Just over one year over a year ago, The Falls Church Anglican did a four-week sermon series on justice.  Kicking it off with the sermon above, I reflected on the Christian’s privilege of being able to work for justice, and also how God was putting on the church’s heart what’s on his heart in a new and powerful way.  I think, tomorrow, in the company of thousands of Christians at The Justice Conference in Philadelphia, I’ll see this first hand, and even better, feel it.

If God does justice, God’s people get to do justice. It’s our calling because it’s God’s nature, and because of that, God is committed to helping his people live faithfully into our calling. He does this in a couple of ways. One is the Bible, another is by raising up prophetic voices, and another is to send the Holy Spirit to put on the hearts of his people the things that are on his heart. And friends, we are living at a moment when all these three things are actually converging, and God has been putting his heart for justice on our hearts in a new and fresh and powerful way.

In the last thirty years or so, we’ve been a beneficiary of what God’s been doing in the evangelical church to put on our screen what’s on his screen. And The Falls Church has had a role in this, among many ways, but one of them is when a couple of our members including Rick Campanelli and Gary Haugen launched the International Justice Mission in the mid-90s. And Gary reflects, looking back at that time, in an article called, “The Church on a Justice Mission.” It was written by another friend of ours, Amy Sherman, in Books and Culture in the summer of 2010. Gary calls what’s happened in these decades “a sea change.” Here is an excerpt from Amy’s book:

“‘When it comes to talking about justice, the whole evangelical landscape is different today,’ Gary Haugen says. Looking back to the mid-1990s, when IJM was being dreamt up, Haugen recalls, ‘there was no teaching on this. I’d heard thousands of sermons by then in my Christian life and not one on justice. There were no books… Today the obstacles of going into the church and speaking about injustice have been almost entirely removed from mainstream evangelicalism.’ God has a plan for fighting injustice in the world, Haugen often says, and ‘it’s us.’ That message has resonated, and he is excited that ‘there’s a whole generation of young Christians for whom the Gospel in the absence of justice is just not interesting or compelling or tolerable.'”

Now that’s the Christian press picking up this sea change. Right around the same time,  Time magazine observed the very same trend about justice and put it in a long article: “A remarkable cultural shift has taken place [over the past decade] among young Evangelicals that has surprised even longtime observers.” One of the longtime observers was our own Mike Cromartie, whom they quoted in the article. They called him and said, “What’s going on here?” He rightfully chalks up some of it to the continuing crumbling of the wall that divides the secular and the sacred.

Friends, we live in exciting times in the church. God is up to a lot that we can see, and he’s up to much more that we cannot see yet.