“We want people to come away with a relational understanding of justice,” Messmore said. “Our framework for thinking about social justice is trying to cultivate habits and virtues of relating rightly to other people and institutions in society.”

Between 1982 and 1991, Billy Joe King Jr. spent all but six months in prison. Today he is a successful carpenter. After a surgery, Bob Pille became addicted to pain medication, taking as many as 900 pills a month. Today he is a chef and mentor to other men with addictions.

What helped men like King and Pille to change? Seek Social Justice, an initiative by The Heritage Foundation, traces the answers to that question through a small group curriculum designed to give young adults a relational understanding of social justice.

“Our ultimate goal is to help people understand human need and how to respond to it most effectively,” said Ryan Messmore, research fellow in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society and lead writer for Seek Social Justice. “We want to pull people back and say, ‘First we want to understand what poverty is, what justice is.’ Our hope is that they will take that knowledge and put it into practice.”

The Seek Social Justice project, officially launched almost two years ago, got its start after parents and pastors began asking The Heritage Foundation to recommend resources about social justice for college students. After an unsuccessful search for thoughtful material on the subject, The Heritage Foundation decided to launch its own curriculum.

“We want people to come away with a relational understanding of justice,” Messmore said. “Our framework for thinking about social justice is trying to cultivate habits and virtues of relating rightly to other people and institutions in society.”

Social justice advocates often turn to government as the only institution capable of fixing social problems like homelessness, drug addiction, sex trafficking, AIDS in Africa, and the environment, Messmore said. But the government’s role isn’t to cultivate right relationships, it’a to protect them, he said.

The six lessons are organized around the different institutions that the Heritage Foundation believes are responsible for social justice. One lesson focuses on the family and another on the church.

Messmore acknowledged that some Christian leaders have argued about the role of social justice in the church, but he said that the debate actually revolves around questions about the nature of the gospel.

“Many people in that debate are not debating whether or not Christians should help people in need,” he said. “They are debating how you should prioritize that in relationship to other things.”

As a result, Messmore said both sides can gain from the Seek Social Justice material since both recognize a need to serve others.

A few things make Seek Social Justice different from other social justice training efforts. First, it doesn’t focus on activism or equipping students to become better protesters. Instead, Messmore said it encourages participants to step back and examine foundational questions like, ‘What does it mean to be human?’

Seek Social Justice also brings research on welfare, poverty, and other concepts into the picture.

“The Heritage Foundation isn’t an institution that operates charities, but we do shine light on which initiatives are working,” Messmore said. Instead of focusing the teaching on a professor behind a podium, the lessons starts with a story that highlights the relational aspect of social justice.

“We wanted to lead with stories of people who are in need,” Messmore said. “We had those people tell us what worked for them…Only at the end do we bring in experts to tease out the teaching points.”

For Messmore, there’s one way to tell if Seek Social Justice has been successful: “If a small group goes through this curriculum and hears the phrase, ‘justice institution’, if they can think of not just the justice system, but they can think of family sitting around table-then we’ve done our job.”

@Copyright 2011 WORLD Magazine – used with permission