Doing Justice and Loving Mercy: Compassion Ministries, Mentor's Guide, MG16

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D O I N G J U S T I C E A N D L O V I N G M E R C Y : C O M P A S S I O N M I N I S T R I E S

Doing Justice and Loving Mercy (3) Society and World

Welcome to the Mentor’s Guide for Lesson 4, Doing Justice and Loving Mercy: Society and World . In the previous lessons we concentrated our attention on the theological framework underlying the doing of justice and mercy in the Scriptures, and explored its ramifications through the creed, through the local congregation, and through ministries of compassion. We have also looked at a variety of models of church/world relations, and explored what it means to embrace a strategy that allows us to efficiently and effectively minister under the constraints of limited time, money, and resources. Now, in this final lesson, we zoom out to take a look at our responsibility to deal with some of the critical issues of our day and time, namely, poverty and oppression, the human environment, ethnocentrism and difference, and war and violence. As world Christians committed to displaying Christ and his Kingdom throughout the entire earth , we must labor to wrestle with the issues that shape our world today. Ultimately, if we are concerned about the Kingdom’s advance in the earth, we must also wrestle with these issues as they are affecting the lives of untold millions of people who today live in conditions and societies where even the most basic needs and rights are unmet and eclipsed respectively. Your responsibility is to help your students feel the weight of their responsibility not just for those close by, but those far off. Indeed, our ultimate goal is that these leaders and students will develop burdens for justice that embrace all people wherever they live and whatever they face. At the heart of the Christian prophetic burden is the responsibility to wrestle with the weightiest matters of the Law and the heart of the Gospel, even those described by our Lord in Matthew’s Gospel. His indictment of the misplaced priorities of the religious leaders of his day ought to bring a sense of pause and sobriety to our lives today: Matthew 23:23 - “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

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