“If the local congregation is not perceived in its own neighborhood as the place from which good news overflows in good action, the programs for social and political action launched by the national agencies are apt to lose their integral relation to the good news and come to be seen as part of a moral crusade rather than part of the gospel.”
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
Here is my understanding of what Newbigin is saying: If good actions/works are not the perception of a local church, then the programs come across as moral policing to the church’s neighbors.
This point comes in Newbigin’s chapter “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel.” In this particular section, he’s arguing that one of the characteristics for a church community to be such an agent for the gospel, it must localize the concerns of its own neighborhood.
When the church fails to do so, it becomes perceived as a moral agency rather than good news embodied. The greater we generalize or nationalize the world’s needs, the more flattened the gospel becomes for anyone.
