Justice and Mercy

Too often, “social justice” is relegated to the margins of Christian doctrine on what it means to be a believer in God and a follower of Jesus. We understand that any Christian teaching that isolates love of God from love of neighbor is a false teaching. Jesus chose a text from Isaiah as his inaugural speech—his mission statement—at the opening of his ministry, which highlighted the earthly, economic, social, and political implications of what it meant to proclaim the Kingdom of God (Luke 4:18-19).

Jesus’s ministry aligned with the Hebrew prophets, who understood that true worship involved the rejection of idol worship—devotion to inequitable, exploitive, inhumane systems—and the embrace of God and God’s way of equal protection and peace.Justice, in biblical terms, is synonymous with righteousness. One does not exist without the other. Worship of God is interwoven with love and care for the Other, and to “bear the cross” and follow Christ means to cast off any pride or privilege that is so easily leveraged for personal gain and political power, and to embrace the plight of the wronged, the shamed, and the vulnerable as our own. Solidarity with the oppressed is an act of true worship (Isaiah 58:6-7).

At RCHP, we are committed to learning how to practice our faith in ways that follow Jesus into the heart of God’s kingdom—a new society, a new political reality, a new way of living with one another—which is predicated on compassion and true justice. There are so many specific ways that we, as a community, are traveling with God’s Spirit down the river of healing and justice. Click below to learn more and get involved!