The Justice of Jesus (TAW062)

Episode 062 – The Justice of Jesus (With Joash P. Thomas)

Some Christians think Justice means that the guilty get their due. Other Christians think Justice is when everyone gets what they need. In a world that feels so unjust, why are we so divided on what Justice is? What would it mean for us to do justice Jesus’ way?

Show Notes

In this conversation, I get to chat with Joash Thomas about his new book, The Justice of Jesus: Reimagining Your Church’s Life Together To Pursue Liberation and Wholeness. When I saw that title, I knew I had to talk with him. We discuss the multifaceted nature of justice, particularly from the perspective of the Global South. Joash contrasts this with Western interpretations of justice, emphasizing the importance of understanding historical contexts, such as colonization, and the implications of privilege. We talk about the role of the church in advocating for justice, the need for community engagement, and the cost associated with pursuing true justice.

Takeaways

• Justice is defined by the good news it brings to the poor.
• The Global South offers a different perspective on justice than the West.
• Christian justice involves restoration and accountability for all.
• Colonization has deeply affected the understanding of justice in the church.
• Privilege must be acknowledged in discussions of justice.
• The church has a responsibility to engage with marginalized communities.
• Justice should not be a cheap pursuit; it requires sacrifice.
• The church’s budget should reflect a commitment to justice.
• We must recognize our interconnectedness in systems of oppression.
• The gospel message includes both spiritual and physical liberation.

Recommended Resources

• The Justice of Jesus: Reimagining Your Church’s Life Together to Pursue Liberation and Wholeness

• Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.
• You can also watch and share the video version on YouTube.

More about My Conversation Partner

Fr. Joash P. Thomas

Joash Thomas was born and raised in India and has served as a U.S. political consultant and lobbyist before moving into global human rights advocacy. He holds multiple degrees and serves in local church ministry as an ordained Priest (a new development since the recording of this podcast) in the Diocese of St. Anthony in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from his St. Thomas Christian roots and a decolonized, justice-centered understanding of Scripture, he works to help Christian folks imagine a faith that unites rather than divides— and that stands firmly with neighbors on the margins.

Find Joash Here

• Website: https://www.joashpthomas.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joash.thomas
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@joashpthomas

Today’s Sponsor

• The Apprenticeship Lap Patronship – Support Marc’s work! www.MarcOptIn.com

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Transcription

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey, friends. I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 62. “The Justice of Jesus.”

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INTRODUCING THE CONVERSATION

Not too long ago, the President of the United States declared Portland, my home city, “war ravaged.” Not long after that, in October, there was a massive protest march through downtown called the No Kings Rally. It was actually the second one in the city, massive, maybe 50 or 60,000 people. There have been ongoing protests in downtown across from the main ice facility for months now. There are signs all over the city protesting ICE’s presence. Churches have started joining with community organizations to host immigrant rights training events. The President was wrong to say that Portland is “war ravaged,” but it definitely is in a heightened state, and people are not happy on all sides.

In personal conversations and social media interactions that I’ve had, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting against these circumstances. I have heard people frustrated with how protests are slowing down traffic and impeding business. I’ve heard folks talk about how all of this behavior is disorderly, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. I even heard one person threaten violence against demonstrators, like, I saw this happen in real life. When the first No Kings March was scheduled, an influential politician called it the I hate America March, which, frankly, couldn’t be more wrong.

I know it’s wrong because I participated in both No Kings Marches, the one last June and then the one last October. At those events, I talked with people all day long, probably 100 or more each time. I read countless signs. What I learned was that every person there was concerned in one way or another with justice. For some, the injustice that they were protesting had to do with health care access. For others, for many, the injustice was the way that brown-skinned immigrants are being treated. For other people, it’s a matter of how the courts seem to only favor the rich and powerful. And there were certainly some who were there feeling that the issue was how our current political regime seems to just disregard any law it doesn’t like now. Some of the protesters at these marches had perspectives I disagree with. Some of them I thought were extreme. There was a lot of anger, but universally, everyone I talked to was concerned with justice, or at least how they envisioned a just society.

I’ve also been watching and listening to folks in my extended Christian community, both in person and online, respond to all of this. Increasingly, I see two diverging groups. Some Christians, quoting the apostle Paul, say that it is the right thing for the church to obey the government, that God is a God of order, and that law enforcement officers and immigration officers are just doing their jobs. It would be anti-Christian to get in the way. And those people, they think they’re on the side of justice.

Then there are other Christians quoting the Hebrew prophets about welcoming and caring for the foreigner and the immigrant, who see that law and order position as deeply unjust. They quote scriptures about immoral kings who exploit the poor. They want to see health care and mental health care access for everyone. They want the US government to stop funding violence worldwide. And those people think they’re on the side of justice. So how is it that in a time that feels so unjust, we are so conflicted when it comes to justice.

Several years ago, I ran into Joash P. Thomas online. Back then, he was talking about the ways the church was asking him to surrender his heritage, expecting him to prioritize white European theologians in his study. He’s Canadian, but he was born and raised in India. He talked about how he experienced church people reacting negatively to him when he was a guest speaker and wore non-Western clothes to preach. I was intrigued by this guy, and so I followed him. And over the years, I’ve learned a lot from his social media posts. And so my ears perked up when I heard him talking about his new book. The book is called The Justice of Jesus: Reimagining Your Church’s Life Together to Pursue Liberation and Wholeness. When I read it, right off the bat, Joash said this, “Justice is not the natural disposition of the contemporary western church.”

Wait, what? How can that be? I grew up in middle America in a conservative Christian community. My dad was a pastor. I went to church school. I could not imagine a group that talked more about how God is just and how we need to support the government’s role in maintaining justice. But then I read these words. “Instead of being shaped by the liberating Spirit of God that anointed Jesus to bring good news to the people in poverty and oppression (Luke 4:18) much of the Western Church was shaped by a theology that prioritizes the salvation of souls at the cost of the dignity and liberation of human bodies.” I had to admit, that was a summary of my church experience growing up, a concise explanation of the gospel I was taught, and as a young pastor, that I was taught to preach. My heart agreed with him, so I asked Joash to come talk about a broader vision of justice.

Joash P Thomas was born and raised in India, has served as a US political consultant and a lobbyist, before moving into global human rights advocacy. He holds multiple degrees and serves in local church ministry as a deacon in the Diocese of st Anthony in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from his St Thomas Christian roots and a decolonized justice-centered understanding of Scripture, he works to help Christian folk imagine a faith that unites rather than divides, and that stands firmly with neighbors on the margins.

So I started our conversation by asking Joash to take us right to the heart of the matter. What is wrong with our definitions of justice?

THE CONVERSATION

Joash Thomas 10:53
So the definition of justice that I was taught comes from the Global South Church, and the definition for justice there was really centered on Jesus’s definition of the gospel that we see in Luke chapter four, verse 18, where Jesus says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, to set the captive free, to set the oppressed free.” From a very young age in the global south Evangelical Church, the Indian evangelical church, I was taught that if it’s not good news to our poor and oppressed neighbors, then it’s not the good news of Jesus Christ.

It was interesting for me then to come to the Western church and hear almost a different gospel being presented, a gospel that was more spiritual in nature. I’d seen this in the global south as well, but it was a bit more overt in the US church, specifically, where any Christian activity prioritizing justice was seen as in danger of being Marxist and not actually being historically Christian, the way it is.

We find this in studying church history. So, I think the definition of justice that I use throughout the book is an ancient Christian definition of justice. It’s Augustine’s definition of justice, which is that justice is giving to each person their due, where justice is giving to each person the good things that God intended for them. And so for someone who has survived violence, that’s healing and restoration. For someone who has perpetrated violence, that is accountability with the ultimate goal of restoration. So justice is for everyone who’s made in the image of God.

Marc Schelske 12:45
There are a couple of things that I’d like to have you define, and then this quote from Augustine feels like a really important mirror. The folks that I grew up around would hear you say Justice is giving to each person their due. They would nod their head and say, absolutely right. But the mental picture that goes along with that absolutely is a courtroom. A criminal has been brought–that’s a phrase we use–they’ve been brought to justice, and that’s what that means. When you talked about this ancient definition of justice, you’re not talking specifically about that. When folks react against the idea that the church would be involved in justice, and they say, “oh, that’s Marxist,” they’re not saying the judicial system is Marxist, right? They’re saying something else is.

So push further into that, and as you do, you used a phrase at the beginning that you learned about justice from the church in the Global South. I don’t know that everybody is going to understand immediately what you mean by the Global South and why that identification is important. So, can you talk about that just briefly for context, and then help us understand how this statement from Augustine is broader than “Law and Order justice”?

Joash Thomas 14:06
Yeah. So let me start by defining what I mean by the Global South. So the Global South is basically a part of the world where a majority of the world’s population lives. So typically, the world is split into two hemispheres, right? The northern and southern hemispheres. And if you look at wealth and equality across the world, you’ll see a large concentration of wealth in the Global North. That’s basically North America, the US, Canada, and the European countries. And you see a lot of wealth that has historically been extracted from the world South places like the country I grew up in, India, and also Latin America, Asia, and Africa. There are some exceptions, obviously, to that, like Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. But largely speaking, the church in the Global South is one that has existed in many parts of the world for longer than it has existed in the Global North.

So, for example, my family has been worshiping Jesus for 2000 years. It was the Apostle Thomas who brought the Gospel to my ancestors. Jesus, who was also in the Global South, by the way… Christianity came from the Global South to the Global North. And unfortunately, because of the way history then played out with the empires and the history of colonization, we have a church in the Global South that looks very different from a church in the Global North. So, for example, I am a part of global evangelical forums like Lausanne, which is a collection of churches from all over the world who identify as evangelicals, and I am very involved in their justice and freedom network. And there’s this tension that you can feel between churches in the Global South who are evangelical and churches in the US right now who have very different definitions of justice, like the one you pointed out. A big part of my ministry and book is trying to highlight why those differences exist.

To jump into a little bit of those different understandings of justice that have been shaped by history. You know, I would say to people who think of justice as only courtroom justice, that that is absolutely a valid form of justice. In fact, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career working in the international human rights space, where I’ve worked with lawyers all over the world who have helped arrest people who have trafficked people, or participated in intimate partner violence or violence against women and children, or police who have abused their power and authority and who have brought these criminals to justice in a courtroom setting. But what I have also learned in doing that work is that that is just one part of justice. Justice is delivered then to the survivor of violence, and it’s delivered to the perpetrator in the form of accountability. But really, Christian justice is so much more than that.

Christian justice is the ultimate restoration and shalom of all things. An idea of Christian justice that’s shaped by the global church would say that that isn’t the end of the story, then for the perpetrator too. Now, of course, you prioritize the oppressed, because God stands with people who are poor and oppressed, so we stand with them as the church. You prioritize them and their well-being and safety, which is why you want to make sure that there’s perpetrator accountability. But we, at the same time, don’t want to discount the image of God and the perpetrator, too. We don’t want to seek to end their lives. We don’t want to take the chance away from them for their restoration, because, okay, right? The bad things that they’re doing, the trafficking that they’re doing, is not good for them either, and that’s not the life that God intended for them to live either. So the church has a role in standing in the gap between people who are oppressed and people who oppress them, and to take the side of the oppressed and, at the same time, work toward the restoration of all things.

Marc Schelske 18:34
All right, so when you say that ultimately, what’s just is working toward the restoration of all things, that feels exciting and easy to get on board with, but feels like there’s a little bit of a poison pill for some of us. Early in the book you wrote, “The work of decolonization will always be a threat to the beneficiaries of colonization, especially those who have not wrestled much with how they’ve benefited from colonization.” So this, to me, connects with what you just said, because if justice means not just maintaining law and order, if justice means accountability for perpetrators, then part of that accountability is thinking about historical violence and how historical violence has shaped the world today.

That’s where we get to this word that many people don’t understand or are uncomfortable with, decolonization. When you describe the Global South, one of the ways that you identified it was that many of these countries are countries that served as resource extraction points for various empires historically, and so some of the struggles that they face today, they face because they don’t have resources that they would naturally have, had they not been exploited through colonization.

So, the poison pill: I’m a nice Christian guy who lives in middle America. I’m white, I’m middle class. I got to go to a private school growing up. It’s easy for me to look at my life through this lens that I’ve worked hard and I’ve been a good guy who’s observed the law. What I have is probably the result of my hard work — You know, my merit. I have benefited from this stuff, right? What I’m hearing you say is I can’t really get on board with the broader vision of justice if I’m not willing to think about stuff like that. Does that feel true?

Joash Thomas 20:47
Yeah, yeah, I would say, as Christians, we’re called to wrestle with the uncomfortable so that we can create great beauty from it. This is what Jesus does for us. He stepped into our messy world. This is the Gospel story, right? He steps into our messy world, becomes incarnational, becomes one of us, takes on marginalized human flesh. Not just human flesh, but a poor, Middle Eastern, colonized, occupied, homeless teacher. He’s ultimately crucified because he was a threat to the Roman Empire, right? And so he was crucified by them, but was victorious against them, right? This is the gospel message: there’s beauty that comes from drawing closer to the discomfort and the mess that’s in the world. This is why, as a people of truth, I think it’s important for us to wrestle with history, both the good and the bad, but especially the bad.

One of the unfortunate things that is in the history of the Western Church is this thing called colonization. That is a historical event. Now I say throughout the book, and even in conversations like this, that colonization, for me, isn’t a political buzzword; it isn’t an academic theory only. It’s actually a lived experience for my family. My family comes from India, a country that was once 20% of the world’s GDP. After the Brits left in 1947, it was 1% of the world’s GDP. So clearly, something happened when colonial powers from the West came, supported by the Western Church. And it wasn’t just the Catholic Church supporting the Portuguese colonial powers. It was also the Church of England, the Anglicans. It was the Dutch Reformed Church, the Southern Baptist Church, and the Southern Presbyterian Church that supported the transatlantic slave trade. Colonization wasn’t just an extraction of material wealth and resources from the Global South; it was also an extraction of human resources. This is why we have the transatlantic slave trade, right?

It’s all kind of connected. What I say throughout my book, The Justice of Jesus, is that colonization wasn’t just bad for the Global South; it was also bad for the Western Church because we participated in this. I give examples of that throughout the book. Because of our participation in it, it shaped us to resist justice for all our marginalized neighbors, for all our neighbors in need of it. It narrowed our understanding of the gospel to take away the physical good news and just keep, in its place, a spiritual good news. This whole idea that Jesus cares more about the salvation of my soul than the freedom of my human body actually comes from colonization, because Christians who participated in it, Christians who participated in slavery, found it beneficial to tell people they enslaved and oppressed and colonized, “Hey, don’t worry about your physical suffering right now. Jesus cares more about the salvation of your soul than the freedom and well being of your human body. So just put your faith in Jesus. It’ll all be okay in the afterlife.” And many did, because there was still some semblance of good news in that, but it wasn’t proclaimed faithfully in the fullness of the good news of Jesus.

Marc Schelske 24:21
It does seem odd, right? If I’m a follower of Jesus, and I say to another person that is in that same social location that I am, “Don’t worry. This is terrible, but we can trust God’s faithfulness,” that has a different tone than a slave owner saying to an enslaved person, “Don’t worry about the way I’m oppressing your body. God will be faithful and reward you in eternity.” The message may be the same thing, but the social location changes what it means. It makes me think immediately of the Slave Bible. You know? “We’re going to do this really wonderful thing of printing and providing Bibles to our enslaved people, but we’re just going to excise the Exodus story so that they don’t have a vision that God wants their liberation, that at some point in history, God led enslaved people to freedom.” We don’t want them to have that part of Scripture. It feels so incredibly, obviously, self-contradictory. How could the Christian person providing those Bibles think, “I’m doing the Lord’s work?” They’re so blinded by their investment in the structure, the hierarchical structure that is benefiting them, that it justifies them to do what is a horrible thing!

Joash Thomas 25:47
Yeah. No doubt. And in many ways, we’re encouraged by the empires of this earth to distract ourselves with a spiritual version of the gospel that does not have any good news for people in poverty and oppression, because it benefits these powers and authorities to stay in place. But as Christians, we’re also told that the gospel can be bad news to powers and systems that oppress our neighbors. This is why you see Jesus engaging with rich people in his context, people with wealth, privilege, status in the Roman Empire. And what does he do? He loves them. He meets them where he is, but he invites them then to sell everything they have and to follow Him and to give to the poor, right? We don’t want to teach much about that. In the Western Church, we find all the ways to discount that.

But, the reality is that the invitation for people with wealth and power and privilege from Jesus is to reckon with what we have and draw connections: “Oh, my goodness, I’ve ripped others off (or someone else ripped someone else off and gave it to me, and this is what I’ve inherited), and now what am I going to do with it, now that my life has been transformed by this encounter with Jesus?

This is true for me too. I come from privilege myself. When I’m speaking at a church, sometimes I have people raise their hands just to show how privileged I am myself. So I tell people, “Hey, if you grew up with a maid, raise your hand. If you grew up with a cook, raise your hand. If you grew up with a driver, raise your hand. At the end. I say, “If you grew up with a maid, cook, and driver, altogether, raise your hand.” Very few people do actually. And I say, “Well, that was me. I grew up with a maid, cook, and driver in India.” I know what it’s like to have privilege status in the Empire, and at the same time, I also have this history in my family of being shaped by colonization. I say that I am both a survivor of colonization and a beneficiary of colonization.

At the same time, these things aren’t neat categories. I became a beneficiary of colonization the day I moved to America, and then to Canada after that, and I started living on stolen land with stolen wealth and stolen resources. You just read my bio at the top of the episode, and sure, I have three master’s degrees. I’ve had a very successful career in international human rights, working in leadership, and of course, I’m very hardworking. But I also have to recognize how my humanity and my privilege and resources are connected with the world around me, because we don’t exist in a vacuum. We need each other. We live in this ecosystem.

So when I see an unhoused person today as I leave church, the thought that comes into my mind now compared to before, which was different, the thought that comes into my mind now is that this person’s poverty is an indictment on my privilege. My savings account, in some ways, is an indictment of the circumstances that cause this person’s poverty, because they’re interconnected. I have resources that this person should also have, but they don’t, because of unjust systems in place. And of course, personal sin can come in too, but we see the personal sin without the context of the systemic and societal injustices and sin.

Marc Schelske 29:30
I think that’s a really interesting point. A lot of folks who maybe are new to this conversation would hear you say that you see that homeless person’s lack in some way as an indictment on you and the resources you have, and would react to that. right? Like, “I’m a good person, I’m a nice person, I tithe, I give to nonprofit organizations. That person’s homelessness has nothing to do with me.” But I think what you’re pointing out is the way that that indictment happens is because when you identify yourself as having some level of privilege, that is speaking to a hierarchy that exists. You used the language of “system,” and that can be hard language for people, because it seems abstract, but really, “the system” is that there is a hierarchy. Objectively, it’s probably not Joash’s bank account that’s causing that guy to be homeless, but Joash is at a certain place on that pyramid. And up the pyramid from Joash, there is a developer who owns 40% of all of the low-income properties in that town. And up the ladder from him are tech billionaires who are extracting value from the personal health data of entire groups of people. We don’t immediately look at those people at the top of the pyramid and think, “Oh my God, what a mental illness to hoard wealth like that!” We don’t think that, and the reason we don’t is that the pyramid itself provides the justification, and I’m on it somewhere.

Joash Thomas 31:10
Yeah.

Marc Schelske 31:11
So, if I begin to say that the guy who owns all of the low income properties, he’s the he’s the reason that there’s homeless people. Well, I’m a few notches down the ladder, and I also own one rental property. So, I’m part of the ladder. I’m part of the pyramid. If I look up the pyramid and say, “It’s all those people’s fault,” then I can disown any kind of responsibility that might fall to me, right? There is a system in place that invites people to climb a ladder where we give value to people who are higher up the ladder. The inverse of that is also true. People who are lower down the ladder are seen as less worthy. This is just in the air. It’s the way that we think. So, talk a little bit about how hierarchy fits into this whole discussion of justice and injustice and the church’s role.

Joash Thomas 32:18
To build on what you just said, “I am my brother’s keeper,” right? This is the opposite of what Cain tells God after murdering Abel. He says, “I’m not My Brother’s Keeper. I don’t know where he is.” I’m just trying to live my life here and all that. But the reality is, we are our brother’s keepers. We are our sisters and siblings’ keepers. Our humanity is interconnected with theirs, whether we realize it or not. If someone else is at the bottom of the hierarchy here, I am complicit by just participating in a structure that oppresses and marginalizes them. We need to recognize that we, ultimately, as human beings, even unknowingly, participate in systems and structures that oppress our marginalized neighbors.

One example of this right now is our taxpayer dollars. I live in Canada, but I’m a US citizen, so I pay taxes in two countries. My tax dollars, both in the US and Canada right now, actively go towards funding children being bombed and starved to death in Gaza. I am complicit in that system. Now I don’t agree with it, but what else am I going to do? I have to pay my taxes. I have to give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s.

In my book, The Justice of Jesus, I walk us through a few tenets of the colonizer’s gospel, one of those tenets–and this is literally what colonizers told their enslaved and colonized people–is that social hierarchies are good and that they’re ordained by God. Many of us in the church have probably heard this with the verse that’s often used to subjugate women in Ephesians. It’s twisted completely out of context, but essentially from that passage, you derive a picture: “It’s man at the top, then women, then children, and slaves.” That’s what the verses say, “Slaves obey your masters.” This is what the colonizers took and exported around the world. So, it was white men at the top, white women, children, then slaves. This is what we saw in the antebellum South in the US.

And we get all kinds of weird, heretical theology from this, too, like the eternal subordination of the Son. Historically, the churches believe that Jesus is coequal and coeternal with the Father. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit all live in triune community as equals with each other. But within evangelicalism, to defend these social hierarchies, we’ve also changed the order of the Trinity now to say that the Son is subordinate to the Father, and this is heresy. There’s a deep connection between how we understand God and how we understand neighbor. And if we want to understand neighbors in these dualistic ways of hierarchy and society, then we’re also going to project the same onto our understanding of God.

Sometimes I tell people who are so frustrated with conversations they’re having with family members right now who don’t seem to care about justice for our marginalized neighbors, I tell them that we just need to recognize that we’re worshiping two different Jesuses at the end of the day. We’re worshiping a Jesus who’s coequal and coeternal with the Father, who came to set us free from our sin, physically and spiritually. They’re worshiping a version of Jesus that they were taught by people who enslaved and colonized people, and that version of Jesus doesn’t care about our physical suffering in the world. That version of Jesus isn’t coequal to the Father at the creation of the world. That version of Jesus just came to get us a get-out-of-hell-free card. That’s the reality. We worship two different Jesuses in America right now.

Marc Schelske 36:27
Right. If that image of God — where what God is most concerned about is the soul — is accurate, then I am licensed to not care about anything in your life that’s not your soul. And if God is just (in not caring about anything but your soul), then it must be just for me to do that. That must be what justice is. You started talking about Jesus’ mission statement in Luke four. It seems like we either as a church have to say that is also our calling, or we have to say in some way that was uniquely Jesus work and not ours.

Joash Thomas 37:13
That is what a lot of Christians say. But that is not what the majority of Christians have said throughout church history around the world, even if that is what a lot of Christians in the West today say, but it’s such a disembodied theology. If we’re the body of Christ on earth, which we say we are, if we’re the hands and feet of Christ, then shouldn’t we also have the mind of Christ, as Paul reminds us in Colossians? Shouldn’t we also do what Jesus did on Earth himself, until his physical body returns? But we have a very disembodied theology, where we think Jesus is gone, and we only care about the spiritual. So we look past the physical bodies, the physical suffering bodies of our neighbors, to get to their souls. In doing so, we actually do more harm than good without acknowledging the physical suffering of their bodies.

Marc Schelske 38:11
Right! That leads us to things like the soup kitchen, where you get served soup after you sit through a 45-minute sermon. Or, when I was a youth pastor, 20 years ago, everybody wanted their churches to have youth mission trips. This was us taking a bunch of our kids, raising a bunch of our money to fly our kids somewhere to do a bad job building a cinderblock building, and do gospel puppet shows. Why did we celebrate that? Well, because our kids are learning to preach the gospel. They’re learning to tell the story, which is the story of souls getting saved.

Joash Thomas 38:48
100%. Instead of taking the posture of engaging with leaders in these communities, the church that’s already present there, being faithful, instead of asking them, “Hey, what do you really need?” We assume, of course, they want the salvation of souls, and of course, they need us, right? And so we then do all sorts of weird things, but there’s a better way, and this is what I call us to throughout the book.

We don’t have to settle for the world that is right now, because the spirit is always doing something new, if we can keep up with the Spirit, right? Times like this in history are challenging, for sure, but there are also opportunities for us to learn and grow and do better than what was handed to us, and bring healing, hope, and liberation in this world, something that the world so desperately needs. But we can’t bring that good news, that hope, and that healing to this world if we look past the physical suffering of the human bodies of our neighbors and creation.

Marc Schelske 39:58
I think that’s true. So, the subtitle of your book is “Reimagining your church’s life together to pursue liberation and wholeness.” That is a little bit pointed, because you’re not saying in the abstract that the capital C church should be different (which I think you believe), but your subtitle is essentially, “You think differently about your local congregation) So, let’s talk about that. I’m a pastor of a very small church here in Portland. So, let’s say everybody’s like, “Yes, Marc, this makes sense. We want to reimagine our community in alignment with this.” So what does that look like? Apart from learning a new mindset, which is so essential, what are the ways that we participate in this?

Joash Thomas 40:46
So I’ve got a chapter on prayer where I give tangible, specific recommendations to spark the imagination. There’s a chapter on advocacy and one on partnerships. I also draw us in a bit closer to three particular aspects of how we do local church, which are our budget, our pulpits, and our posture as a community–our theology. I talk a lot about church budgets–individual budgets, too, for sure–but church budgets as well. How are we spending our money? Of course, this is for every church to discern for its own context, but I want us not to neglect the physical suffering and oppression of our neighbors around us as we plan our church budgets. I don’t want our church budgets to be overly spiritual and look past the suffering of the human bodies of people in our neighborhoods and our communities.

One of the things that I mentioned in this book is that I did a survey of evangelical churches across Canada and saw that most Canadian evangelical churches spent the vast majority of their budget on themselves. Every church community has its needs. You have your operational needs. I also say don’t underpay your staff. That’s the form of modern slavery. It’s important for us to honor our staff and our volunteers and take care of that. But then, in addition to that, there’s about 10% margin that churches sometimes have for missions budget or whatnot, and most of that is actually spent towards spiritual ministry, and not any forms of physical ministry.

I had this conversation with a friend at one of Canada’s largest churches, who is a missions pastor. I leave the bad examples anonymous. I mentioned the good examples by name in the book. But, this friend of mine just got coffee with me, and he said,, “It blows my mind, because my lead pastor will tell you that justice is a big part of the gospel, and that the gospel is both physical and spiritual good news,” but then he told me about the situation twhere they had a surplus in their budget of about $30,000. That would be quite nice for you as a local church pastor, I’d imagine! Here’s a large church having a $30,000 surplus in its budget, and it had two options presented before it. We can either support our local and global anti-human trafficking partners, or we can support this one long-time missionary partner that air drops Christian radios into parts of Europe by parachuting those radios in. Lo and behold, they go with the latter, because if there’s a chance that we can even save some souls, we will take that over caring for the physical needs of children being trafficked.

That says a lot, because Jesus said, where your money is, there your heart will also be. I hold a mirror up, and I say, “Hey, don’t assume your church would make a different decision here.” We need to examine our postures, our theologies, and our budgets. The hope behind this book is to get us to reflect more, wrestle more, and discern with the Spirit in our context. It’ll look different for every local church, but I hope it presents enough ideas to at least spark the imagination on prayer, giving, and advocacy.

Marc Schelske 44:18
You said in the book that we should expect — No, that’s my word. You didn’t say that — you said, “The justice of Jesus is expensive.” What did you mean when you said that?

Joash Thomas 44:30
So, I ground that in the parable of the Good Samaritan. We see the Good Samaritan do something that cost him. It cost him two days’ wages. This is something that Christians, both in the conservative and the progressive, exvangelical side, are guilty of. We prefer what I call cheap justice. We prefer the kind of pursuit of justice that has no cost to us or very little cost to us. When, in reality, the justice of Jesus should cost us something, and it might even cost us everything. And this is why I think it’s helpful to have the examples of the saints in the church or the prophets, people who stood up for justice. People like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was literally killed for standing up for justice. People like Bishop Oscar Romero who, in El Salvador, stood up to the American empire and was killed by the local military of his government for standing up for justice. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed by the Nazi Empire for standing up for justice. You see Christians throughout history, leaders in the church even, stand up for justice and pay the cost for it. You see the Old Testament prophets do that. You see John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, do that.

So why do we think, in the West, that Justice won’t have a cost to us? Are we ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of our marginalized neighbors, to give up our lives the way Jesus did for us, if called upon and if needed? I don’t think we think of justice in those ways, generally speaking. And I want to invite us to a posture where we hold everything loosely and we recognize that if we really believe that the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it belongs to the Lord, and everything I have is also the Lord’s, and if there are people around me in need of me, standing in the gap, throwing my body in between them and their oppressors, if needed, I will do that, because that is what the justice of Jesus looks like in an unjust, cruel world today,

MARC’S REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 45:15
Christians are fond of saying, “Our God is a God of order,” but what kind of order do you mean? If you think that order is limited to decorum, to church services being well-planned, or to folks obeying the law, then you are missing something crucial about the way of Jesus. God is a God who orders the world and who is inviting us to participate in a righteous and just ordering of the world. God’s order is liberative. It is gracious. It is not an order that privileges the elite or the powerful or the wealthy. It is an order where the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. So yeah, God is a God of order. But is God’s order an order you want to be part of?

Joash’s vision of justice is another way to talk about God’s order. The Hebrew prophets called this order Shalom. That means peace, but not the kind of peace that is just no disruption, no war. Shalom means peace in the sense that everyone gets what they need, which was exactly St. Augustine’s definition of justice. This conversation with Joash has given me a lot to think about. I hope you will too pick up his book, The Justice of Jesus: Reimagining Your Church’s Life Together to Pursue Liberation and Wholeness, and start thinking about how you and your church could be more part of God’s order in this way.

I’ll end with Joash’s words. “Times like this in history are challenging, for sure, but there are also opportunities for us to learn and grow and do better than what was handed to us and bring healing, hope and liberation in this world, something the world so desperately needs, but we can’t bring that good news and the hope and healing that goes with it if we look past the physical suffering of our neighbors.”

May you have the courage to make the shift from a faith that is only about spiritual salvation to one that includes physical liberation. And may the Spirit inspire you to see how you can be part of God’s righteous and just ordering of the world.

Thanks for listening. Notes for today’s episode can be found at MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW062. Did you like this? Well, there’s more. I gave you my whole pitch to subscribe at the beginning of the podcast today. So no need to say anything here. You can opt in at www.MarcOptIn.com, and if you want to choose one of those tiers to support, that’s where you’ll do it.

Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.