“Keep the main thing the main thing,”¹ Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert intone to no probable disagreement in their amply-titled book What Is the Mission of the Church?: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission. Literally everyone wants to keep the main thing the main thing. The real disagreement comes when one asks, “What exactly is the main thing?” or, even more problematic, “What does this main thing mean for me?”

Writing with a stated desire to correct the at times shrill and conscience-binding injunctions of “kingdom-oriented” Christians (both of the “liberal” and “theonomic” varieties) who insist that the work of the church either should involve (or might even consist in) engagement with every facet of human life, DeYoung and Gilbert spend most of their pages admirably attempting to navigate between the extremes of mere humanitarianism and mere gnosticism in order to arrive at a clear mission statement more biblically binding the consciences of the whole church. They evince a godly fear that, in the church’s well-meaning attempts to achieve cultural relevance and social transformation, she might have lost sight of the mission under which all of her works must be subsumed—namely, making disciples. In spite of the brevity of their book, they attempt to account for a wide variety of biblical passages and hermeneutics, and they clearly recognize that the difficulties of their titular question arise far more in practice than principle.

In the end, however, if one determines a “corrective” book’s value on the basis of how much capacity it has to actually correct people’s minds and actions, this book seems to have little value beyond a few salutary refinements to accepted doctrinal commonplaces. On the whole, those who disagree with DeYoung and Gilbert’s exegesis and eschatology will likely leave the book with unchanged minds, while those who agree with them will likely leave with unchanged lives. In both cases, the practical division of the church will only deepen as a result.

Words vs. Deeds

That said, I whole-heartedly agree with DeYoung and Gilbert’s mission statement for the church:

The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples into churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father.²

In fact, I think very many, if not most, Christians would agree with this mission statement—when “properly” interpreted, of course. For instance, some might say that Jesus “made disciples” and “declared the gospel” through both words and deeds, and he commanded us to do likewise in His name (Col. 3:17). These would say that obedient deeds also declare the Gospel, or at the very least, that the absence of embodied obedience (i.e., hypocrisy) can and often does become an obstacle to the Gospel (Matt. 23:13). They might say that the Great Commission says we must teach people how to obey, and we certainly can’t do that without obeying God ourselves.

In other words, DeYoung and Gilbert’s mission statement on its own cannot countermand various and contradicting applications, so, being unsatisfied with a merely doctrinal agreement on the mission of the church, they attempt to address the behavior of Christians in order to accomplish a social, cultural change within the church. The irony should not be lost here. DeYoung and Gilbert say the problem is one of right doctrine, but they must admit that agreeing on doctrine has not corrected the missional drift they perceive in the church.³ The conflict, far from being a mere doctrinal disagreement in need of DeYoung and Gilbert’s tidy propositional adjustment, actually arises from a quite complex and divergent set of doctrinal emphases and practices stemming from largely the same orthodox doctrines. Everyone in this debate mostly agrees in the abstract, but somehow we just cannot seem to be able to work together.

An Emphasis Turned into a Reduction

Perhaps understanding this, DeYoung and Gilbert spend much of their book fleshing out why they think the exclusive execution of the church’s mission in practice should be telling, not showing, the Gospel. They believe this basically exclusive emphasis has biblical warrant and follows ineluctably from their doctrinal “corrective.” Their most fundamental biblical rationale, resting on their Reformed emphasis on God’s monergistic sovereignty, is that, “Just as it is God and not we who will establish his kingship over the world, so it is God and not we who will create the new earth in which that kingship is exercised.”⁴ They continually emphasize the Christian’s passive position in regard to the transformation of the world: “It’s fascinating and instructive to see how passive the people of God really are in the creation and ‘building’ of the new heavens and new earth.”⁵ They speak throughout the book against any idea that we “partner” with God in His work.

I agree with them that many biblical passages express that the transforming of individual hearts and also the world is the exclusive work of God. But many other passages, which they completely ignore or selectively exegete, indicate that God accomplishes His exclusive converting work through means—His Spirit in and through His people. If God transforms the world, which they claim to believe, does He do so without means? When and where has He done this? The simple fact is that God nearly always uses means—human means as well as natural means—to do His work. They obviously recognize this when it comes to the conversion of sinners, or they would not enjoin Christians to urgent, faithful, verbal witness. But don’t they see that God’s transformation of the world progresses upon the conversion of sinners? So it would follow necessarily that if we have any part in the conversion of sinners (a main thrust of their book), we also have a part in the transformation of the world.

Synergy in Conversion and Transformation

Paul says that the apostles are “co-workers” (dare I say partners?) with God (1 Cor. 3:9). Elucidating the mysterious synergy of sanctified good works, he says in another place, “For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me” (Col. 1:29). He tells the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12b–13). Is God working here or are believers? Yes! Add to this the repeated statement of Jesus to various people He had healed, “Your faith has made you well” (Matt. 9:22; Mark 5:34; 10:52; Lk. 8:48), and you have a fairly regular and repeated pattern of God both working in and through His servants and then graciously crediting and rewarding them for their efforts in His work. Had DeYoung and Gilbert been there in Jesus’ presence, would they have lectured Jesus on the fundamentally passive nature of our involvement in God’s transforming grace and power?

God’s sovereign monergism cannot be denied from Scripture, and I would never attempt to deny it. But our responsibility, even our privilege, to be the agents of His work should not be dismissed either. DeYoung and Gilbert’s emphasis has become discouragingly reductive. In their zeal to interpret true doctrines to support their dubious position, they have fully served neither the biblical texts nor their audience. Sovereign monergism should not excuse us from any Gospel work. Rather, it should motivate and encourage us in it!

Can the world help but be changed if God blesses our mission and many people come to salvation in Christ? Of course not. As J. I. Packer writes, “You have every reason to be bold, and free, and natural, and hopeful of success, for God can give His truth an effectiveness that you and I cannot give it.”⁶ The doctrine of God’s sovereignty should fill us with optimism—not in our own efforts as if they were indispensable, but in His work in and through us in fulfilling His unbreakable promises. A sovereign God will accomplish what He has promised both in us, in the church, and in the world, and we get to take part in this work!

DeYoung and Gilbert seem to take God’s sovereignty in the other direction, telling us that their doctrine of human passivity “protects us from a wrong and ultimately discouraging optimism about just how good we should expect to be able to make this world.”⁷ This is not a bracing application of God’s sovereignty. “Get used to things being this bad and wait passively for Jesus to fix everything at the end”? No, thank you. I’ll work from God’s promise and receive His work in and through me in faith.

So I have no problem, again, with DeYoung and Gilbert’s doctrine of God’s sovereign monergism, when properly applied. I have a problem with their reductive and self-serving application of this doctrine, however. To believe the true doctrine is not the same as to apply it correctly.

Are Good Works Part of the Mission or Aren’t They?

Their question-begging emphasis on telling versus showing the Gospel pervades the book. For instance, they preclusively define witness as “verbal witness,”⁸ though such a construction hardly accounts for the reason the Greek word for witness in the New Testament (martus, from martureō) eventually came to mean dying for the faith as much as or more than preaching it. A witness for God is one whose deeds and life testify to the truth of the Gospel as much as his words do. This is not at all to downplay the church’s verbal witness. Our verbal and embodied witness must coordinate, or they will both suffer. We should not divide the verbal and embodied witness, even if you would distinguish them. As Edmund Clowney writes: “Witness is by life as well as by word, but never without the Word of God.”⁹ Lest we forget, “we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:32). Without obedience, we do not have the Spirit, and how can we bear a true witness without Him?

Throughout the book, I kept wondering, “Do DeYoung and Gilbert think it possible to adequately declare the Gospel without tangible manifestations of obedience?” I don’t think they do. They protest regularly (methinks too much) about what they are not saying. They do not believe good works to be bad, un-Christian, or even unnecessary.¹⁰ But if both words and deeds are essential to declaring the Gospel, why not just say that? It hardly matters which is technically “primary” if both are essential and interdependent. And if your emphasis necessitates regular, vehement defenses for doing good works at all, you have probably not achieved a biblical balance.

Undeterred, and striving to both have their biblical balance and eat it too, DeYoung and Gilbert offer other motivations for good works than “kingdom building” or “mission.” They say we do good works out of obedience to God, because we love our neighbors, to display God’s character and work, in response to the Spirit as His fruit, and to win a hearing for the Gospel.¹¹ Yet, lest we forget in the midst of what seem like a lot of great reasons to integrate good works into our missional vision, DeYoung and Gilbert remind us insistently and continually that, all that being the case, good works are not part of the mission of the church. On the contrary, Clowney offers the more natural, balanced, integrated, and orthodox view: “The heart of the gospel moves the church to mission and to deeds of mercy which have always been part of the Christian mission.”¹²

By the end of DeYoung and Gilbert’s book, they have not integrated good works into the church’s mission, and yet, through lexical and exegetical contortions, they have not discarded good works from the work of the church either. Instead, one would be forgiven for thinking, against DeYoung and Gilbert’s regular protests, that they think good works are perhaps like a vestigial organ of the church—possible to remove without mortality to her mission but to be retained until infected with liberal over-activity. Christians who leave off good works and cultural engagement entirely in order to focus on the preaching of the Gospel in verbal forms would seem to have retained the core mission of the church—the primary part of Christian duty, as if such a division between word and deed could ever occur. Again, I don’t think even DeYoung and Gilbert believe this, so why do they persist in this disputation over words?

If the church cannot accomplish her mission without good works, and God requires every Christian to do them, why not include good works in a more comprehensive understanding of the church’s work in accomplishing her mission through the obedience of the saints in word and deed? Do DeYoung and Gilbert even understand the purpose of a mission statement?

How a Mission Statement Works

A mission statement for an organization does not exhaustively prescribe the works of every member of an organization. Rather, it dictates the goal of these works, and thereby focuses and directs them. A mission statement tells you what you’re aiming to accomplish, not necessarily how to accomplish it. In other words, every individual associate for an organization must submit and relate every one of his works to the overall mission of his organization (or discontinue such work), but the mission statement does not always give specific provision for what each associate’s work actually consists of. This distinction bears much weight in our current discussion.

For instance, the mission statement for Google reads, “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But no one would say this prohibits custodians from taking out the trash at Google’s corporate offices. No one would come up to them and say, “Hey, stop that! Taking out the trash is not our mission. You need to be organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful!” Further, one should be careful to properly honor the essential and important quality of the work the custodians do. Of course, Google’s custodians have no direct part in Google’s stated mission, but without them, where would Google’s mission be? Under a heap of trash, actually. One’s work does not need to be the mission in order to be on mission.

DeYoung and Gilbert begin to address this, I think too briefly, when they distinguish the “organic” from the “institutional” church:

. . . we need to bear in mind that there is a difference between the church considered as a bunch of individual Christians and the church understood as an institution—as an organization of Christians that can and indeed must do some things that individual Christians cannot and indeed should not do. Perhaps we can talk about these two different entities as “the church organic” and “the church institutional.”¹³

In their view, the good works of individual Christians in “the church organic,” like the excommunications of the institutional church, are areas where the works of the organic and institutional church do not overlap. They ask rhetorically: “If I am commanded to do justice, does that mean ipso facto that it is the church’s mission to do justice?”¹⁴ No, perhaps not. But, similar to the custodian taking out Google’s trash, it also doesn’t mean that my obedient commitment to biblical justice isn’t actually part of the church accomplishing its mission. The one does not exclude the other.

To complete the partial reasoning of their examples, the organic church does excommunicate through and with their representative institutional leaders under the apostolic authority given to the church (1 Cor. 5:4–5), and individual church members must follow through in this excommunication organically. For instance, the “not even eating with such a one” of 1 Corinthians 5:11 does not refer to the institutional church’s work of excommunication, but the organic church’s work of excommunication. Both the institutional and the organic church excommunicate, in other words, even if their job descriptions in that excommunication differ in particular practice. And concerning justice, the institutional church bears rightful blame when the organic church does not “do justice” in and through her members. I recognize DeYoung and Gilbert’s distinction, but they make too much of it on one hand, while not discerning its corrective implications on the other.

They should have been able to draw out from their own distinction of the organic and institutional church that every individual Christian must play a part in the church’s mission, but that part may not be identical for all Christians. This cuts both ways. They want to use their correct distinction to prove that not everyone needs to involve themselves in mercy ministry (or in the same mercy ministries), when it just as readily proves that not everyone in the church needs to be focused primarily on the direct verbal ministry of the Word. Each kind of witness is essential to accomplishing the mission of the church. The central failing of the book is that it attempts to make the singular mission statement of the universal church the reductive, particular job description of every local church and individual Christian. Such a conflation of mission and work has disastrous consequences.

Diminishing the Dignity of Diaconal Ministry

In DeYoung and Gilbert’s zeal to exclude certain works of Christians and churches from the mission of the church, they cut off a huge part of embodied obedience from its proper place of elevated dignity in service of the Gospel. Again, mission statements do not provide parameters for their own accomplishment. Each Christian’s work must be in service to our universal mission even when it does not exhaust that mission directly in itself. But who determines what this work in support of the mission will be for each Christian or local church? Not DeYoung and Gilbert. And not cultural activists, either. God does (Eph. 2:10).

One of the most glaring examples of DeYoung and Gilbert’s reductive conflation of mission and works concerns their interpretation of the institution of the diaconate. They imply that the deacons were not also performing the mission of the church in their particular works of mercy. Beginning on the wrong foot, DeYoung and Gilbert make the ludicrous claim that “if you are looking for a picture of the early church giving itself to creation care, plans for societal renewal, and strategies to serve the community in Jesus’s name, you won’t find them in Acts.”¹⁵ On the contrary, you do find these things, if you would only take your blinders off. In fact, the institution of the diaconate is just this—one of many “strategies to serve the community in Jesus’s name.”

Then, letting the other shoe drop, DeYoung and Gilbert diminish the Gospel significance of the proto-deacon’s work in Jerusalem. In DeYoung and Gilbert’s selective interpretation, the work of the deacons operates as a necessary Christian obedience that freed the Apostles to do the real mission of the church. In their treatment of Acts 6, they mutely pass over the obvious exegetical implication that “a great many priests [the Old Testament version of deacons] became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7)¹⁶ as a direct result of the diaconal obedience in “serving tables.” If the Apostles had not considered diaconal service as “on mission,” why would they have been so eager to provide for its accomplishment through representative officers of the church? Did they lose sight of the real mission in this? Was Paul off mission when he perpetuated the office through Timothy?

If you say, “No, the Apostles were freeing themselves up for the real mission,” then I must ask, “Were the deacons on mission, then, or not?” Again, here, you see the failure of DeYoung and Gilbert’s unnecessarily exclusive emphasis on one aspect of the church’s work in accomplishing her mission. The difference between the Apostles and the deacons was one of emphasis and application, not a disagreement over the mission of the church. The church’s universal mission is exactly what DeYoung and Gilbert say it is, but that cannot and should not circumscribe all the actual works individual Christians and local churches do to accomplish that mission. Further, conflating the universal mission with the particular works that accomplish it, as DeYoung and Gilbert have done, actually harms the mission of the church and devalues and disenfranchises large numbers of Christians who have been given to the church by God for different purposes than the direct ministry of the Word.

Are the Works of the Church the Same as Her Mission?

Perhaps a better question (though admittedly not a better book title) than “What is the mission of the church?” would be “What may the varied works of individual Christians and local churches be in fulfilling the singular mission of the universal church?” While DeYoung and Gilbert purport to answer the former question, they actually address the latter for most of their book. They never explicitly reference this confusion. Perhaps they do not realize that the mission of the church is not identical to the works of individual Christians representing the church, for they give an insufficient and incoherent answer to the second question precisely because they think they are answering the first. They want to call the argument doctrinal, but in fact most everyone, myself included, already agrees with their mission statement. Their book does not primarily correct doctrines, then. It primarily addresses practice, and in a way that effectively binds consciences.

Ironically, they accuse their opponents of unnecessarily binding the consciences of believers by focusing on right practice instead of right doctrine. In the dialogue that closes the book, the wise and balanced Pastor Tim sagely advises:

. . . don’t give in to the temptation to tell everyone exactly what their life needs to look like. . . . Resist the urge to make the church body do everything you want the body parts to be doing. . . . People are called to different things. Their consciences are pricked in different ways. So don’t expect everyone to be into whatever you’re into, or against everything you’re against. . . . if you take every last one of your convictions and all your idealistic passion and lay it over your whole congregation, you’ll wear them out or tear them up.¹⁷

If only DeYoung and Gilbert would follow Pastor Tim’s (i.e., their own) advice. What if they are doing the same thing in their exclusive emphasis on verbal witness that they accuse Chris (and others) of doing with their exclusive emphasis on embodied witness? God has not called every Christian to the direct verbal ministry of the Word like the Apostles, preachers, or teachers of the church. Only partial reasoning and self-servingly selective exegesis can say otherwise. God calls every Christian to support and receive the ministry of the Word, certainly, but does that look the same for every Christian, or even for every local church?

In words that echo Pastor Tim’s advice, but toward a broader and more inclusive purpose, Paul urges in Romans 12:3–8:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

As DeYoung and Gilbert would expect, many of God’s gifts to the church have to do specifically with our verbal witness (e.g., prophecy, teaching, and exhortation). But many of God’s gifts in, to, and through the church have a far different primary function. The gifts of service, contribution, leadership, and mercy clearly serve the church’s embodied witness.¹⁸ And quite appropriately, Paul tells each variously gifted member of the church “not to think of himself more highly than he ought.” Paul recognized that discovering and faithfully performing your own gifted emphasis in the work of the church can tempt you into believing that other Christians with different gifted emphases have failed to do what they should be doing, or worse, have less importance than you do for and in the church.

Perhaps unwittingly, but no less effectively, DeYoung and Gilbert’s unbalanced emphasis diminishes the importance and impoverishes the dignity of those Christians in the church who concern themselves primarily with diaconal works as God-gifted callings. Conversely, their exclusive emphasis on the direct verbal ministry of the Word has the tendency to puff up preachers, making them think their work exclusively constitutes the mission—and therefore the work—of the church.

Re-Romanizing the Church’s Work and Mission

One can find a close historical analog to DeYoung and Gilbert’s exclusive emphasis on the ministry of the Word, and by logical extension, the ministers of the Word, in the Roman Catholic hierocracy that prevailed until the Reformers called the church to biblically rebalance her understanding of her mission and works. As R. W. Henderson explains:

One point for which the sixteenth century Protestant reformers criticized the medieval church most severely had nothing to do with formal theology or doctrine. Instead it had to do with the failure of the ecclesiastical institution to function in a manner which would minister to the real needs of men and society rather than to the well-being of institutions and their attendants.¹⁹

To combat this insular and self-indulgent clerical elitism, Luther taught that all Christian vocations share in dignity and missional service under the biblical umbrella of “the priesthood of all believers.” Connected to this, Luther expanded the at the time primarily clerical understanding of “calling” to include all believers in their earthly tasks, not just institutional churchmen in their “heavenly” ones. According to Robert Kolb,

Luther transformed the use of the word “calling” or “vocation” by assigning it to all Christians. Believers recognize that God has placed them in the structures of human life created by God and has called them to the tasks of caring for other creatures, human and otherwise, as agents of God’s providential presence and care. Luther called people in the exercise of their response-abilities “masks of God,” through whom God, for example, milks cows so that his human creatures may be nourished.²⁰

Note that this rebalancing needed to take place in spite of the Roman Catholic church’s famously unbiblical elevation of good works in her soteriology. Even when the church majority viewed good works as necessary for individual salvation, even then, good works had become all but lost in the mission and work of the church.

Recognizing this, Calvin became especially attentive, after his formative exile from Geneva in Bucer’s Strasbourg, to the positive delineation of the office of deacon. Curiously, Calvin’s first editions of the Institutes did not outline a positive formulation of the office or ministry of deacons,²¹ but instead focused on dismissing the useless Roman Catholic institution with: “Is there one word here of the true ministry of deacons?”²² By the end of his time in Geneva, however, he had provided quite a few words about the true ministry of deacons.

In the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, for instance, Calvin drew from Acts 6 and Romans 12 to profile two main diaconal works (with their attending sub-offices): distribution of alms (by procurators) and mercy ministry to the sick (by hospitallers).²³ Would either of these works or offices be included in DeYoung and Gilbert’s verbal vision of the church’s mission? Contrary to their presumed agreement with Reformed thought, with its proper emphasis on the Word of God as the guide of faith and life in the church, DeYoung and Gilbert have unwittingly re-Romanized the church’s work, limiting it far beyond Scriptural prescriptions.

The Dire Consequences of a Reductive Mission

DeYoung and Gilbert think we need another category for good works between “of utmost importance and of no importance.”²⁴ They do not think it necessary to consider good works a part of the mission of the church in order to preserve them as duties for the church’s members. I think this is historically naïve and biblically irresponsible. They must not realize that when the embodied and incarnational witness of the Gospel becomes decoupled from the mission of the church, this cannot help but marginalize and devalue in the church, and often exclude from the church, the people most eager to obey their God-given callings as representatives of the church in diaconal ministries. If some saints have been commissioned by the Holy Spirit to do diaconal works, which works have been officially confirmed both by normative apostolic example and explicit biblical prescription, then the church has been commissioned to do these works through those saints. For diaconally-gifted Christians, good works are of utmost importance to their particular callings. When the church excludes these works from her mission, in effect, she excludes these people from her mission. 

When preachers and teachers—who are responsible to encourage, equip, and collaborate with diaconal saints through the ministry of the Word—abuse or mishandle their ministry of the Word to rob diaconal works of all missional significance, these ministers set in motion a grave chain of consequences. First, a church without representative embodied witnesses becomes more and more insular, mono-topical, and pharisaical, now unable and later unwilling to make her disembodied truths relevant and effective in the world. Then, the continued exclusion of diaconal works, and those who lead in them, feeds a vicious cycle of narrowing clerical self-service which serves to further mute the church’s public witness on social, political, economic, and cultural evils. Those who could and should be addressing these concerns are not permitted to address them in the name of the church, so the ever-narrowing circle of church leaders—who rightly never saw these things as their job in the first place—start to develop any number of political, financial, and institutional rationales for silently maintaining the status quo.

When silence creates security for the privileged few ministers at the top, the forces of wickedness become all too eager to support this security if it will feed back into more silence. Suddenly, the church whose “spirituality” and “verbal witness” had once kept her from engaging in diaconal ministries, finds itself being supported and controlled by the kingdoms of this world she had once so delicately scorned to countenance. Slowly but surely, the entire composition of the ministry becomes thoroughly corrupt and mercenary, until the church’s few official representatives are hardly willing to speak any truth at all for fear of losing their privileged and moneyed positions of power and prestige. What began as a formal dismissal of embodied witness then finally becomes a formal dismissal of verbal witness as well. I think this explains what happened in the medieval church leading up to the dawn of the Reformation.

And what about the diaconal Christians and their ministry? How are they affected by the exclusive emphasis on verbal witness? Their formal exclusion from the church’s work doesn’t mean they will give up their God-given callings. At first, they start their own extra-ecclesiastical Christian organizations or do their work quietly by themselves. But in the absence of the church’s support and encouragement, and the crucial co-partnership of the verbal ministry of the Word to keep them on track, their good works become more and more beholden to those willing (or forced by the state) to support them. Divorced from the church, their works become thoroughly “secularized,” then thoroughly ineffective—if not thoroughly corrupted. When the church effectively abandons her diaconate, the state and the unbelieving world step in to fill the void—to the detriment of all those suffering and the shame of the church, her Gospel, her Christ, and her God. These are the natural and historical outcomes of DeYoung and Gilbert’s unbiblical emphasis, fully realized—a ministry of the Word with no salt and a secularized diaconate with no light.

Am I exaggerating? To cite an extreme example²⁵ that strikes a little closer to home: the Reformed antebellum church employed a rationale almost identical to DeYoung and Gilbert’s to excuse herself from publicly condemning and combating the patent and obvious evils of slavery in her day. In Joel McDurmon’s devastating book, The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, he describes how the unbalanced emphasis on the societally passive “spirituality of the church” explains

. . . the churches’ near-exclusive focus on missions which emphasized the need to save [slaves’] souls while neglecting virtually everything regarding their physical lives, including the oppressions they suffered while being beaten, raped, torn from families, maltreated, etc. The church could obviously condemn such acts in the abstract and as generalities, but rarely, if ever, disciplined members who committed them, and made no efforts to influence society or law against them until a few instances at the bitter end.²⁶

To illustrate this antebellum doctrine of the church, McDurmon quotes at length from pro-slavery Reformed theologian James Henley Thornwell, whose 1859 arguments against the church’s formal or direct involvement against slavery could logically (and easily) be drawn straight from What is the Mission of the Church?, though DeYoung and Gilbert would, I hope, shudder with me at his brazen disregard for human life and dignity:

. . . It is the great aim of the Church to deliver men from sin and death and hell. She has no mission to care for the things, and to become entangled with the kingdoms and the policy, of this world. . . . no man will say that Jesus Christ has given to His ministry a commission to attend to the colonization of races, or to the arrest of the slave-trade, or to the mere physical comforts of man. It is not the business of the Church to build asylums for the insane and the blind.²⁷

We all need to consider, with unflinching self-examination, whether a truncated view of our responsibility as the church—both institutional and organic—has not permitted and even exacerbated the social evils of our own time. Will future generations look back at us like we look back at Thornwell? Will they wonder why we did not work harder to exterminate abortion, racism, sex trafficking, or pornography from at least the church, if not the world? One day, we will stand before Jesus our Judge. Can we honestly say He will be pleased with us if we tell Him, “It was Your job to end hunger, homelessness, slavery, sickness, and poverty? We were preaching the disembodied Gospel and waiting for you to fix things Yourself. Wasn’t that our mission?” Our Lord may very well reply: “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

Conclusion

Though I believe the disembodied intellectualization of the Gospel to be a pervasive and terrible problem in the Reformed church, and I have addressed it as the grievance to my Mother and the dishonor to my Father that it is, I must say that I believe DeYoung and Gilbert wrote this book from a conviction that biblical preaching and the Word of God do not have the place in the contemporary church that they should. I agree, and I commend them for their commitment to this. But I want them to understand that their main thing isn’t necessarily the only thing. The solution to one reductively exclusive emphasis should not be another. The church, as one body, should recognize that the work of her hands and feet is the work of the body as much as the work of her mouth is. The mission of the church may be singular, but her works must be as manifold as her children.

Furthermore, DeYoung, Gilbert, and all those who agree with them may not need another book on the importance of the ministry of the Word. They might need to listen to a book—or better yet, a person—on the importance of mercy ministry and cultural engagement. Instead of separating themselves from other believers over a purported disagreement about the church’s mission statement, perhaps they should build some bridges instead. Then, they they can come beside their “kingdom-oriented” brothers and sisters and add good words to good deeds if words are indeed lacking.

But this much is true: If Jesus has commissioned and gifted some members of the church to accomplish diaconal works by the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father, these are also properly the work of the church body through those members. And, through these works, God is also accomplishing His mission in and through the church. The works of the church are inseparable from her members. When we discard or depreciate any works God has given the church to do, we begin to discard and depreciate the members responsible to do them. There is no reason, and in fact no real way, to disentangle words and deeds from the essential witness the church bears in and to the world. To discard one is always to cripple the other. When we insist that an exclusive emphasis on one artificially and unbiblically limited set of duties constitutes the whole duty for all the members of God’s universal church, we will only, as sage Pastor Tim explained, “wear them out or tear them up.”

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