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Because social justice is now "cool" in churches, pastors are jumping in and starting new programs.  That is great and I don’t want to squelch that for an instant.  But I do think we should use the resources of the people in our congregation and run these programs with more wisdom.  Principal among our gifted congregation members are social workers.  I love social workers.  My dad had his Masters in Social Work and worked for the state of Illinois – Department of Children and Family Services – where he worked with cases of abuse and neglect of children.  In Vancouver, British Columbia, we had some outstanding social workers in our congregation who worked for the province, the Salvation Army, and did other social work consulting.  They were of enormous help to me as a pastor in an urban environment.   

I recently talked with a group of Taylor University social work majors in a class taught my friend Rukshan Fernando.  I gave them these final challenges. 

A pastor’s advice for people with passion and expertise in social work

1. Use your expertise to help us serve people.  Because we are new at this, we are trying to reinvent the wheel.  Help us put systems in place that treat people with dignity.  Help us tear down systems that dehumanize people.  Let us disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. 
2. Learn to think theologically.  Ask questions of your Bible in community.  Learn what these terms mean: Church, Missional, Community, Incarnation, Kingdom.
3. Do not get caught with a cause.  Did Jesus just heal people?  Did he just do compassion?  No, he also taught and trained. 
4. Be a prophet.  Forth-tell the truth about how people are getting hurt.  You see it.  Say it.  Admit that emperor has no clothes.   
5. Begin to think of your social work as evangelism.  Evangelism usually means manipulation.  Shouldn’t it mean that the good news is  “is good for everyone” (John Ortberg)? 
6. Don’t get caught without Jesus.  Traditional liberal social gospel has often dismissed the Bible and God’s active presence in the world.
7. Study hard.  If you know something about caring for alcoholics, God will use you as a wise advisor.  You will help the church care for alcoholics more compassionately and effectively.   
8. Learn to tell stories.  Describe the situation, retell the dialogue, and give a reason for the hope that you have. 
9. Bring people with you as you serve.  Show us the dark alleys.  Help us to talk with the poor, the sick and the foreigner. 
10. Continue to be renewed spiritually.  Learn what Sabbath is.  Sabbath is about not being in slavery anymore.   
11. Understand the beauty of art.  Please don’t pinch pennies on beauty.  We need color.
12. Do not demonize business people.
13. Learn to eat with people.   

AIDS, as the premier example of the havoc wrought by income disparities, and pornography, taking a toll on the souls of church leaders, are the two new most difficult challenges faced by the next generation of pastors. 

At Skye Jethani’s post "AIDS Activism Makes Strange Bedfellow" at Out of Ur, he gives a nice little report on AIDS day.  See my previous posts on AIDS with a link to the free online PBS Frontine video here and my post on pornography here.      

One additional comment.  I have been thinking recently about how social justice is cool (Rick Warren, Emerging Churches, etc.)  Because it is a "trend" (sad, huh?), pastors need to be careful to not think they invented the concept!  We need to continue to access the resources of wise Christian social workers, missionaries, economists, etc. rather than reinventing the wheel. 

Social workers, stand up and help us pastors!  We know now that we need to be facilitating and encouraging this justice work but it would be great if you would help us do it! 

(See my next post about the advice I gave some Christian social workers in a lecture recently). 

Tony Jones makes this comment about one of the ETS papers this year:

(Frankly, I’m a bit shocked that "scholarship" like this is allowed in an academic guild like ETS.)

Tony shouldn’t be shocked.  There is no quality assurance whatsoever at ETS.  I should know because I presented this year at the Evangelical Theological Society and my paper was not that good!  It is my impression that ETS accepts papers from anyone who proposes them.  The person simply needs to have a Th.M or Ph.D. or is working on it.  They also need to sign the inerrancy clause and thus be a member. 

No one looks at your paper before you deliver it.  No one looks at it after you deliver it.  You simply deliver your paper for 20 minutes and then take 10 minutes of questions.  If you are a no name, you may have 0-20 people.  If you are a big name, you may have 150.

Thus, there is zero structure that would ensure the papers have any certain quality.

Because I knew what the setting would be like, I viewed my paper as a kind of learning experience working paper draft that I was looking for feedback on . . . Since then I have decided to completely redo it!  🙂 

This lack of quality control differs from the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and American Academy of Religion (AAR) where it is difficult to have a paper accepted.  You have to submit your paper to a specialized area to get it approved and there are only a limited number of spots.  In some of these instances, the paper must be approved ahead of time.

It just goes to show that peer-reviewed journals are still the best way to get reliably good content. Not conferences.   

It is my perception that ETS functions as two things. 

First, it is a place for conservative evangelicals to talk with one another.  This is good in one way because sometimes in the broader guild you have to talk about methodology for a week to establish your presuppositions in order to actually talk about the topic.  For example, does the New Testament have anything to do with ethics?  You have to argue that at SBL. At ETS, you can consider that a given and move on to talking about specific issues. 

Second, the ETS also functions as a kind of minor league in the scholarship world.  The major scholars tend to present papers at more specific, scholarly settings like SBL and AAR. 

How have we gotten to this place?

The Boomer inerrancy wars have taken quite a toll on this organization. (See the musings from conservative Roger Overton here at the A-Team blog and here and here from Norman Geisler about his resigning because of the doctrinal slide of ETS on inerrrancy!) (H/T afriendnamedben here). 

Also note Tony’s comments about inerrancy here which I have pasted below.

5) The Authority of the Bible: Again, I am not mentioned, so maybe I’m OK here, too. But I am on the record as reviling the so-called "doctrine of inerrancy." It’s a doctrine that demands so many relative clauses ("in the original manuscripts"(which, by the way, we don’t have), "in the author’s intention" (which, by the way, we can’t know), etc.) as to render it worthless. I choose, instead, to speak of the trustworthiness, even infallibility, of scripture.   

I’m not sure how to sort all of this out.  While people continue to beat each other up over inerrancy, maybe there are some other things we can do.   

How do we reform ETS and make it a place where outstanding rigorous discussion scholarship is done?  So people don’t read half-baked papers like I read!  🙂

I know this discussion is being held by the hierarchy of ETS as well.  Many of them are known for their rigorous scholarship.  Greg Beale comes to mind.   

If ETS conferences are going to be renewed and reformed, they are going to need younger people in their 20’s and 30’s like us to take a leadership role in the process.

Here are some suggestions for overhauling ETS conferences. 

1. I think what we need to do at ETS is to appoint coordinators of each of the major areas.  These coordinators need to look through the papers before hand, which people submit in March.  They then choose the best papers to be presented in November.  Hopefully, they also send editorial suggestions back to the person.  In the end, there are less papers, but more quality ones. 

If not with the whole conference, we designate a strata that does it that way.  There are the level 1 papers and sessions.  Then we have also the typical open sessions.

We need to invite first tier scholars to pioneer these level 1 papers and sessions.   

These scholars also need to be from a range of evangelical schools and include evangelicals that teach at secular schools.  See my list of seminaries and where they fit on the evangelical spectrum.  The whole range needs to be represented.   

2. We need to provide scholarships for women and international guests to increase the diversity. 

3. We need to charge more for the conference.  Right now it costs $20 for the early registration for the member and $40 for the late registration!  Ridiculously cheap.

4.  Someone needs to redo the website.

See my thoughts on doing ETS well and the kinds of scholars that present there here.