Colder weather and the holiday season bring an uptick in requests from various causes and ministries. That makes this time of year a good time for a word about “the social gospel.” So, I’d like to use this post to offer that word.

The intellectual and political movement associated with the term “the social gospel” began in the 1870s and peaked in the early 1900s. Its promoters were liberal ministers in the mainline Protestant churches of America. These men preached that Christian principles such as love, compassion, and charity should be actively applied to very real-world problems such as: war, poverty, crime, child labor, alcoholism, financial inequality, health, and education.

Most of these ministers held to a postmillennialist view of prophecy, which meant they believed that Christ’s Second Coming to walk this earth again would not happen until the entire world was more or less a realm of Christendom. In order to create such a world, social evils had to be eradicated. Therefore, these ministers preached about fixing what we might call “the dirty here and now” rather than longing for “the sweet by and by.”

The problem, however, with “the social gospel” was that it was built upon the premise that people are basically good and their inner goodness simply needs to be given the right environment in which to flourish. While this premise does tickle our ears, it most certainly does not align with either recorded history or the Bible. According to the Bible each individual is a sinner by conception, birth, nature, and choice. In other words, each of us is a far cry from being basically good.

This explains why Jesus, during His earthly ministry, did not spend His time doing social reform. As evidence of that even though many of His followers wanted Him to lead an overthrow of the wicked Roman government, He constantly refused to do so. He didn’t even work to eliminate the slavery of His day despite the fact that there were multiplied millions of slaves scattered throughout the Roman empire.

Jesus focused, instead, upon spiritual matters. He did this because He understood that the heart of the problem with each person is the problem of the heart. Did Jesus cure the sick? He did in many instances, but He didn’t heal every sick person in Israel. Did He feed the hungry? He did on a few occasions, but He didn’t eliminate all hunger worldwide. For that matter, even those people for whom He provided healing and food would eventually get sick and hungry again. Such is the state of this world.

Rather than trying to preserve the popularity His miracles brought His way, Jesus used His ministry efforts as a platform to tell His audiences about their need of the salvation offered in Him. He preached on hell more than any other preacher in scripture, and He openly called people to repentance. The point is, He didn’t just open His hands to help needy people; He also opened His mouth to tell them about their greatest need. Even as He ascended back to heaven following His death, burial, and resurrection, He said to His followers, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel” (Mark 16:15). That’s different than telling them to, “Go into all the world and do good things.”

While the Bible does teach that we, as Christians, are to be concerned about justice, inequality, and the needs of others, it never once hints that we can solve all the world’s problems by making prisons more humane, building hospitals, staffing soup kitchens, funding homeless shelters, promoting rehabilitation centers, etc., etc., etc. Why is that? It’s because these things merely make this world a better place from which to die and go to hell if those who benefit from them don’t believe in Jesus as Savior after hearing a clear presentation of the gospel. You see, somewhere there is a right balance to be struck between our social work and our evangelizing. Admittedly, finding that balance requires a lot of prayer and spiritual discernment, but we must find it if we are going to practice Christ’s brand of evangelism. And that, my fellow Christians, is the only way we can keep the main thing the main thing.