When Justice Alone doesn’t bring the Kingdom
Following the outing of Mike Pilavachi, writers including Ian Paul and Scottie Reeve have published reflections reasserting the importance of charismatic experience.
Ironically, it was Mike Pilavachi who taught me that life-changing spiritual encounters could occur without hype and manipulation. In my last post, I mentioned the life-changing and then later, dissolutioning experiences I had with charismatic Christianity. Despite its undeniable formative power in my own life, charismatic experience became fused with all kinds of weirdness.
One Easter Camp, Mike sat on the stage in front of 5000+ people and waited. No music, no hype, no exhortation. One of my young people broke the silence with a very loud fart, at which point I thought we’d be heading back to our tents early. Then, like a storm, waves of crying and shaking swept through the building. At that moment, Mike quietly left the stage. No drama. Just a genuine, raw encounter with the power of God. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Like Scottie & Ian, I also think it would be a mistake to throw the baby of charismatic experience out with the Palavachi-flavoured bathwater. If we hold charismatic experience at arm’s length because of negative encounters (which is exactly what I once did), we risk robbing those we lead of a vital dimension of a healthy Christian life. These writers are not the first to make this point, because, sadly, Mike Palavachi is not the first Christian leader whose dark side eventually found him out.
Apart from that brief reflection, this post isn’t really about Pilavachi or charismatic experience. It’s about the other branch of the Soul Survivor mix: Christian social justice.
Social justice, too, had its champions and critics, its stage time at Easter Camp, and its promises of deep spiritual formation. Yet unlike charismatic experience, I rarely see Christians reflecting on the formative power of social justice.
Last month, I shared some personal stories of how social justice shaped me over the past two decades. This post takes a step further: a theological reflection on the promises and pitfalls of Christian social justice. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my conclusions. If we end up in slightly different places, that shouldn’t be a surprise; we all carry different hopes, assumptions, and life experiences. What follows is simply my perspective, not an attempt to speak for anyone else.
The Pull of Heaven on Earth
I had, I now realise, an over-realised eschatology. For those less familiar with theological jargon, that means the belief that the fullness of God’s Kingdom can be experienced fully in the present. In popular forms, this shows up in prosperity teaching: the idea that healing, health, and wealth have already fully arrived and should be experienced now. Mine was more subtle. I believed that if we gave our lives wholeheartedly to Christ, and if we laboured passionately for justice, the Kingdom would surely come “on earth as it is in heaven.”
As a missionary on deputation, I often preached Matthew 13, the parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price, to inspire radical discipleship. “God wants to transform the world,” I would say. “He’s looking for people willing to partner with him.” Sometimes I quoted Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
It was inspiring, at least I thought so. But I was wrong. Not about what God wants from us, or that he longs to partner with us, but about the role of our effort in bringing the Kingdom. Linking human action so closely to the coming of the Kingdom placed too much emphasis on what we do and not enough on what God does. Roy’s vision is powerful, but she’s describing a progressive utopia, not the Kingdom of God. Our collaboration with God can bring glimpses of a world without suffering, injustice, and selfishness, but society and creation will continue to groan while sin remains. In this life, no matter how pure our motives or passionate our activism, these foretaste glimpses are fragile and incomplete, and the fullness of God’s Kingdom will only come when all that has marred creation is finally removed.
Why Witnessing Christian Goodness Isn’t Enough
For years, I assumed social justice would draw people to Christ. Surely a church passionately feeding the hungry, cutting firewood, or running social enterprises would inspire onlookers to faith. I leaned on verses like Luke 4:18–19, Matthew 5:14–16, and Micah 6:8 as proof. But experience taught me otherwise. Though secular Kiwis were impressed—sometimes deeply moved—by what we did, not one of them joined our community because of it.
Now, while the occasional ‘unicorn convert’ might exist, my experience was consistent: secular Kiwis admired our youth group’s service projects—cutting firewood, trimming hedges, running our social business—but none were moved to devote their lives to the Prince of Peace.
Why did the early church’s acts of mercy draw outsiders into the faith—feeding the poor, rescuing abandoned babies—while similar efforts today so rarely do?
The answer, I think, comes through historian Tom Holland and missiologist Michael Frost.
In a conversation with Nicky Gumbel, Holland observed:
“You invented care for the poor… but now we have the welfare state. Your monasteries pioneered healthcare and education, but now we have the NHS and state schools. Your Bible uniquely taught human dignity, but now we have the European Convention on Human Rights. The state has basically stolen all your best ideas.”
Frost puts it another way: good works have lost their ability to surprise. Early evangelists proclaimed the gospel to such profound effect because hundreds of thousands of ordinary believers lived in such a way that they “evoked curiosity about the Christian message”. Their sacrificial acts of kindness startled the empire. All these centuries later, for secular Westerners, good deeds by Christians no longer evoke curiosity. “If we hear that a Christian business owner has donated money to a course, or that a church has opened a feeling program or a hospice, we aren't intrigued. Such things are expected.”
Such things are expected.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t serve, give, or care. But we can no longer assume that onlookers will be drawn to faith by our good works alone. For secular Westerners, Christian goodness rarely surprises anymore.
It’s evangelism, not social justice, that must be central to Christian mission.
Ten years ago, I would have totally disagreed with that statement.
In 2014, Rosey and I were training at a small residential missionary school in Melbourne. We were alongside a group of students deeply shaped by Sydney Anglican theology—complementarian, Reformed, and rigorously biblical. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, that meant they didn’t believe women should preach or exercise leadership over men, were wary of social justice, and cautious about anything charismatic. I, on the other hand, believed strongly in all those things. So we had some robust conversations.
One day, after a lively discussion, I explained to a lecturer my ‘continuum of mission’.
“There’s room for both evangelism and social justice,” I said. “You’re all about evangelism; I’m all about justice. As long as we respect each other, we’ll be fine.”
He paused, smiled, and asked, “Continuum, huh? So where was Jesus on the continuum?”
That question lodged in my mind like a fuse waiting to go off. It took nearly a decade to explode. Mission, I’ve realised, isn’t a continuum. It’s a both/and.
Jesus was all about evangelism and all about justice.
He didn’t do either/or or mostly this, a little of that.
That said, while Jesus was fully committed to a life of compassion, it’s a stretch to say that justice was his central purpose. Legendary missiologist David Bosch captures the both/and tension beautifully:
“Although evangelism may never simply be equated with labour for justice, it may also never be divorced from it… Evangelism is the core, heart or centre of mission; it consists in the proclamation of salvation in Christ to nonbelievers, in announcing forgiveness of sin, in calling people to repentance and faith in Christ, in inviting them to become living members in Christ’s earthly community, and to begin a life in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
It’s a sloppy reading of Jesus’ life to conclude he was not passionately committed to justice. But it’s possibly even sloppier to elevate justice above the work of salvation. Many of us, inspired by works like The Hole in Our Gospel, embraced justice wholeheartedly. Ironically, in the process, we sometimes created an even bigger hole—sidelining evangelism while pursuing justice.
Looking back, I’m still grateful for what those years taught me. I still believe justice matters deeply. But I’ve also learned that when justice takes centre stage without Jesus at the centre, it loses its way. In my next post, I’ll look at what’s endured from the justice movement, and what kind of legacy it’s left the church.
Sources: David Bosch, Witness to the World: The Christian Mission in Theological Perspective; Michael Frost, Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People.