I recently joined the team over at FoolishBlog, and I finally got my first post finished. If you’re allergic to websites with the word foolish in them, I’ll go ahead and put it here for you:

Like my friend Scott, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about the issue of social justice, and how to think about it biblically. I’ve read books by lawyers, books by radicals, and some articles by really cool people. And by cool, I mean hip and trendy, not so much below average temperature. I learned a lot from my reading, and I feel like I’m starting to grasp what our God thinks about justice and how we as Christians should respond. Hopefully I’ll write more on that in the future, but what I want to focus on now is somewhat of at side topic that I came across in my reading.

When most people talk about social justice, they also usually lump in compassion or charity ministry- i.e. feeding the poor and caring for orphans and widows. This is a great service that Scripture calls us to many times, and its taken a back seat recently in much of the American church, I think mostly because its not something that most middle-class Americans see on a daily basis. But this kind of ministry is starting to make a comeback it seems, among the hip/young/emergent crowd. It’s exciting to see God working in the hearts of this generation, and it will be really interesting to see how this plays out over the next ten years or so.

After I started to pick up on this trend, I began to ask the question “why?” Why is it cool all of a sudden to feed starving children? Why are young, passionate believers flocking to aid and human rights organizations? And subsequently, why are they not flocking to gospel ministry and traditional mission agencies? Do these people just want to feel good about what they’re doing? Are they afraid of sharing the gospel? Are they not really committed, sold-out Christians? I think the answer could be something very different.

This is very much speculation on my part, and hopefully we can dialogue about it in the comments, but this is my hypothesis: the reason these young people are moving toward humanitarian aid rather than missions is that they have a desire for full time ministry helping others, but they don’t identify with the “missionaries” they’ve known. I don’t want to speak out of place here, and I hope I’m not misunderstood, because I’ve known many missionaries that I would love to emulate in many ways. But I think most of us, if we’re honest, remember that couple that came to our church and showed a slide show of half-naked tribesmen from the jungles of Goiania. We probably didn’t think to ourselves, “Wow, this missionary guy is just like me. I could totally see myself going to Goiania with this guy and ministering right along side him.” Most likely it was closer to, “Wow, this missionary guy is kind of weird and socially awkward. If that’s what a career missionary is, that life is not for me.”

This is one of many reasons that I’m encouraged to see and hear peoples’ reaction when I tell them about how my friends and I are planning to serve full time on a foreign field. Yes, “normal” people can be missionaries too. In fact you and your friends can be missionaries. I’ve been in several conversations over the last few months with people where I’ve seen the light go off in their head, and they actually considered this for the first time. So I say, go ahead. Do it. Get a group of friends together and go live a “normal” life of ministry sharing the gospel and building the church on the other side of the globe. I think we could see an amazing movement of missionaries being sent out that hasn’t happened in the US since the 1940s. And that’s not to say compassion ministry won’t be a part of what you do (just about every missionary I know is involved in charity) but let the gospel be the center of your life’s work- because while helping the poor feels good, we are primarily called to be a light rather than a band-aid.