My wife asked me last night what the difference was between community service and social justice.......good question! Here was my response - tell me what you think.
I basically believe that service can and does look like anything - with anybody. I feel like serving your community comes out of a deep place of obedience and an overflow of compassion and Spirit in each of us. Serving others in the name of Jesus is required of his church, not requested. But when that requirement begins to reach into a "calling" that touches root issues in our society - I think you start to get more into the social justice part of the equation. Social Justice is something we address in the cause of a problem - not just its symptoms. Having said that - we can't fix the cause of most of the problems we see in society. But God can. He deals with causality at the heart of humanity when his presence invades a circumstance.
Still, we as a Church throw our hat in the ring when it comes to "social justice" issues - as we should. Although most of the time what we are doing is just serving our fellow man. Hopefully in the name of the one that sent us - Jesus.
Here is the example I gave her:
You have the problem of homelessness in the city of San Diego - it's right there in front of us. What do we do? We bring them food, give them money, pray for them, love them, transport them, recommend places to go and recover our just survive. But what we have done is simply serve them. Truth be known - that is really what we should be focused on. Why? Because anybody can do that. It doesn't take a degree, it doesn't take a foundation, a system, lots of money or time. It just requires you and your willingness to show your community the heart of God in action.
To begin to answer the "social justice" side of that equation we have to try and "solve" the problem. What do we do? Maybe we set up a "help line" that connects a homeless person with his/her parents or friends that still love them. Maybe that leads to a reconciled home life that they can return to with our intervention and a large amount of humility on their part. Then we have begun to solve the problem of that ONE person. So we replicate that - over and over. If it works then we have taken a "social justice" action in addressing the cause of the problem. But all we can do is poor our attention on the surface issues - it still takes healing to fix the family, right? Enter God.......
Anyway, there seems to be a collage of effort in both of these areas and social justice and service have somehow become the same thing - they are not.
We need to remember to lead people into what they can do - service. If God has a place for them in the world of Social Justice it will become evident and whatever they bring to that table will make room for itself. But in the meantime, if we remove the idea that in order to serve someone you have to DO all the things that social justice requires then we have furthered the cause of both things and the Kingdom. Haven't we?
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