I met Benny while he was staying in a local homeless shelter and began visiting my church. After spending years struggling with addiction and homelessness, he seemed ready to turn his life around. His most pressing need was for a new kidney, and it seemed like stable housing would be a prerequisite to getting one.

To get on the kidney transplant list, Benny needed to quit smoking. I figured that once Benny didn’t have to worry about where he would sleep each night, he’d have the energy to focus on giving up cigarettes. So, a few months later, Benny moved in with me.

The problem was that while Benny waited for a kidney transplant, he had to undergo painful dialysis treatments three days a week. As soon as he was done, all he wanted was a cigarette to take his mind off the pain.

After living with Benny for about two years, he passed away due to kidney failure. There are times when I feel like we failed Benny. Could we have done more to help him quit smoking and get a new kidney?

Unfortunately, the dichotomy that exists between our idealistic beliefs and the stark realities of today’s world is more rule than exception. American revolutionaries touted the equal rights of men but chose to reinforce chattel slavery. Many churches have fought for the rights of the unborn while the sexual abuse of born children continues to be uncovered. Countless poverty relief organizations have unintentionally stripped impoverished communities of any hope for self-sustainability.

As the teacher of Ecclesiastes puts it, “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted” (1:14–15).

While we may be tempted to despair, God has worked powerfully through imperfect movements throughout history. The church has been instrumental in bringing healthcare to the masses, ending chattel slavery, and pursuing civil rights.

If we extricated ourselves from any movement with flaws, we’d have nowhere to go. Even if we were to embark exclusively on solo ventures for change, we could not escape our own mixed motives and selfish inclinations. GK Chesterton once wrote a long essay in response to the question, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Over the years, his essay has been boiled down to a more pithy, apocryphal response: “Dear Sirs, I am.”

A Call to Humility

Throughout the generations, God’s Spirit continues to call his people to speak up for the poor and oppressed. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied,” Jesus promised (Matt. 5:6). How, then, do we promote the causes we have a conviction for without losing sight of the sobering realities of unintended consequences and broken leaders?

I believe the key is humility. If anyone had reason to feel confident in his cause, it was Desmond Tutu in his fight against apartheid in South Africa. This makes his words of warning even more powerful: “When we identify with a good cause, we must as well have proper distance from it and maintain respect for those on the other side” (Christianity Today Interview, October 5, 1992).

Humility means we never lose sight of the need for reformation within our movements and organizations. We apply Jesus’s principle of removing the speck in our eye before removing the log in our brother’s (Matt. 7:3). We take ownership of how we contribute to the problems we are fighting, and we acknowledge the myriad problems within our ranks. We refuse to buy our own press that we are the ones saving the world because the world also needs saving from us.

Humility means we see the value of other causes as well. We need groups committed to pursuing racial justice, and we need groups promoting foster care. We want to end child hunger and provide affordable adult housing. Tempted by a scarcity mindset, we tend to think that resources poured into one cause means fewer resources for our own. So, we pit our causes against those of others, believing the lie that all we need to fix deeply embedded problems is a certain number of resources. We forget that our God owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps. 50:10).

While compromise is unavoidable in a complex world of competing visions and causes, in humility, we must never let the ends justify the means. Pursuing our goals at whatever cost reveals how highly we think of ourselves and our vision. We must keep in mind that any true and holy visions were never ours to begin with.

It’s Not About Us

A grave danger in this work is when causes become inextricably linked with certain organizations and leaders. Paul warned the Corinthian church about this: “For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each” (1 Cor. 3:4–5).

Leaders and organizations come and go. If they truly care about their cause more than their pride, they will welcome and encourage others to start like-minded organizations. They will be open to partnership and accept that their particular movement might only last for a season. In humility, the causes we are committed to must remain bigger than us and our tribe. Many a megachurch pastor has fallen prey to the conflation of their church with God’s Kingdom.

As we seek to be faithful in the various causes to which God has called us, humility invites us to surrender our work daily to the care of God, who alone can bring real transformation. Unless God’s Spirit blows on our efforts, they will be in vain (see Psalm 127). We must never forget that any endeavor worth our time is a fight against the powers of evil, sin, and death. Only God can bring the healing and life that our world needs. Only God can break the bonds of darkness in our midst. Forgetting this will lead to inevitable burnout.

Henri Nouwen put it well: “Working for social change, to me, means to make visible in time and place that which has already been accomplished in principle by God Himself. This makes it possible to struggle for a better world not out of frustration, resentment, anger or self-righteousness but out of care, love, forgiveness and gratitude” (Nouwen, 2016).

Despite our frailty, somehow, God sees fit to include us in his work of making all things right. He delights to work through us and leaves no room for nihilistic abandonment of this world. We love the Bennys in our lives even when we’re not sure we’re making a difference. Our causes matter because they are an imperfect expression of his own heart. It is humbling, indeed, that God would call us to join him in redeeming the very mess that we have made.

So let us follow Paul’s advice in Galatians 6:9 and “not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up!”