Life in the Churches!!!

On the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - site of Calvary and Jesus's tomb - you will see a row of chairs. They divide the territory of the Ethiopian from that of the Egyptian church, which both lay claim to portions of the roof; the rival monks frequently come to blows. The holiest site in Christendom is not a very Christian place.

Fighting over the rearrangement of deckchairs is something that comes naturally to modern Christians. In Britain this week the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, laid into the senior clergymen who frustrated his reforms in the 1990s.

He described the result: "A Church that is running out of cash and spending it on buildings, that has lost its vision and is becoming a club for the elderly."
He saw little grounds for optimism in "Fresh Expressions", the scheme of his successor, Rowan Williams, for evangelising the nation. If the Church of England were a human being, he dismally concluded, "the last rites would be administered at any moment". HaHa

All this is rather rich: Lord Carey spent most of his 10 years at Lambeth Palace blithely reassuring everyone that the C of E was in hearty good health. But he now admits his "decade of evangelism" was a flop.

We can exaggerate the death of Christian England. It is the still church spires that punctuate the landscape, and still church ceremonies which measure out our lives. More than 70 per cent of us claim to be Christian. But only four per cent of us go to church on Sundays. Church membership has fallen by a quarter over the past quarter-century.

Lifting our eyes to the hills, whence comes our help?

Today the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are re-Christianised nations. It is pastors from Senegal who come to evangelise secular France, and Nigerians who pack the pews in London.

Fully a third of the population of the planet professes Christ, compared to 20 per cent who are Muslims, and 14 per cent who are Hindus, (atheism boasts a puny three per cent). Though estimates differ on which faith is growing fastest, the prospects for the Church in Africa, South America and China are rosy.

But there are also reasons to be cheerful in Britain. In the introduction to his Religious Trends, Peter Brierley, the great expert on church attendance, quotes GK Chesterton: "Five times in the last 2,000 years the Church has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each case it was the dogs that died." HaHa

Looking closely at Brierley's statistics, three patterns emerge. The old institutional denominations - the traditional C of E, the Catholics and Presbyterians - are in decline.

So are the heretical Churches on the wacky fringes of the faith, the Jehovah's Witnesses and their strange brethren.

There is a scriptural echo here: "We played the flute for you, but you did not dance." Christ parodied those who could not understand their failure to win souls: "We sang a dirge but you did not mourn." Both the weird and the dull, the outlandish and the hidebound, fail. There is a third way.

The Churches that are growing are the ones which are orthodox but experimental: the Pentecostals and evangelicals, relaxed in style but strict in substance, liberal in all but doctrine and appealing not to liturgy but to grace.

They are terrifically embarrassing, of course, with their shouting and clapping; then again, "I will be even more undignified than this," said King David as he danced before the Lord. Decorum is bunk.

"Whenever two or three are gathered together in My name," said Christ, "there I am in the midst of them." God is no doubt just as delighted with seven old ladies muttering their responses in an echoing church as he is with 700 twenty-somethings bellowing God-rock.

Yet surely there is something in the attendance figures which shows that, as St Paul put it, "having the form of godliness but denying its power" is a recipe for a moribund Church.

The precursors of the Pentecostals were the Methodist field-preachers, speaking to the masses who could not, or would not, enter formal churches.
John Wesley vowed to "live and die an Anglican", but in time Methodism left the C of E, and has declined sharply in modern times (indeed, its profile is the grimmest of all the denominations). Churches, like all institutions, must renew themselves.

The success of the Alpha course - run at 7,000 churches across the UK, teaching the fundamentals of the faith to 200,000 people a year - shows the way. Alpha is not a missionary movement of the Billy Graham type: it is run through local churches, delivered by local vicars.

Such bottom-up organisations, as well as the "para-church" initiatives like New Wine, Spring Harvest and Soul Survivor, give great cause for hope and may confound Lord Carey's gloomy forecasts.

A book is published next month called Messages to the World: the statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University. According to Lawrence, two things stand out which help to explain bin Laden's extraordinary appeal.

One is his spiritual orthodoxy. Western apologists for Islamism might argue that bin Laden is fighting a war against American "imperialism" in the Middle East, but Prof Lawrence points out that the word "imperialism" does not occur once in all bin Laden's statements:

"For him, jihad is aimed not at an imperium but at 'global unbelief'". And he has "strong scriptural support" for the struggle, justifying it in language which directly echoes the sacred texts of Islam.

The other thing about bin Laden is his modernity. Professor Lawrence's book is a compendium of old-fashioned Islamic preaching gathered from a range of new media sources: video, the internet and satellite TV.

The world is witnessing a race between the religions, with the front-runners being radical Islam and evangelical Christianity. Traditional Christianity is losing ground, while the cultured Briton's favourite faith, "secular humanism", is nowhere.

What is the situation in the Church which you attend?

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