Christian Ministries and Civil Society

Do we really believe God wants to make ALL things new?

In the 1830s, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the rowdy, adolescent United States of America and wrote down what he saw in a masterful book, Democracy in America. Even today, almost 200 years later, his insights remain among the most profound analyses of The American Experiment ever written.

Tocqueville, even then, could see that something remarkable was happening in America. Historian and Baylor University professor Thomas Kidd offers this helpful summary of Tocqueville’s findings: “America’s strength came from its religious heritage, its tradition of local participatory politics, and its many mediating institutions and civic associations, all standing between the individual and the government.” In other words, America was strongest in the middle, with a robust civil society limiting the power of the state while allowing citizens to flourish and self-govern.

Benjamin Franklin often gets credit for forming the first cooperative association in America in 1736 when he helped organize Philadelphia’s first volunteer fire brigade. Today, more than 2-million non-profit organizations operate in this country, with most of them consisting of local people meeting local needs and solving local problems. The aggregate impact of the money and labor contributed by these “mediating institutions” runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Just the 1300 or so ministries that MinistryWatch tracks have a combined revenue of more than $45 billion.

But as I look over the list of ministries in the MinistryWatch 1000 database, I find myself wondering: What are we Christians doing with our time and money, and is our understanding of how God is working in the world expansive enough?

By that I mean this: it is easy to find evangelism and discipleship ministries in our database. There are hundreds of them. And that is as it should be. But are there Christian ministries that focus on the vocations? We have a few. The Rabbit Room focuses on Christians and the arts. The Acton Institute brings a Christian worldview to the field of economics. The Christian Medical and Dental Society brings together Christian healthcare professionals for fellowship, discipleship, and advocacy. It has done important work, helping policy makers understand how Christian ethics can inform healthcare debates.

What about ministries that focus on vexing problems in culture? A recent article in Christianity Today highlighted the work of Forward Memphis, a Christian organization that helps people escape the clutches of payday lenders. Organizations such as Strong Towns are what I call “Christian adjacent.” They are not distinctively Christian organizations, but they concern themselves with human flourishing and “loving your neighbor” in ways that depend heavily on Christian ideals. (To hear my interview with Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn, click here.) But the number of such organizations is remarkably few.

We live in a great country. I want to be clear about that. But we still have a lot of problems. And I must confess that I am a bit double-minded about how Christians should react. One of the reasons I am writing this “Editor’s Notebook” is to think aloud on the topic, and to invite your comment. Should we have organizations trying to bring a distinctively Christian worldview to the problem of affordable housing and gun violence? Or should we stick to evangelism and discipleship, in the belief that these activities are upstream from all our social problems? I am also aware that even faithful Christian organizations that have tackled vexing social problems sometimes end up compromising their Christian mission for the sake of increased financial or political power.

I will confess. I do not know the answer to these questions.

But I do know this: Tocqueville observed that America was – and today it remains – unique in the number, scale, and scope of these mediating institutions.

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In our own time, management guru Peter Drucker described our impulse for collective action as “that peculiarly American form of behavior. Nothing sets this country as much apart from the rest of the Western World as its almost instinctive reliance on voluntary, and often spontaneous, group action for the most important social purposes.”

Charles Murray warned us in his book Coming Apart that one of the most significant (and negative) developments of the past several decades has been the emptying of the middle, the shriveling of local control and local action in government and in civil society. It is important to note, though, that while this emptying of the middle has weakened our society, it also offers a huge opportunity for Christians to have influence. Most of us will never run for governor or president, but while we may not provide leadership to change culture from the top down, we all have opportunities to do so from the middle.

The bible is plain: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. The world, and all they who dwell within it.” (Ps. 24:1). This verse means, in part, that God is concerned with all of creation. The bible also tells us that God is in the process of making all things new, not just some things. Of empowering His church to restore all things, not just some things. I know that loving God means that we love our neighbor.

It seems to me that these ideas are not ancillary to the Christian life, but central, and perhaps these ideas should inform more of our Christian institutions.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A few paragraphs above have been re-purposed from my book (co-written with John Stonestreet) Restoring All Things. I welcome your thoughts on this topic, and your suggestions for ministries who are doing the kind of work I suggest. Email me: [email protected]