that way since the Reformation and the Renaissance came at the same time, the Reformation church beginning in Germany and moving South, the Renaissance kingdom in Italy and moving North. 

In some ways they both had a lot in common. They both encouraged people to ask questions and think things over. Is the Catholic Church really right, when it says that the main thing we should do is try harder to please God? Is agriculture run by the nobility the heart of society, or are cities the way of the future? They both could come closer together too: now everyone should learn to read, and one good thing to read is the Bible.

For Protestants especially kingdom and church shouldn’t overlap too much. There should be space for Protestants in Catholic countries, shouldn’t there? Can’t Christians serve the Lord in either a monarchy or in newly invented American secular democracy? That word secular seems helpful. That’s what made room in America for all those godly people who didn’t really fit in their state church, including my great-great-grandfather, who got tired of paying tithes to the Church of England while giving enthusiastically to his Calvinistic Methodist Church.

Try to keep church and state, church and kingdom separate—that’s the Protestant way, especially the American way. But there are tensions. The biggest issue ever in America was black slavery. Especially the Presbyterian church waffled on that, even as they knew that our slavery didn’t really fit the biblical kind at all. The church once took a stand against ‘man-stealing’ on biblical grounds but by then so many black babies had already been born here, plenty enough to keep slavery going. What if Christians had said, this unbiblical slavery just has to go, the church will help you know how to vote to get that done? But what then? How in the world will those newly free people be able to make it? How can we keep the plantations running? (Right now we’re mourning the death of Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago. After he was gone, Reconstruction was a mess and put the Klan in charge. If I’d been there I’d have said, move all the blacks out of the South and help them homestead in the Dakotas, since it’ll be way too hard for the South to adjust).

But since I wasn’t there, and since the aftermath of slavery was so hard to think about, Charles Hodge and others said, all those practical details we can’t find in the Bible, so let’s not say much about slavery. Southerner theologians made that even clearer: the church’s job is to teach only about ’spiritual’ things, not about political things like slavery. But somebody had to do it, didn’t they? People who were discouraged with Christian inactivity did, especially Unitarians. Now there’s a kind of happy ending, but with much sadness attached.

Before the Civil War most Christians were post-millennial, sure that right now we’re going to make the world a lot better and then Jesus will come back. But when Christians had disqualified themselves from doing that, naturally there came the swing to pre-mil, nothing really good is going to happen until Jesus comes back. That even became a ‘fundamental of the faith,’ right up there with the deity of Christ and his virgin birth! 

World War One was hard theologically—how could those Christian Europeans be so foolish and hateful? We have to do better, Christians have to be involved after all and remake the world so that never happens again. Isn’t that pressing agenda a lot bigger than all that theological nitpicking that the church has specialized in? Hence arose the ‘social gospel’ and its despising all those ‘fundamentalists’ who didn’t see any point in making a better world. The kingdom won then and the church lost, big time!

Can we do better? Can Christ’s church give social direction without losing the gospel in the process? Can we have any credibility with our rising generation if our message has no visible applications? Or is there something about our thinking that has been limited by our ‘Western mindset?’

I ask that now as I look at the World Reformed Fellowship’s Statement of Faith, adopted just a few weeks ago. What do you think that a global Reformed statement of faith would look like? I’m intrigued when I see attention given to how much power demons have and how the Lord overcomes them. So then I ask myself, why do I have so little interest in that subject? Could it be because I’m more sophisticated than those in developing countries? Or is it because my ‘Western sophistication’ comes straight from the darkness of the Enlightenment that smudges clear biblical teaching that I’d rather ignore! 

If I can learn that much from thinking about demons, what could I learn from thinking about how the gospel relates to poor people? (We have covered that over too with a major dose of Ernst Troeltsch’s sociological religion, since Presbyterians are so rich anyway that only poor Pentecostals need be interested).

  Read the whole thing on wrfnet.org under “About” and “Statement of Faith.”  This is the part that gets my special attention, with my added highlighting for the most striking parts.

World Reformed Fellowship Statement of Faith

X. Mission and evangelism

1. Our calling to be God’s witnesses through word and deed

Our mission in the world flows from our passion for the glory of God and our assurance of the coming of his kingdom.  The church as the community of Christ, is God’s instrument of evangelism, which is the preaching and sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ, through both words and deeds, that Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures and that he, as the reigning Lord, now offers forgiveness of sin, eternal life and gifts of the Spirit to all who repent and believe.  In obedience to the commission of our God, we have to present two hands to all people: (1) the hand calling them to repentance, faith and eternal reconciliation with God through Christ, and (2) the hand manifesting deeds of mercy and compassion, extending the goodness of God’s kingdom on earth in the name of Christ.  This is the example given to us by Christ himself and proclaims that we are conformed to the image of Christ and have received the Holy Spirit as the first fruits and guarantee of God’s new creation.

2. The extent of the call to mission

Our proclamation of the gospel has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life.  Likewise, 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 great commission by which God sends us out to serve the world.  If we ignore this commission we have nothing to bring to the world.  Our obedience to God stirs up our zeal for missions by making us trust him totally.  This makes our witness both bold and gentle, and attracts the attention of unbelievers.

3. The compassion of Christians for the world

We affirm the great need for Christians to be clothed with compassion in the name of Christ, in the midst of poverty, disease, injustice and all forms of human misery.  We are concerned that there are millions of people in this world living in desperate poverty.  In calling us to clothe ourselves with compassion we are called to walk with the poor and convey the transforming grace of God with a quality of spiritual life that allows us to enter a suffering community not as saviours, but as servants of Christ the Saviour.

4. The transformation of human community

We understand the transformation of community to be the comprehensive reversal of the effects of sin over all of life and all the earth that alienated men and women from God, from self, from others and from the environment and the restoration of God’s order in creation.  It is God’s intention that all human beings should be full bearers of his image.  This task begins in this life but will only be completed when Christ returns in glory at the end of time.  It aims to transform the sinful culture and society in which we live and to construct a new culture and new society in conformity with the nature of the Kingdom of God which has been inaugurated by Christ.

I think I'm getting it. From the global impoverished church’s point of view, it’s all a package. It’s a ‘quality of spiritual life that allows us to enter a suffering community.’ So ‘we have to present two hands to all people: (1) the hand calling them to repentance, faith and eternal reconciliation with God through Christ, and (2) the hand manifesting deeds of mercy and compassion, extending the goodness of God’s kingdom on earth in the name of Christ.’   

What do you think, is there any chance we sophisticated Americans could be globally Reformed? Reformed with Both Hands? What would it look like? I got started with WRF from my friend and encourager Diane Langberg, who shows us sexual trafficking clearly, in a way we needed to see it. Now we know the dark side of the Super Bowl. So what do we do about it? We know we don’t want to just ignore it with our deep chasm between kingdom and church, now do we? Both Hands!

That’s a beginning. What’s next? ‘We are called to walk with the poor.’  That’s the other Hand, isn’t it? What can that look like? It could be seriously stepping up our own diaconal ministry, reaching out not just to our members but everyone around us? Urging our people to scale back their life-styles in order to give to others? Could it be asking the political parties to move in that direction? Asking them vigorously by voting that way? (I have tended Republican for a long time, back to when the New Deal wanted farmers to kill little pigs to keep the price up. There’s some GOP anti-abortion talk, but is it serious? Is it now time to look harder at those Democrats who talk so much about helping the poor? Would that be that global both-handed way?) Maybe this too fits into our repentance revival praying—show us O Lord, how we are to be and act for your people, the poor.

The details aren’t that clear to me but the direction is - much clearer than before. That’s coming from hearing those other believers, all over the world. Isn’t the Lord kind, to give us WRF when we need it so badly?

There’s something else on my heart that for me fits in here. I’ve been reading Bill Edgar’s compelling Schaeffer and the Christian Life. Fran taught us what realistic faith in Jesus Christ would look like. Reality was his biggest word. You remember perhaps the crisis in his life, when he wasn’t sure the Christian faith was true, after all. He said, that was because it seemed to me that among many of those who held the orthodox position, one saw little reality in the things that the Bible so clearly says should be the result of Christianity (p 82).

That was very personal and we don’t know many details. But it included evil power plays among the leadership of the separatist Presbyterians. A once solidly united Movement had been coming apart at the seams, again and again. Prayer  together seemed very trivial and winning leadership much too important. Fran’s missing gospel realities were very plain and against Jesus Christ. I empathize with Fran and his experience, and I rejoice in the hope he found in all those hikes through the Swiss mountains. I rejoice that in my life when at Westminster Seminary Ed Clowney, George Fuller and Sam Logan worked so hard against our ingrown religion and opened up wide our caring ministry to so many believers with so many different godly priorities.

Now all this comes together for me, and I hope for you? What have we learned from our global fellow Christians? Why didn’t we see that long before? Is our stance of ignoring or despising the poor around us realistic Christianity? Don’t we have to look at ourselves through Fran’s eyes, seeing what has not been realistic in our living for Jesus? Isn’t that where so much of our repentance must now be? Shouldn’t we be calling out to the Lord to know how, and to keep us from lapsing back into indifference?

Both Hands for the poor, and for Jesus!