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Adelekan, Book Review  51 

  

Book Review 

 

Christian Compassion: A Charitable History  
By Monty L. Lynn 

 
Reviewed by Tokunbo Adelekan 

 
 

   
 

Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2021. $35.00 

 

It takes a unique sensibility of historical 

consciousness, ethical imagination, and pastoral 

wisdom to write the kind of history found in 

Compassion:  A Charitable History, where every 

section, in some cases every paragraph, requires 

capturing befuddling dramas, many-stranded ideas, and 

evolving moral practices. Yet in many ways, Monty 

Lynn, Professor in the Department of Management 

Sciences at Abilene Christian University, is up to the 

task, providing a readable map of Christian charity that 

reflects an admirable knowledge of the variegated 

Catholic and Protestant contributions to Christian 

social understanding and progress. 

Lynn invokes the biblical metaphor of a “river” 

(Psalm 46:4) to mold a fluid portrait of compassion that 

courses around three epochal developments; 1) from 

the inauguration of the Church in 1st-century Roman 

Palestine to the 4th century, 2) from the fall of Rome 

through the Medieval period into the period of the 

Reformation, and 3) from the early Modern 

Enlightenment project/experience to today's capital-

driven North Atlantic-Centric theatre. As a primer, 

Lynn’s work not only maps the ways in which 

compassion has been imagined, but tactically (if not 

always evenly) implemented through a complex 

patchwork of historical, geographic, cultural, and even 

continental theatres. Lynn’s account embodies the 

witness of the great hymn “Thro' many dangers, toils 

and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought 

me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.”  

Lynn begins the book by setting a foundational 

framework for defining and understanding Christian 

compassion through the ages. Combining insights from 

social science and theology, Lynn argues the divine 

nature of compassion can best be understood as being 

comprised of five facets, all ensconced in Christ:  

Seeing, Feeling, Hearing, Acting, and Desiring. The 

more these facets are present at the individual and 

communal level, the more energized Christian 

compassion becomes. As Lynn uses these to choose 

and frame what, who, and how to include in this history, 

he traces the evolution of Christian compassion 

through the epochs, from small-scale individual and 

communal efforts geared to those in need, to the 

development of the church as the patron of the poor, 

to the institutionalization, professionalization, and 

specialization of care during Christendom, and to the 

explosion of parachurch organizations fostered in a 

significant way by the globalized and competitive 

missions movement that has resulted in what Lynn sees 

today as three streams of Christian charity:  the 

liberation and justice stream, peace and 

humanitarianism, and mutual aid and community 

development. 

The book can be read in at least three 

distinguishable, yet inseparable ways. First, it can be 

read as a prismatic attempt to capture the Church’s 

priestly and prophetic role in alleviating human 

suffering en route to shaping the contours of 

civilization. It can thus be read as a treatise on how 

Christians of different stripes have lived out the 

Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Second, it can 

be read as a treatment of compassion as a malleable, 

elastic, polyvalent category whose peculiar and 

protracted manifestations stress how institutional and 

individual actors have revised the boundaries of the 

church’s ethical vocation. For example, what may be 

read as aid to the poor under a specific set of conditions 

may be construed as fomenting sloth, curbing moral 

and intellectual potential, and draining on institutional 

or national economies under a different moral regime. 

Therefore, given the radical contingency and intractable 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 3(2),  Winter 2022 

Adelekan, Book Review  52 

  

changeability of all human affairs, it is important that we 

approach the grand scheme of Christian witness with a 

degree of epistemic humility and philosophical irony. 

Third, the book can be read as a mission-evangelism 

manifesto; a bold appeal to those who are disenchanted 

with arid forms of Christianity and who wish to reclaim 

the soul of the Church’s earthly witness, to plumb the 

faith for its rich reserves of coping and care, and for its 

ethic of defense and deliverance from repulsive and 

retrograde systems.  

Lynn’s work is dialectical, discursive, and 

disciplinary. It is dialectical because it highlights the 

creative interplay between the heart of a loving God and 

the fallen, yet faithful, witness of Christian heroic actors. 

Accordingly, Christian mission is foremost a declarative 

act of participation in God’s mission in the world. The 

discursive dimension of the book is seen through the 

manner in which Lynn deploys the social sciences to 

interpret the prism as stated above of Desiring, Seeing, 

Feeling, Hearing, and Acting as the five distinguishable 

yet inseparable nodes through which compassion is 

imagined. Finally, compassion, for Lynn, is disciplinary. 

It is the formed and lived witness of a dynamic ethic of 

self-surrender and self-overcoming—an idea conveyed 

not just in our confessions, creeds, policies, and 

pronouncements. Therefore, compassion is curricular 

as well as liturgical behavior.  

Three interwoven dimensions of compassionate 

practice delineated in the text are 1) the ministry of 

spiritual direction often informed and inspired by the 

biblical faith and sacred texts, 2) the problems and 

possibilities that describe and prescribe the existential 

affairs, moral habits, and spiritual disciplines of 

Christian communities as they navigate specific social 

conditions, and 3) the exploration of the links between 

sacrificial leadership and heroic communal practice in 

overcoming the myriad dimensions of our human 

fallenness and finitude—as they serve as signs of the 

Kingdom of Heaven. In short, Lynn’s narrative 

trumpets the truth that “they will know we are Christians 

by our love.” 

Though rife with explanatory sobriety and 

interpretive power, Lynn’s study is essentially a chapter 

on the compassionate witness of the Church to North 

Atlantic civilization. Lynn’s “river” may be an apt 

metaphor, but it bends curiously and unsettlingly 

outside of the “Global South”—Africa, Asia, and Latin 

America. This restrictive outlook not only fails to meet 

the ambitious goal that Lynn has set for himself, but it 

also overlooks the colorful and burgeoning waterfalls 

that could provide substantive and sophisticated fauna 

and flora for his otherwise salutary “riverful” account. 

To what degree have the contributions of Pentecostals 

and Charismatics fostered and expanded the church’s 

compassionate witness—much of which highlights the 

undeniable role of the red, yellow, black, and brown 

peoples, also, perhaps more importantly, the 

astounding role of women in the flourishing of the 

Christian story?  Any “charitable” map of Christian 

compassion must come to terms with these ennobling 

and expanding missional “theatres,” instead of treating 

them as merely tributary to the Western currents of 

Christianity.  

Needless to say, at present, the Western mainline 

Church is at a crossroads, thus compelling deep self-

interrogation, reformation, and perhaps even 

repentance when necessary. We can no longer take as 

axiomatic (and it pains me deeply to confess) that the 

church is a regenerative force in society—especially 

because some of the evils of modernity, such as slavery, 

the Holocaust, and colonialism, to name a few, have 

had partial roots in Christian institutional identity. This 

requires an acknowledgement of how issues of 

knowledge, privilege, power, and status have shaped not 

only the charitable practices of Christian communities, 

but also the animus against the Church that lingered and 

seems to have deepened in the present moment.  

Overall, this book is resourceful and relevant to 

Christian practitioners in all areas of the global church, 

including those working in relief, development, and 

advocacy organizations. Specialists will doubtless find 

omissions and oversimplifications, but it is important to 

remember that Lynn has understood and attempted to 

chart a course, not to provide an encyclopedic mosaic. 

The inclusion of stories, images, and charts adds a 

personal element that prevents the work from 

becoming a dry, laborious academic exercise. The work 

can be a guidepost for those who seek to mine the 

Judeo-Christian faith for tools and templates needed to 

demystify and decenter the hierarchical and repressive 

systems that continue to degrade and devalue human 

creative potential—I read it as an accessible and 

applicable exploration of doing mission in the real 

world.  

 

As Augustine reputedly quipped, “tolle lege,” take up 

and read. 
 

 

Tokunbo Adelekan is Associate Professor of Theology 

and Ethics at Palmer Theological Seminary 

(Eastern University) and teaches courses in 

Ecclesiology, Globalization Studies and African 

American Studies.  He is also Senior Pastor of the 

Tabernacle Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio. 

 

Author email:  olumo101@gmail.com  
 

 

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