Pans Plus

Although we don’t particularly want to admit it, the Church in the Western part of the world is not in a particularly healthy condition. There are are number of reasons for this, as you might expect, not all of them under our control. But there is at least one which I believe we could and should do something about. We seem, to me at least, to have lost our sense of direction.

I say this because it has become very clear that in the last half-century or so the Church has changed enormously, to the extent that it is in some ways almost unrecognisable. Much of this change has supposedly come about in order to enable our mission to the modern world, and here at least it has clearly not been a success. Parishes in most denominations which were flourishing even twenty years ago are now on their last legs, many have already passed into oblivion, and more will be following soon.

Numbers may not be everything, but without them there is nothing – certainly no viable parishes. People and money are essential to the life and work of the Church, and both are now in critically short supply. No doubt the rural downturn has contributed to the decline; the same with the movement of population – and especially the young – to the north, not to mention across the Tasman and further afield. Likewise the changes in our culture and in the way we live have been both very great and very fast. Television, different working hours, Sunday sport, consumerism, the debt economy, computers and the internet have created a world which could hardly have been imagined a generation ago.

And there is the intellectual climate in which we all live and breathe – for good and ill. I have thought for years that we have become quite hopeless at justifying, let alone recommending, the Christian faith to those who do not share it. For all our endless talk about mission, not to mention a ‘mission-shaped Church,’ we clearly haven’t a clue how to go about it. Indeed, it is obvious that often we have no real interest in mission at all – just in survival. We want to perpetuate the life of the institution, but what the purpose of the institution is in the first place, about that we have conflicting and not very clear ideas. Not only do we not know what we are selling – we have no real knowledge of the market either. Thus Professors Geering and Dawkins (to mention but two) can walk all over us, and when we dare to speak up at all, it is usually only to concede that they are making some good points, and that the free expression of opinions is a very good thing.

While acknowledging the importance of our changed circumstances, we have not really understood them. Most of all, we have not grasped a number of very important points:

1. Most people need meaning in their lives. They need to believe that the universe – and their place in it – make sense. Christianity provided this in the western world until the last couple of centuries or so. And it did so because it was believed to be in harmony with human experience. But once experience was thought to be at odds with theology, not surprisingly, problems arose. It became a question of one or the other, either Galileo or the Inquisition, either Darwin or Genesis. And when Galileo and Darwin turned out to be a lot kinder (i.e. Christian) than those who opposed them, then the damage was done. Furthermore, the sacredness of human life appeared to be badly undermined by Darwin, Marx and Freud and their disciples. Darwin desacralised the world, Marx desacralised the community, and Freud desacralised the human personality. Instead of being planned and inspired by God, all three became the products of blind and impersonal forces. Not a lot of meaning and significance was left to human existence after that!

2. Much of religion is often nothing more noble than magic, that is to say, a means of controlling life, of being useful. Christianity has been largely ousted from this role by science, and it is in the latter that most of our contemporaries in the west now put their faith. They have not lost faith as such, on the contrary their faith is flourishing, it’s just been transferred to another system of belief – witness their unquestioning acceptance of such things as quantum theory or general relativity, neither of which the vast majority of them can know anything about. It’s just that the ability to control life (such as it is) is now supplied by another set of presuppositions. Where some vestige of the magic is believed to linger – as in the healing activities (or otherwise) of people like Oral Roberts or Benny Hinn – then popular enthusiasm is more likely to follow. The same goes for the Crystal Cathedral and even Joyce Meyer, whose take on Christianity people clearly find useful in running their own lives.

3. And it’s not just that we have allowed God to be little more than a ghost of himself. We have done the same to ourselves. We are embarrassed by our immortality. We are hesitant to proclaim that we were designed and made for a glorious eternity beyond the grave. So the the very reason for the Gospel – the abolition of death by an Incarnate God who died and rose again – is no longer at the very heart of our proclamation and our public faith. As the Orthodox Liturgy says, Christ has died trampling down death by death. Before everything else, that is what Christianity is all about. I wonder if you agree?

(Written in 2011)