What the History of the ‘Social Gospel’ Can Teach Us Today

THE CHURCH ADULT education class was stuck. After five weeks of exploring the immigration crisis with legal and advocacy organizations, they invited me to help them discern where and how to act. But they were foundering. A subset of the group had been working with the congregation on immigration issues for many months. “Why haven’t the changes we pushed for come to fruition?” they asked me. “How can we make a difference?”

Congregations are often unclear on how they can act effectively in public during our dangerous and unpredictable times. In my teaching and practice of congregation-based community organizing, I’ve learned that one reason for this is because the issues dictate the strategy. Too often, faith leaders present the crisis around a particular justice issue as more pressing than the sacred values we hold and that motivate our faithful action.

Our deep concern for an issue is rooted in the value we attribute to what or who is threatened. Desecration of Indigenous land is horrendous because that land is sacred. Masked forces detaining immigrants, tearing them away from family and community, violates the sacred dignity of a person. Questions such as “How can I make a difference?” keep us focused on issues. But asking what kind of difference we want to make, and to whom, helps us focus on the values and relationships that ground good organizing work.

Questions like these require congregations to wrestle with power and build up a certain form of it: relational power. Relational power is the ability to act meaningfully in public, grounded in relationships. This kind of power is political more than partisan. Building relational power requires that we map and analyze such power both in our congregations and in the broader institutional landscape. This work clarifies who is responsible for injustice and what sort of actions will hold the decision-makers accountable.

Relational power is dialogical. It holds the capacity both to influence others and to be influenced by them through finding common values and respecting the agency of others. This point is crucial for congregations to understand. Brittle congregations have change-averse cultures that do not cultivate relational depth and listening. When they attempt change, their relationships are so rigid that they break. Powerful congregations, however, have a relational fabric that is tightly woven yet flexible because they have invested in authentic connection to one another and their values. These congregations are robust enough to receive the energy it takes to change culture and organizational structure. Value-based community organizing builds powerful congregations because it develops cultures that foster responsive structures both in and out of the church.

Listening and telling stories are fundamental Christian practices.

When we tell stories about what we hold most dear and why these deep concerns matter to us as Christians, we clarify what we are willing to do to protect threatened people, goods, or ideals. Our sacred values are nested in narratives about who we are individually and communally. Values such as justice and love mean little apart from their context.

Listening and telling stories are fundamental Christian practices. The tradition of value-based community organizing also is not new. The social gospel movement of the early 20th century, for example, placed Christian ethical commitments on par with theological ones. The social gospel Christians organized for radical equality and democracy rooted in economic and political power. For them, questions of social salvation were just as important as individual salvation.

Social gospel leaders, such as Winifred Chappell, Mordecai Johnson, Howard Kester, Reverdy Ransom, and Claude Williams, built organizations that fostered, encouraged, and equipped faithful community leaders who fought for a cooperative common-wealth. They understood the power of structure—of fostering organizations that supported institutional ecologies of relational power from which communities can act meaningfully in public: through votes, unions, protests, or taking the work of governance in their own hands. These leaders answered the call to build relational power as a religious practice among the dominated and exploited. As theologian Gary Dorrien puts it, social gospelers believed that Christians are called to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.

I hadn’t planned to lead that adult education class through a power-mapping process, but it helped them understand why they hadn’t been successful previously. Then we explored how relational power is built by reweaving congregational cultures and telling stories of sacred value. We ended with the invitation into the slow and patient work of organizing, which is a gift of the social gospel movement. Telling and listening to these stories builds relational power, yes, but more than this, it enacts our faith.