Any mission endeavor must begin and end with the Gospel.  It must be focused entirely on the Good News of Christ, if it is to be a truly Christian mission.  However, our problem is when we begin to take that idea of Gospel too narrowly.  We falsely assume that the only significance of the Gospel is leading people into a relationship with Christ, end of story.  While I am by no means diminishing this incredibly important facet of the Gospel, salvation is not the only area of our lives where the Gospel is significant.  It drives and informs every aspect of our lives.

This is particularly significant when we begin to think through what ministry looks like in the inner city contexts.  A few years ago, while I was on staff with a college ministry, one of the people on our leadership team befriended a young teenage girl who had just found out that she was pregnant.  This girl was poor, not married, and without much family or friends to help her navigate this incredibly difficult time in her life.  We decided to ask the college students in our ministry to consider donating some diapers, baby formula, and other things that this struggling single mom might need.

While we were very encouraged to see the generosity of the majority people in our ministry, there were others, who instead of giving, questioned the validity of even trying to help this girl who obviously had been living a life of sin in order to get her where she was in the first place.  While what those students were saying certainly didn’t sit right with me, I could understand the sentiment.  Would we be condoning sinful actions?  Should Christians encourage such behavior by allowing people to get bailed out of the bad situations they created for themselves by their sin.  But quickly it became apparent that the problem wasn’t that this girl had sinned, or that we would be condoning her actions by helping provide for her and her new baby.  The problem was, we didn’t understand the Gospel.  As we wrestled through these questions, our college pastor made a statement that has helped me understand the significance of the Gospel ever since.  He said, “if you can’t see yourself in the face of an unwed teenage mother, then you don’t understand the Gospel.”

You see, the Gospel teaches us two primary lessons that should inform the way we think about everything.

First, the Gospel teaches us that each one of us are helplessly lost in our own sin and as a result separated from God and others and enslaved to our sin.  None of us are inherently better than anyone else.  None of us, by nature, are less depraved than another.  In fact, the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:3, calls us “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”  Do you see it? All of mankind are children of wrath.  All of mankind are fallen.  All of us are sinful (Romans 3:23).

However, the Gospel teaches us something else as well.  The Gospel teaches us about Grace.  The Gospel teaches us that our God is a gracious God.  Any and all good things we have in our lives are the result of the Grace of God.  And any good things in us are equally a result of grace.  That grace looks a lot of different ways.  It could be that we were blessed with parents that cared for us and taught us right and wrong in ways that many people don’t have.  It could be that we were raised in church and had mentors to help lead us and guide us.  And ultimately, if we are confessing Christians, then it has been God’s grace that has not only saved us, but made us a new creation, adopted us as sons and given us the gift of the Scriptures, the fellowship of the believers, and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit to lead us.

And by the way, even with all of those incredible blessings of God’s grace, each of us still sin.  We still get angry.  We still lust.  We still covet.  We still hate.   In other words, the Gospel levels the playing field.  I am no longer able to look at myself and think about how great I am, and I am no longer able to look at someone else and judge them in comparison to my greatness.  The reality is, but for the grace of God, every single person is depraved and hopelessly lost.  But there is Grace.  There is hope.  But that hope is not of ourselves, that hope is in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

This understanding of the Gospel has to be at the center of every missions experience, particularly in the inner city.  In the inner city, sin is not hidden, it is right there for everyone to see.  For example, in New Orleans, our teams stay in the middle of the French Quarter.  You don’t have to look long to see unbelievable expressions of sin.  It is everywhere and it is out in the open.  As you talk to the homeless drunk on the streets, or the drunken guy going into the strip club, the prostitute, or the young parent who leaves his two-year old child at home to go smoke crack with their friends, it is easy to jump quickly to “us-vs.-them” thinking.  It is easy for us to start judging them and comparing them against our standard of righteousness, ourselves.  What we should be doing is comparing both of our lives against the righteous standard of Christ.  Then we will realize that we are not better than them.  This is not an example of “us vs. them.”  This is two humans, created in the image of God, tragically marred by sin, and with a desperate need of the hope of Jesus Christ.

There can not be an effective mission trip, particularly to the inner city, without this perspective.  If not for the Grace of God…

Colossians 1:13-14 – He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.