This is a massively important topic for our world today and for how individuals and churches live out the Christian life.

You may not know what these two are, but if you are a Christian in a western society, they shape how you understand your faith, the Christian life, and God’s place in the world.  The distinction and history between the two also goes a long way to explain the political divide among American Christians.

I hope you’re paying attention, because this is huge.

For much of American history many Protestants understood the Gospel, or the Good News of Jesus in very individualistic terms.  If you would acknowledge your need for God and the ways you have gone against both God and what is right, then God will forgive you, God will be with you, give you new life, joy and peace in the here and now, and the promise of new life after death.  It was the Gospel of the saved and transformed individual.  History and the world today are full of individuals that God has and is incredibly saving and transforming in supernatural ways.  I am one of them.

Then in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century some theologians looked at Jesus and they looked at the type of Christians the church and the theology of their day were producing and they noticed that something was missing – Jesus’ ethics of caring for our neighbor and the least of these in the society and world around us (See Matthew 25 for an example).  This aspect of the Christian life had never been wholly abandoned by Christians and the church, but these theologians rightfully noticed a lack of understanding and practice in this important aspect of living out the Way of Jesus.

The reform movement that these theologians launched became known as the Social Gospel – the Good News that the life of Jesus compels his followers to not only accept the Good News, but to be good news for the societies in which they live, especially when it comes to the “least of these.”

The influence of this movement has been immense!  The phrase, “What would Jesus do?” was coined in this movement (by Rev. Charles Sheldon) and this challenge to Christians to live out Jesus’ ethics in regards to social problems has had an enormous impact in the areas of child labor, women’s suffrage, economic injustices, work conditions, prison reform, racial injustices, education reform, and public health.

I doubt it will shock very many people to learn that those who emphasize the individual aspects of the Good News of Jesus tend to be conservative and those who emphasize the societal aspects of the Good News of Jesus tend to be liberal.

So which one is right, the Gospel or the Social Gospel?  They both are.  Also, they can both in their own way wander far off the path of Jesus.

The Social Gospel has always been essentially a critique or a course correction movement for the way the Christian life is lived out and taught.  Caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the suffering has always been a part of the lived out faith of Christians, but sometimes it has gotten pushed to the fringes.  The Social Gospel movement is a reminder that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40), that we are created to do good works (Ephesians 2:10), and that faith without action is no faith at all (James 2:20).

For all its amazing good as a corrective movement to the individualistic way the Gospel is sometimes lived out, the Social Gospel movement has gotten off track from time to time and needed its own course correction.  When it forgets that the hope of humanity and our world is not found in government, public policy, or human achievement but in what God is doing through Jesus, it has stopped being the Gospel.  When it loses sight of the fact that Jesus did not come to earth to be a political, social, or institutional reformer, but to change the hearts, the desires, the morals, and the character of the individuals in those systems, it loses sight of where the power  and the hope of the Gospel truly lies.  When it prioritizes addressing spiritual poverty less than anything else, it loses site of both the Way of Jesus and the true plight of the human condition.

As I have tried to live out the Social Gospel – the application of Jesus’ ethics in the society and community around me, I have continually run into the realization that the oppressor people most often need to be free from is themselves – not something “out there” but something inside.  I am almost daily reminded that we can give people all the food stamps, the free housing, and life opportunities in the world (remember I’m not knocking caring for the poor here), but if we don’t offer them the life changing love of God, and if they don’t grab a hold of it, then it’s all hopeless.  We’re just spinning our wheels.

I recently did a funeral for a man who experienced more poverty, hardship, and societal injustice in his life than most of us will ever know.  None of those things seemed to have any effect on him though, because he was spiritually rich.  He was full of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).  He was poor and oppressed most of his life – and I wish we could have done more about that – but he was also rich in the things that truly matter.  I wish everyone was so rich.

So in the question of the Gospel vs the Social Gospel, I say “YES!”  They are both essential for us living out the Way of Jesus.

May God teach us all to love what God loves, grieve what God grieves, and dream what God dreams – and may that inner reality shape our communities, our society, and the world.