The Social Gospel

The Social Gospel

Rev. Stephen Milton

Lawrence Park Community Church, Toronto

January 26 2025

This year, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of the United Church of Canada. In honour of that, over the next few months, Roberta and I will be delivering some sermons which look back on the history of the United Church. The basic story is simple. In 1925, four denominations agreed to come together to create a new denomination, the United Church of Canada. Before 1925, these denominations knew that they were facing tough times. Their membership numbers were dropping, and they were competing for the same souls. There were three major denominations: Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists. The fourth denomination were the unionists, who were composed of churches where the Presbyterians and Methodists had already united.

There were some clear differences between the denominations. The Presbyterians were mostly from Scotland. They were very into order and structure, including sound finances. The Methodists were more evangelical, and had British and American roots. They held tent meetings to save souls in the summers. Both of those denominations were in competition for new converts in the Western provinces.[1] In the years before union, they decided to divvy up parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan to each denomination to avoid competing in the same dirt towns[2]. Those negotiations brought them closer together, and made the idea of a merger less strange.

As the negotiations for a possible union progressed in the years before 1925, there were naturally some basic questions that needed to be answered. What will this church be called? What is our goal as Christians? Everyone seemed to agree that this United Church should do its best to convert everyone in the country to Christianity. Both the Presbyterians and the Methodists were already involved in running residential schools[3], with the hopes of converting Indigenous children to Christianity. But for everyone else, there remained a basic question: what kind of Christianity should this United Church be promoting?

That was a hot question, because in the decades before 1925, Christianity in North America had been splitting in two. There were those who argued that Christianity’s main concern was converting people to the faith so that their souls could be saved and get into heaven. Christians had a duty to save people from eternal damnation. Christianity was about saving souls, so the gospel, the good news, was about conversion. 

Before the 19th century, pretty much all Christians would have agreed with this approach. But in the 1800s, a new argument was introduced. It was a reaction to the misery that was emerging in cities like New York and Toronto, where thousands of immigrants were arriving from Europe every year. They came to find a new life. But what they got were jobs in smoky factories where safety regulations were lax and work days that were 12 hours long, and work weeks were often seven days long. There was no unemployment insurance or worker’s compensation. Cities were becoming places of misery and poverty for the poor, and many turned to the bottle or theft to survive.

Some Christians looked at this, and said, our duty is to  help these people, even if they aren’t Christians. This commitment to the needs of the poor became known as the social gospel. This understanding of the Bible’s message led to inner city soup kitchens, food banks and shelter for the poor who could not find housing. 

Where did they get this idea about the importance of serving the poor and the desperate? Today’s scripture reading gives us an idea. It is still early in Jesus’ ministry. He has been baptized and been tempted by the devil in the desert. It appears that he has been preaching, and doing some miracle healings in Capernaum. Today, he has gone back to his hometown, Nazareth, where he grew up. Jesus had grown up here in a carpenter’s shop, learning his father’s trade. Now he’s back, but as what? A healer? A rabbi? Well, on this Sabbath Saturday, the town is about to find out.

Jesus goes to synagogue, like he always did. Synagogues weren’t churches. They were where people came to hear scripture, and then debate it, and learn about it. Adult education and community was the focus at the synagogue. No one sacrificed animals to God there. 

Midgal synagogue

Here’s a picture of one from Jesus’ time, not too far from Nazareth. There are stone benches on all sides where men and women would sit. The stone in the middle is where the Torah scrolls were opened and read.

Jesus reading scroll
On this day, Jesus is asked to read the Torah, which he has probably done many times before here. He is given a scroll from the Prophecy of Isaiah. He reads it out loud. Here are the words Luke says he spoke to assembly:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f]

 Then Jesus sits down, and declares that “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” So, Jesus is saying, I am the one this was written about. I am the Messiah who is expected. That on its own is a huge statement, and amazes the people who have known this man his entire life. 

But for today, I would like us to notice something else: the Messiah’s mandate. The text does not say, go out and save souls. It does not say, tell people to behave morally or they will go to hell. Instead, it says the messiah will proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and set the oppressed free. There are no conditions here. There’s no morality test, this freedom is only for good people who have behaved well their entire lives. There’s no religious test: the Messiah should only speak to Jews, should only free Jews. There’s none of that. Instead, there is this simple instruction: proclaim freedom to those who are oppressed, poor and in prison, and set the oppressed free. 

It was scripture passages like these that inspired the social gospel movement of the late 19th century. 

Walter Rauschenbusch 

The theologian who coined the term was this man, Walter Rauschenbusch. In the late 1800s, he was a Protestant minister working among German immigrants in the Hell’s Kitchen ghetto of New York City. 

Hell’s Kitchen
Like its name suggests, it was a social disaster: poverty, disease, terrible working conditions, and lots of alcohol addiction. In a series of books, he argued that when Jesus was alive, he spent most of his time in places like Hell’s kitchen, as a poor person, helping the poor. Jesus preached that The Kingdom of God is for now, not later in heaven. Jesus said things like “The Kingdom of God is here.” Jesus wanted to change society now, Rauschenbusch argued, not later, and certainly not after we are all dead.  In his words:

No man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus.[5]

This did not mean that Christians were to be social welfare workers and ignore the state of the soul, however. He argued that even if every material need was met, human beings would still experience an inner spiritual emptiness, since wealth is like straw to the soul. We need God for our souls, but the love of God was inseparable from the love and care for each other, especially those in need. 

This vision of the importance of the social gospel was adopted by the denominations which came together to become the United Church. In the decade before union, the Methodists and the Presbyterians included Rauschenbusch’s book in reading lists they sent out to congregations across the country.[6] They told their people that a true Christian today needed to understand sociology, not just scripture.[7] And like the minister from Hell’s kitchen, they saw the salvation of the soul and help for the poor as going hand in hand. When the United Church came together in 1925, they created a board of Evangelism and Social Service, because the two could not be separated. 

In recent years, these two sides of the faith, saving souls and saving society, have diverged. 

Budde

Last Tuesday, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde preached to the new Trump government. She called on the President to have mercy on those who will suffer oppression under his government – undocumented migrants and the LGBTQ2S+ community. 

She was preaching the social gospel. However, the backlash against her words were swift and cutting. If you watch her sermon on YouTube, try reading the comments. Many are outraged that she lectured the President. Others object that she missed a chance to call souls to repentance and conversion. That’s the other strain in Christianity at work – it is about saving souls, not helping the powerless. What Rauschenbusch sought to tie together in Hell’s Kitchen has become separated again.

This is also true within the United Church of Canada today. We are still socially progressive. We have been vocal proponents for the creation of pensions, unemployment insurance, the equality of people of all genders and sexualities. We have sought to free the oppressed, as Christ declared long ago in that synagogue. But we haven’t been as a good at saving souls. We don’t evangelize very well, and we seem timid about the saving grace of our faith. That is one of our weaknesses. It means we are a secret to people who are suspicious about churches. They assume we are all moralizing bastions of conservatism. Many people today  are looking for a spiritual home where they can explore who they are, and their place in the universe. The young among them dismiss racism and homophobia as the hangups of older generations. The irony is that our old church is the new wine in old bottles, we have kept Christ’s message of compassion and active help alive. The challenge for the church now is to share this good news better, to help more people learn that God loves all of us, and asks us to share that love with each other. It was good news when Jesus read it from Isaiah’s scroll 2000 years ago, and it is still good news. Amen. 

[1] “Is Co-operation Impossible?” The Christian Guardian, April 8, 1908. 

[2] Editorial by Chown, The Christian Guardian , April 5 1911, p.7

[3] https://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Overview-of-the-IRS-System-Booklet.pdf

[4] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-magdala-synagogue-judaism-and-christianity/

[5] Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 48.

[6] Ian Manson, FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT": SALVATION, SOCIAL REFORM, AND SERVICE IN THE

UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA'S BOARD OF EVANGELISM AND SOCIAL SERVICE, 1925 – 1945, PHD thesis 1999, 32.

[7] Ian Manson, FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT": SALVATION, SOCIAL REFORM, AND SERVICE IN THE

UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA'S BOARD OF EVANGELISM AND SOCIAL SERVICE, 1925 – 1945, PHD thesis 1999,