by Tim Stafford

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review by Howard Snyder

WHEN I FIRST picked up this slim book, I assumed it was simply a lightweight overview of U.S. reform movements. I was pleased to find the book to be more substantial, analytical, and insightful—and therefore more useful—than I anticipated.

Stafford writes with some passion; he was a student activist in earlier years. His own experience led him to try to understand more deeply how reform movements arise, why they work or fail, and how they should be seen from a biblical Christian standpoint.
Stafford, now a senior writer for Christianity Today and the author of several other books, uses four reform movements as his primary case studies: abolitionism, the temperance movement, the suffrage movement, and the struggle for civil rights. He also cross references other movements, though he largely bypasses farmers' movements, such as the Farmers' Alliance, which might have added more grist for his mill.

Stafford helpfully points out that few evangelicals today really understand the power of earlier Christian reform movements (or largely Christian reform movements) because of the way 20th-century Christianity developed. The division between a more liberal, socially activist mindset and theology, and a more otherworldly, fundamentalist mindset and theology left contemporary evangelicals without a usable memory of effective ways of authentic reform. “This book is meant to help retrieve some of that needed memory,” Stafford writes.

Rather than narrating the story of various reform movements sequentially, Stafford organizes the book around key issues that reform movements typically face. This approach works. Key chapters include “Starting with Truth,” “Meeting Resistance,” “Staying Power,” “The Seduction of Violence,” and “Party Politics and the Prophetic Alternative.” Stafford analyzes, for example, “the seduction of violence”—exploring the civil rights movement and, earlier, Carry Nation's attacks on saloons.

Stafford is particularly effective in pointing out the ethical ambiguities and moral choices that would-be reformers confront. “We need activism because the world needs to change for the better,” he writes. But this is not a simple matter: “On almost any issue, different activists have chosen different pathways.” The same is true today in confronting issues ranging from HIV/AIDS and abortion to war and world poverty.

Problems crying out for reform can be approached in various ways. Stafford concludes, “No approach is perfect. Each approach tends to have its unique momentum, sometimes leading to unexpected results. When activist movements are in start-up mode, you can't always see what the long-term implications will be.” My own research confirms this. The results of reform movements are—almost by definition—unpredictable. That's what makes reform movements exciting and potentially powerful—for good or ill.

One of Stafford's central points is that genuine reform begins with the discovery, or rediscovery, of truth that the church is neglecting or denying. So it was with the antislavery movement, says Stafford. “The truth that slavery is sin” started to cut through deadlocked political and economic debates about slavery, making slavery a moral issue that had to be addressed as a matter of right and wrong. “Truth matters,” Stafford concludes. “This I learned from abolitionism. Even in a postmodern society where truth is relativized, truth has the power to move people.” A rediscovery of biblical truth—the sin of slavery, or of despoiling God's good creation—“can launch a movement to change the world.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is a case in point. The book had the impact it did in part because it dramatically drove home the essential sinfulness of slavery. This is a crucial point. Having acknowledged that, however, I am not sure that Stafford adequately resolves the issue of conflicting values and conflicting truths (or perceptions of the truth) in dealing with social issues.

Stafford ends up, very appropriately, focusing on Jesus and the kingdom of God. He notes that the “idea of the kingdom of God underlies the reforming impulse in all Western societies.” Nearly echoing the argument of E. Stanley Jones (the famous Methodist missionary to India) that the kingdom of God is the true realism, Stafford writes, “I believe the kingdom of God is growing within the structure of our world. Those who want to change the world are responding to cues form a deeper reality, whether East or West. The kingdom of God is really happening, and we feel it. We feel the discrepancy between what is and what out to be.” This is what Jesus announced: The kingdom of God meant that things are being put right, the way God promised. Jesus both announced the kingdom and acted upon it: Wherever he went and with whomever he talked, a little bit of the world set right could be seen. And Jesus enlisted others—“a corps of followers” whom he trained “to act as his lieutenants.”

Real Jesus followers are in the world-changing business, Stafford argues. Echoing Romans 8, he writes, “The whole cosmos groans in a kind of therapeutic pain as it endures the discrepancy between how it is and how it was intended to be. And the time is here to put it right. We are called to join in the changing. This is a moral vision based not on law or coercion, but on love.” Stafford's vision is of Christians so in love with Jesus and so energized by the kingdom vision that they “take on the discouraging business of changing the world.”

This is a very useful book—well informed, well researched, and full of insights that help catalyze today's churches into being faithful, loving, and potent “shakers of the system” for the sake of God's kingdom.

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