When Justice Captured My Imagination: How a generation of young evangelicals rediscovered mercy, mission, and the poor
I got serious about my faith in the mid-nineties. I’d grown up in a strongly Christian family but drifted through my early teens. What pulled me back was a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit, and the deep friendship and community I found in my local youth group.
Charismatic experience and evangelism were the heartbeat of our youth group. Praying in tongues, shaking, falling over — all normal. A couple of times a year, we’d head down to the local mall to perform dances and dramas, and every summer we packed into a campground for a beach mission.
But, for me at least, that wasn’t to last. In 2000, I went to a conference called Redline, where we were told revival was imminent — so imminent it would be carried around the world on Air New Zealand planes. All it required was willing participants. I was all in. I handed over my supermarket-job savings, bought the tapes and booklets, and went home waiting for God to move.
The next year I went again, hoping someone would explain what had gone wrong. But most people seemed to have quietly moved on; the promises that hadn’t come to pass were rarely mentioned. I shelved charismatic experience into the “I don’t know what to do with this” part of my mind.
Into that vacuum new voices began to rise. Tony Campolo told us at Parachute festival that we didn’t give a shit about the poor. Bono began reminding the church of its biblical obligation to work for justice. Brooke Fraser released Albertine. Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution was passed around. Even beyond the church, Live 8 revived the spirit of Live Aid, and the Make Poverty History campaign revived a global hunger for change.
I was, once again, all in.
In 2005 I left my teaching job for five months in Ethiopia with a child-sponsorship agency. It was formative — walking slums and refugee camps, befriending street kids, and once being vomited on by a three-year-old in the final stages of HIV/AIDS. I learned something of Ethiopia’s history and culture, and I also saw the tensions within the aid-and-mission world: older missionaries rooted in Bible translation and church planting, younger practitioners fluent in community-development language but often constrained by Western funders wary of overt evangelism.
Reading the gosepl of Luke — with its relentless attention to the poor — felt like watching Scripture come alive.
Back in Aotearoa in 2006, unsure how to process it all, I enrolled at Bible College of New Zealand. It was the most cathartic of experiences. I devoured books, talked with mission lecturers who had spent decades in the developing world, and processed my experiences through assignment form (that last phrase might be the nerdiest confession I have ever written!).
I discovered the Mosaic justice of Leviticus 25 and the prophets’ searing critiques of neglecting the poor. Principal Mark Strom taught us that the Kingdom of God holds justice and evangelism together. Slowly a call formed — as Brooke Fraser sang, “now that I have seen, I am responsible.”
That same year Rosey and I met. I nervously confessed a growing call to cross-cultural mission; she took some time to pray it through, and then said she was in.
We thought a move overseas would follow quickly. Despite trips to Kenya, Ethiopia and India, it didn’t. We had babies, and I threw myself into youth ministry.
Church work gave me space to introduce young people to service and justice. Alongside our own regular service projects, we joined Youthserve — a week-long Scripture Union camp where we planted trees and painted fences. City Lights was similar, only larger: young adults from across Auckland gathered in Māngere to worship together and spend several days painting, lopping, and cleaning.
I’ll never forget the end of one City Lights gathering: several hundred of us eating together in the crypt beneath St Paul’s, Symonds Street — the birthplace of the charismatic renewal in the late ’60s. A speaker told us this justice movement would reshape the church as profoundly as that earlier renewal. I believed it. Serving in this way felt like being “born again, again” — as powerful as my late-90s charismatic encounters.
Over the next two decades I stayed committed. As a youth pastor I scheduled regular service projects and took teams to Fiji for hands-on community development. With NZCMS, our family joined a social business in South Asia, working alongside formerly trafficked women. More recently I’ve served as community-ministries enabler for the Nelson Anglican Diocese.
In short, I’ve been all in on Christian social justice. I don’t regret it — it has shaped me profoundly — but in this post and the next I want to name some things, that on reflection, we got wrong.
The arrogance of wanting my ‘thing’ to be everybody else’s
Social-justice activists bristle at the idea that justice is just another church program. My vision for justice and community service was that they should be central to healthy church life; everyone should have the opportunity to be meaningfully involved. And as evidence, I’d point to Jesus’ self-appointed commissioning in Luke 4.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
I still think justice is vital. But I now realise people aren’t necessarily uninterested in it because they’re spiritually shallow. Service and justice don’t speak to every soul like they do to mine. Others are gifted in, or connect with God through sung worship, hospitiality, prayer, pastoral care, or evangelism. Justice belongs in that mix — but it must never become a weapon to measure others’ faithfulness. Paul’s image of one body with many parts reminds us that different gifts are necessary for the life of the church.
The church makes a poor activist community
Many of us inclined toward activism have felt the church is too slow to engage the local community — too conservative or fence-sitting on global justice.
As a youth pastor, I wanted to see all the people in the pews hitting the streets with paint brushes or loppers in hand. It’s when we serve, I told myself, that our faith comes to life. Looking back, I still feel that was a noble goal. When my young people served, they felt as is they’d done something deeply meaningful. And service provided an opportunity to integrate their faith to the real world.
But, honestly, only a small portion of the wider church ever joined my initiatives. Back then I read that as a discipleship deficit; now I see it as partly a reflection of the church’s nature.
The church isn’t an activist collective; it’s a worshipping, meaning-making community. It welcomes people across the political, economic, and discipleship spectrum. That diversity makes it slow.
As Bonhoeffer warned, “those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that community.” Churches move cautiously on justice and service not nessecarily because they don’t care, but because they’re churches; to expect otherwise risks disappointment and damage.
Looking back I can see both the beauty and the blind spots of that season. Social justice gave my faith fresh fire, but it also left me with illusions that needed dismantling. In my next post I’ll name those illusions — and ask whether our justice passion followed the same arc as our charismatic one: blazing bright, but in danger of burning out too quickly.