So You Want to Help Reforming Society?

If you think about it, many of the human instruments the Lord used to accomplish his divine purpose were not well-known. In His providence and by His grace He calls ordinary and unknown men or women (a few were even unnamed) to do exploits in order to advance His kingdom.


There are times when God uses the best and the brightest, the rich and the famous, in extraordinary circumstance, to do what He has decreed beforehand. But often times He accomplishes His greater agenda through ordinary folks and by usual means in a very common situation.


One keen observer of how God works in our world has this to say, "...God's program of redemption is all-encompassing. Wherever life has been corrupted, it needs to be reformed. Accordingly, a prime citizen of the kingdom will typically be a reform-minded citizen, looking for ways to address some of the deformities in human life and culture. As you know, reform happens in many ways. It may occur when a nation gets shamed into seeing its injustice...or its carelessness (think of new building codes that require wheelchair accessibility). It may occur when the conscientious efforts of good people in business, medicine, law, labor, education, and elsewhere gain sufficient momentum so as to make a positive difference in those fields.


"Some of these reforms are led by Christian people who genuinely hope for the kingdom of God. Some are led by non-Christian people moved by simple desire for truth or justice. Many are led by people with mixed motives. But every genuine advance toward shalom is led by the Holy Spirit, who promiscuously chooses instruments of God's peace. In any case, Christian people seek the gift of discernment to know when and how to join existing movements toward shalom and when and how to start new ones.


"But here a word of caution is in order. It's one thing to talk about reform, and another to do it. Christians have been good at talking, and writing, and talking some more. And some have been pretty good at doing, too. But it's possible for reform-minded people to overestimate their rhetoric and underestimate the job. Some social realities are extremely resistant to reform. Great money, power, or pleasure supports them. Great acceptance surrounds them. Long traditions sustain them. Some of these realities therefore seem irredeemable, or nearly so...take an old problem of which you may have recent memories: What would happen for high school students to quit forming into cliques that marginalize or even terrorize their weak or unpopular classmates?


"John Calvin believed that an unredeemed life keeps oscillating back and forth between pride ("I've made it!) and despair ("I'll never make it"). In his view, redemption gives people security, or (one of Calvin's favorite words) 'repose.' His idea was that those who lean into God's grace and let it hold them up can then drop some of their performance anxiety.


"Perhaps the same pattern holds for Christians' approach to reforming culture. On the one hand, we need to avoid triumphalism, the prideful view that Christians will fully succeed in transforming all or much of culture. No doubt triumphalists underestimate some of the difficulties. They may underestimate cultural ironies too. After all, the history of the world is full of revolutions that Christians hailed as part of the coming of God's kingdom, only to discover that the revolutions ended up generating as much tyranny as they displaced.


"On the other hand, we also need to avoid the despairing tendency to write the world off, to abandon it as a lost cause, and to remove ourselves to an island of like-minded Christians. The world, after all, belongs to God and is in the process of being redeemed by God. 'God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...in order that the world might be saved through him' (John 3:16-17). Indeed, God's plan is to gather up 'all things' in Christ. How bizarre it would be for Christians to turn their backs on this plan. How ungrateful it would be to receive the bread of life and then refuse to share it with others.


"As a matter of fact, Christians have been in a solid position where the reform of culture is concerned: we have been invited to live beyond triumphalism and despair, spending ourselves for a cause that we firmly believe will win in the end. So, on the one hand, we may take responsibility for contributing what we uniquely 'have' to contribute to the kingdom, joining with many others from across the world who are striving to be faithful, to add the work of their hands and minds to the eventual triumph of God.


"Meanwhile, none of us is stuck with trying to promote the kingdom of God with an occupation we can't stand. At one time people were born into their occupations, so that the son of a farmer, for example, was simply expected to take over the family farm. If he wanted to do something else with his life he was thought to be peculiar or, worse, traitorous. But, as Nicholas Wolterstorff has written, Reformed Christians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rejected the old idea that each of us is born to be just one thing - a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. Instead, each of us must find an occupation so intrinsically valuable and so naturally suited to us that, through it, we may add to the treasure of the kingdom. In fact, adds Wolterstorff, we must not only find an occupation to bring to the kingdom; we must 'shape' it to suit this purpose. The point is that occupations are often valuable to the kingdom, but only if we reform them. So in today's world, perhaps a Christian would shape the occupation of quality-control supervisor by encouraging whistle-blowers instead of retaliating against them...


"Only a few of us will launch great reform movements, and even fewer of us will do it deliberately. But all of us may offer our gifts and energies to the cause of God's program in the world. When we make this offering by means of an ordinary occupation, we will sometimes feel as if our 'lives' are very ordinary. No matter. An ordinary occupation done conscientiously builds the kingdom of God. Jesus built the kingdom as a carpenter before he built it as a rabbi. And he taught us in the parable of the talents that the question for disciples is not 'which' callings they have but how faithfully they pursue them..." (Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, 117-121).