Thanksgiving 1973, a group of evangelical Christians in Chicago drew up a “Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern” which represented an important event for the life of the whole Christian community in this country.
Members of the Division of Church and Society and of other units of the NCC have been impressed with the degree to which that statement lessens the distance that is often assumed to separate “evangelical Christians” from “ecumenical Christians.” We deplore the use of such labels as though they were mutually exclusive, and we welcome the Chicago Declaration as an expression of a common concern. We do not suppose those who made it to be any less evangelical for having lifted up afresh the social concern that has always been implicit, and sometimes explicit, in their tradition. In the same sense, we do not relinquish any of our historic concern for social justice by reminding ourselves that we have not sufficiently manifest the evangelical spirit that has always been implicit in the ecumenical movement.
Though that Declaration neither invites nor requires response, we are moved by the Holy Spirit to express a deep feeling of kinship with that statement and with our fellow-Christians who issued it. Using the same form and some of the same words, we offer a response in the spirit of humility and searching, to the end that a new understanding, a new dialogue, and possibly a new reconciliation may emerge.
The Response
As people “committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and to the full authority of the Word of God,” we too affirm that “God lays total claim upon the lives of the people.” We cannot separate our efforts to alleviate the distresses of human society from the urgency to proclaim the Gospel of Christ, which truly saves and frees persons to become what God created them to be.
"We acknowledge that we have not adequately expressed or embodied our commitment to the sovereignty of the one God, the Lordship of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit." As a result, many have failed to see in us the Christian motivation which compels our work in the world: that we are there at the behest of the Savior for the deliverance of our fellow human beings for whom he died.
“We acknowledge that God requires love.” But we have not always shown love to those who have disagreed with us on the need to transform the structures of society. We have been too often inclined to criticize or ignore those who have tended to emphasize the personal rather than the structural.
“We acknowledge that God requires justice,” and we have tried to help bring about a more just society. We are aware of shortcomings and defects in the means we have chosen. While we do not in any way recede from our continuing determination to seek justice for all of God’s children, we acknowledge that we have not sufficiently shown this determination to be rooted in Christ’s Gospel. Though sometimes denounced as “radical,” we have not been nearly as genuinely radical as the Gospel calls us to be. We have sometimes forgotten that we are pilgrims and sojourners. We have failed to deal with the structures of the world as instruments of the principalities and powers. We have not proclaimed the full truth of Christ, which brings a more profound diagnosis of the human condition, a farther-reaching cure, and the possibility of real healing and transformation of persons and communities.
“We affirm that God abounds in mercy and that he forgives all who repent and turn from their sins.” So we seek a Christian discipleship that is no longer shy or diffident about proclaiming the complete Gospel of Christ, with both its personal and its social implications. We must not only “attack the materialism of our culture and the maldistribution of the nation’s wealth and services” and “promote more just acquisition and distribution of the world’s resources,” but we must offer by word and deed a witness to God’s purposes for human life as expressed both in Scripture and in God’s mighty acts in history, so that struggling, suffering, despairing people can find personal redemption in Christ that will empower them to liberate themselves and others.
We must not only "resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near-religious loyalty," but we must free ourselves from the many captivities of our inherited cultures, West and East. Therefore, we “ecumenical” Christians would like to join other Christians in a faithful pilgrimage beyond the systems and structures of our present bondage into the new ways in which God may lead us, for there is “more light yet to break forth from his holy Word.”
From the Unit Committee of Division of Church end Society, Notional Council of Churches.
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