Bob posted a challenge to Christian advocacy in the iBridge blog. Peter Rowan introduced this book to me in the Missiology class earlier this year. Here is a passage:
"What does love require?
Joyti is a 14 year-old girl from a rural town in India who was abducted and drugged by four women who sold her into a brothel in Bombay. She has been locked away in an underground cell and severely beaten with metal rods, plastic pipe and electrical cords until submitting to provide sex to the customers. Now she must work seven days a week servicing 20-40 customers a day.
Osner is a 45 year-old man in Haiti who was illegally arrested and thrown in prison when the local mayor wanted to seize part of his land for her personal use. The detention is completely illegal under Haitian law and five different court orders have been issued demanding his release, but the prison authorities refuse to release him because of their political relationship with the mayor...
If you love Joyti, you must try to get her out of the brothel. If you love Osner, you must seek his release from prison...
This is what love requires. Yet this is not what most evangelical mission or development agencies do. While it may not be appropriate for every organization to take up this role, our clear biblical mandate suggests that somebody in the body of Christ certainly should.
This, then, is a distinctive need – different from those who suffer from not hearing the gospel and different from those who suffer deprivation.
"What does love require?
Joyti is a 14 year-old girl from a rural town in India who was abducted and drugged by four women who sold her into a brothel in Bombay. She has been locked away in an underground cell and severely beaten with metal rods, plastic pipe and electrical cords until submitting to provide sex to the customers. Now she must work seven days a week servicing 20-40 customers a day.
Osner is a 45 year-old man in Haiti who was illegally arrested and thrown in prison when the local mayor wanted to seize part of his land for her personal use. The detention is completely illegal under Haitian law and five different court orders have been issued demanding his release, but the prison authorities refuse to release him because of their political relationship with the mayor...
If you love Joyti, you must try to get her out of the brothel. If you love Osner, you must seek his release from prison...
This is what love requires. Yet this is not what most evangelical mission or development agencies do. While it may not be appropriate for every organization to take up this role, our clear biblical mandate suggests that somebody in the body of Christ certainly should.
This, then, is a distinctive need – different from those who suffer from not hearing the gospel and different from those who suffer deprivation.
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Then, we slowly lost the doctrine of Imago Dei, and thus we dichotomized between helping a man physically and spiritually, as if it were possible to do one without the other (granted that you can feed the body, and send the soul to hell, unlike the liberation or social gospel, but really, evangelicals know better than that). Recently, I have come to realize how important and powerful this doctrine is, and how it is a connection point in evangelism. Many people are shocked at gory pictures of mangled bodies in accidents or riots in Indonesia, or the concept of growing people for body parts in the movie, the Island, or the starving of people in Africa while wealthy G8+1 countries refuse to help them by cancelling their debt, or a rich church with a extravagantly expensive fortress-of-a-building right next to a slum … all these images shock and anger us, because the doctrine of the Imago Dei is written in the hearts of man, even when they don’t know it.
Thus, a Christianity that already has her hands dirty, proving by her actions that she believes this doctrine as much as she says she does, can then use that doctrine as a very powerful starting point in her apologetic for the gospel. But this is the catch, she (the church) is not doing it, simply as a means to and end (evangelism) but because she really does believe this doctrine, and because to help man made in the image of God, is the right thing to do. I think this was the point of our Lord Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, love your Neighbour as yourself, because its what God wants from you.
“but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.”
James 3:8-10 ESV
get out of 'maintenance mode' and choose one small area where we can make a difference as lil' 'platoons of mercy and justice' as Colson called it...?