TEXT: Genesis 1:28

Why Christian Community Development? Recently had an extended conversation with an executive of a major missions sending and enabling agency who seriously questioned the validity of socially focused ministry for church missions--and for years he had served in a position labeled as "Christian Social Ministries" with another organization! He kept wanting to say that there is no specific call to Christian social ministry in the gospels. The church was commissioned to evangelize and disciple, went his argument. I argued--successfully I believe--that the very thrust of the gospel was the proclamation that the Kingdom of God has come and is coming, and the church was commissioned, yes to evangelize and disciple, but also to establish the aroma, the fragrance, the essence of the Kingdom in the present world. Social transformation is a central thrust of the proclamation of the gospel for it calls for the reconciliation of the individual with God and one another, for the reconciliation of all of creation with God, and that means that among other things the gospel is a declaration that "justice has begun to roll down like water."

In seeking a text for our devotion this morning, I was drawn to an unlikely place to look for a mandate for Christian social ministry or community development. I owe a great deal of my thoughts this morning to a message that I have read by Dr. John Kinney, the Dean of the School of Theology at Virginia Union University in Richmond, VA.

The original command given to humans is to be fruitful and to cultivate the earth. Fruitfulness and cultivation are charges to be life-creating, life affirming, life-encouraging, and life-fostering agents.

The call to be fruitful is expanded through a call to stewardship and faithful care of each other and the earth. It goes beyond biology.

To be fruitful is more than bearing children. To be fruitful is to bring forth life our to emptiness. It is to bring life where the principles of death stake a claim, to give meaning and content a voice, hope to despair. To be fruitvul is to step iinto situations where the fullest possibility has not yet been realized or maximized and be an agent that precipitates the realization of the fullest possibilities resident in God's creation and in God's people.

To give life where death has staked a claim, that's what it means to be in the image of God.

The call to faithfulness and fruitful stewardship is violated when we abdicate responsibility and surrender our minds, ways, resources and selves to the dictates of the snake.

The ministry of Jesus was a prophetic social ministry because it is geared to the restoration of relationship.

To be social is a tendancy toward living together in communities, having to do with human beings living and acting together, having to do with promoting companionship, community, and communion.

Social ministry is helping and/or promoting the realization of authentic community and communion. It is the ministry of Christ and the church.

social is not descriptive of a particular form of the ministry. It is the designation of the fundamental character of ministry. All authentic ministry is social.

Moses at the burning bush. "What do you have in your hands?"
put your hand on your breast! There is another who will go with
you.

the lesson of being responsible to my brother.
You cannot talk about upward mobility when your brother or sister is falling deeper into the pit of hell.

Story from The Brothers Karamazov

We need each other. A relationship always is in the process of claiming the future. Social promise is forward looking, tomorrow reaching and future welcoming.
Illustrate with boiling cabbage illustration.