Christians and Society
Week 3: Balanced and Centered Church Ministries
Goal: Discuss the various thrust of church ministry and models of church engagement to our culture and
how we must stay centered and balanced.
Centered Church Ministries – Pursue an integrated, balanced ministry that not only converts
nonbelievers but also builds up believers, that teaches the word and carries out practical ministries, that
seeks personal conversion and Christian community, social justice, and cultural renewal.
The biblical goals of ministry are threefold and comprehensive: (1) we are called to minister and serve
God through worship (Romans 15:8-16; I Peter 2:9), (2) we are called to minister and serve one another
through Christian nurture (Eph. 4:12-26); and (3) we are to minister and serve the world through
witness (Matt. 28:18-20; Luke 24:28; Acts 5:32). We are not called to specialize but to do them all. All
of these goals are really one goal because they are so interrelated --- we are to sing the praises of God.1
Centered Church Engagement with Society – There have been four models developed that all highlight
key truths found in the Scripture but all are ultimately lacking. We will pursue an integrated, centered
approach that draw from elements of all four models.
Transformationist – Engage culture largely through an emphasis on Christians pursuing their vocations
from a Christian worldview and thereby changing culture. The Lordship of Christ should be brought to
bear on every area of life --- economics and business, government and politics, literature and art,
1
Ibid, p. 294
Christians and Society
Page 1
journalism and the media, science and law and education. Christian should labor to transform culture,
to literally change the world. They view ‘secular’ work as in important way to serve Christ and his
kingdom and celebrate Christians who excel at their work. The main problem with society of secularism
forbidding believers from striving to see their beliefs and values reflected in culture. Abraham Kuyper,
Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, Neo-Calvinist.2 Some problems: too intellectual, underappreciation of
the church, self-righteous and overconfident, too focused on politics, the danger of power.
Relevance – Christianity is fundamentally compatible with the surrounding culture. Those who embrace
this model believe that God is at work redemptively within cultural movements that have nothing
explicitly to do with Christianity. It see Christ at work in all “movements in philosophy toward the
assertion of the world’s unity and order, movements in morals toward self-denial and the care for the
common good, and political concerns for justice. It is not just that these things are good in some way --they are the work of God’s Spirit. In general, they are optimistic about cultural trends. They seek to
reinvent church’s ministry to be more relevant to the needs and sensibilities of people in the culture and
more committed to the service and good of the whole community. While not condoning immorality and
relativism, they locate the main problem as the church’s incomprehensibility to the minds and hearts of
secular people. They make little distinction between how individual Christians should act in the world
and how the institutional church should function. Some problems: trendy and quickly outdated, too
willing to negotiate Scripture for culture, loss of the gospel, loss of distinctiveness of church.3
Counterculturist – The church is a contrasting society to the world. This model strongly emphasizes that
the kingdom is manifest primarily as a church community in opposition to the kingdom of the world.
They do not see God working redemptively through cultural movements outside the church and calls the
church to avoid concentrating on culture, looking for ways to become relevant to it, reach it, or
transform it. The church is to be a counterculture, an alternate human society that is a sign of the
kingdom to the world. This model level sharp criticism against the conservative evangelical church and
the new evangelical megachurch. Instead of making the world more like the church, they have only
succeeded in making the church more like the world. Some problems: too pessimistic about the social
change, tends to demonize modern business, capital markets, and government, ignores validity of
contextualization, downplays the doctrine of justification and substitutionary atonement, less focused
on evangelism. Anabaptist, Mennonites, John Howard Yoder The Politics of Jesus.4
Two Kingdoms – God rules all of creation, but he does so in two distinct ways. First, there is the
“common kingdom” established through the covenant with Noah in Genesis 9. In this realm, all human
being are members, and people know right and wrong through natural revelation or common grace. In
addition, to the common or earthly kingdom, there is the redemptive kingdom established with
Abraham in Genesis 12. Only Christians are members of this kingdom and they rule not through
common grace and natural revelation but through special revelation of God’s Word. Two Kingdom
proponents place high value on Christians pursuing their work in ‘secular’ vocations. We must not thing
we can only serve God within the church. All work is a way to serve God and our neighbor. Unlike the
Transformationist, believers are not creating distinctly Christian culture. They should not try to change
culture so that it reflects Christian beliefs, nor should they think they are to “heal” creation. The job of
the church is not to change society but to simply be the church. They see a secular, neutral state
(commerce, capital markets, etc.) as exactly what God wants, not a state coercively imposing religious
2
Ibid, p. 195
Tim Keller, Center Church, p. 201
4 Ibid, p. 205
3
Christians and Society
Page 2
values. Some problems: more weight to common grace that the Bible does, human life outside of
religion, social quietism, hierarchy between clergy and laity. Martin Luther, Calvin?5
Why all the models are right…and wrong – “Each model is biblically unbalanced. That is, each has a
pivotal theme that is true but insufficient, and the more we reductionistically apply that theme to
cultural engagement without reference to other themes in the Bible, the more unbalanced the
theological vision and less fruitful the work. Taken to extremes we either become too optimistic or
pessimistic, too passive or active about cultural change. The biblical material calls for a balance not of
compromises but of ‘being controlled simultaneously and all the time’ by all of the teaching of
Scripture.”6



Although it is not wrong to be a proponent of one model, we should do our best do discern and
incorporate the insights of the other models.
There may be seasons where one model is more emphasized than others
Each model will tend to attract people based on their different ministry gifts and callings
Special Note on Abraham Kuyper (Neo-Calvinist, 1837-1920) – “that while individual Christians may
engage in politics the church as such may not. This was the position of Abraham Kuyper, who drew a
clear distinction between the church as organism and the church as institution. The latter was the
church formally organized and acting through its office-bearers and official structures. This institution,
according to Kuyper, should have no political voice. The church as organism, on the other hand, is the
totality of believers dispersed through society, lacking any formal organization, yet linked organically
through their common membership of the body of Christ. These believers, according to Kuyper, have
every right to raise a political voice. But he went further. Precisely because they are linked organically
they have a right to form associations: for example, to set up parent-controlled Christian schools or even
(as in Kuyper’s own case) Christian political parties. This was a corner-stone of Kuyper’s public
theology.”7
5
Ibid, p. 209
Ibid, p. 230
7Donald Macleod, https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/school-of-divinity/documents/theologyinscotland/T-iS%20sample.pdf. Also, see p. 241 of Center Church for Tim Keller’s discussion of the same subject.
6
Christians and Society
Page 3