The Promotion of Social Righteousness

(Excerpt from series on the Great Ends of the Church)

An exhibition is meant to be seen. And promotion is meant to cause an outcome. You can promote an exhibition. Bare minimum for promotion is you put up an announcement somewhere and hope that someone sees it. If you want to promote something a little more thoroughly you stand on the street corner and hand out flyers or coupons. Maybe you go door to door. And if you want to get really obnoxious about your promotion, what do you do? You send in the telemarketers! You pay them extra to call people at dinnertime. Maybe you go whole hog and hire that team of telemarketers who have psychic powers who somehow always know that exact moment that I’ve taken my seat and call then. They cost extra. Because then you really get someone’s attention right?

So that’s what promotion is. It’s different from exhibition in that it has measurable outcomes. And that’s why the promotion of social righteousness is a different sort of animal from the rest of the Great Ends. The other great ends have alot more to do with the character of the Church, with the activity and commitment of the Church. But the promotion of social righteousness to the world has more to do with the world than with the church. It’s the promotion of social righteousness after all, not private righteousness or personal piety, but social righteousness to the WORLD. So this great end is saying that part of our job as Christians is to persuade, convince, push, and motivate the world to act with more and more righteousness in its social structures. Separate from any attempts to evangelize even, we as the church are called to work on behalf of those who cannot speak up for themselves, we are called to speak out when we see evil being perpetrated, and we are called to hold those who have power accountable for what they do and how they do it. Contrary to the impression you might get from Christians who love be on TV, this is not our sole calling in life, but it is one of our jobs.

This great end of the church beckons us to call attention to the fact that morality is not just whatever we agree it is, that it is not just that which is most convenient and expedient at the time, but that our moral laws come from God. That the standards for a society’s moral existence come from a source greater than the society itself; that they come from the living God. And this great end of the church, the promotion of social righteousness, and the great body of scripture that serves as its warrant, helps us to know that we do in fact have something to say to a civilization in decline.