Not "either-or" but "both-and"

Robert Martin at Abnormal Anabaptist has a thought provoking post looking at the division with the broader Mennonite church between those who are "liberal", i.e. concerned about justice, peacemaking and the poor, versus those who are "conservative", concerned with docttinal precision, evangelism and piety. As he rightly argues, you cannot have one without the other. A church without a zeal for reaching the lost is not really the church at all or at least is not functioning faithfully. Likewise a church that cares only for souls and not for the poor and the hungry is missing a crucial aspect to how we are called to live.

His post, Can You Have One Without the Other? looks at a specific subset of the church but what he writes applies pretty equally to most of the church in America, a church rent assunder by division and suspicion of one another. It is well worth the read, both for the look at a part of the church (Mennonites) that is somewhat foreign to many evangelicals and for the questions he raises that apply equally to the rest of the church. Check it out.