BROWNWOOD, Texas (ABP) — When Christians help hungry people, they earn the right to share the gospel — not only with people in need but also with a skeptical society — Jim Denison told a conference on ethics and evangelism.
"The church must respond to hunger if it wishes to reach the culture," said Denison, Baptist General Convention of Texas theologian-in-residence and founding president of the Center for Informed Faith.
He joined Bill Tillman, the T.B. Maston professor of Christian ethics at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology, in delivering the Currie-Strickland Distinguished Lectures April 27 at Howard Payne University.
The imperatives of Scripture, the need to offer a holistic response to people in need and the skeptical nature of post-modern society all underscore the need for a Christian responsed to hunger, Denison insisted.
"The church must respond to hunger if it wishes to obey the Scriptures," he said. "Hunger is addressed in every category of biblical revelation."
Denison cited examples from throughout the Old and New Testaments to illustrate the Bible's overwhelming emphasis on care for the poor and hungry.
He said failure to meet those needs disobeys Scripture and calls into question the validity of Christians' claims in the eyes of needy people.
"When we feed the hungry, we demonstrate the relevance of our message," Denison said. "We show them God's love is real when our love is real."
Denison said responding to hunger is a witness not only to poor people who benefit directly, but also to the larger culture.
"The church must respond to hunger if it would earn the right to speak to our culture," Denison said. He said that is because "you and I are living in a time of unprecedented skepticism in the Western world with regard to historic Christianity."
"We live in a post-modern culture which considers truth to be personal, subjective and individual," Denison said. "In our culture, religion is a hobby, a matter of personal preference with no transcendent meaning or truth."
Consequently, he concluded, non-Christians no longer view the church as relevant to their lives and needs.
Denison said the 21st century will look more like the first century than any time in between. Just as the early church "turned the world upside-down" by showing a skeptical culture the love of God by acts of love, he said, the church today can do the same thing.
"The first century church demonstrated the rightness of its faith by the relevance of its ministry," he said. "Culture today believes if it's relevant, it might be right. If we feed hungry bodies, it earns us the right to feed souls."
Tillman likewise stressed the biblical imperative of meeting the needs of hungry people and the way living out that imperative can be transforming — both to the recipients of ministry and to Christians who are involved in it.
The "weight of evidence" — hundreds of references in the Bible to matters related to hunger and poverty — demonstrate the importance of the subject to God, he asserted.
"So much attention is given to the matters of hunger that one surely can begin to put together where some of the will of God lives, where kingdom emphases are and where creative thinking on the part of Christians needs to be applied," he said.
Gary and Molli Elliston of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas established the Currie-Strickland lectures in honor of David Currie, executive director of Texas Baptists Committed, and in memory of Phil Strickland, longtime director of the BGCT Christian Life Commission.
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Ken Camp is managing editor of the Baptist Standard.