We can't go back to the past
The church needs to cast a positive vision for the future, not try to go back to a time which no longer exists
Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?”
For it is not wise to ask such questions. Ecclesiastes 7:10
Over the last few days I’ve been reading Peter Hitchens’ book The Abolition of Britain. In it, he argues - persuasively - that things used to be better in this country. That’s not to say that things were perfect in the past, or that every advance of the last hundred years has been a bad thing. But it is true that things have decayed rapidly in many ways over the last thirty years or so, and the Christian Britain which Hitchens grew up in no longer exists.
One of the things which has struck me about the book is that Hitchens doesn’t seem to have any solutions. In a recent interview with Peter Whittle, he said that he originally wrote the book as a manifesto to galvanise people to action, but because that didn’t happen, twenty years on it has become a eulogy. However, I think it’s worth asking the question - if you’re not proposing any concrete changes, what exactly do you want to happen? My sense from reading the book has been, things were better in the old days - so … we should just go back to then. (I should add, I haven’t yet finished the book, so he may yet come onto solutions. But it doesn’t read that like to me at the moment.)
I see a lot of this “turn the clock back” thinking within conservative circles, but this is doubly so within the church. It seems to me there are a lot of traditional Christians who want to go back a few years and do things like they did when more people went to church. The problem is, the way we did do church back was appropriate back then. That world is no longer - in my opinion, it’s gone forever. I love the Book of Common Prayer, but it was written in a particular context, a context which feels increasingly alien to many ordinary people.
If we want the world to listen, if we want people to sit up and take notice, then I think we need to offer something new. In fact, not simply new but radically different to the way we used to do things. Please don’t misunderstand me - I’m not saying we need to relax our standards and be more ‘seeker-sensitive’ (i.e. dumb church down to try and be more ‘attractive’ to newcomers). I believe we need to be MORE unashamedly Christian than ever before, we need to embrace more deeply what it means to be the church.
Let me explain what I mean. I want to start with how the world has changed before moving on to how we can do church in today’s world in a way which makes sense.
How the world has changed
It’s fundamental to understand that the world has radically changed in the last hundred years. Maybe we have never witnessed such a huge transformation in such a short space of time. In particular, technology has revolutionised our lives - who would have thought fifty years ago that virtually the entirety of the world’s literature could be available in a device you carry in your pocket? (And who would ever have thought that most people would mostly use that device looking at cat videos? - but that’s a story for another day…)
Although the world has changed in all sorts of different ways, there are two key areas I want to highlight which have a direct bearing on the church.
The age of entitlement
Many people, especially young people, think that the world owes them simply by virtue of them being alive. This is a point which Mike Ovey makes explicitly in his GAFCON address (which I mentioned in my post about revival). Human rights have led us to believe that we are entitled to just about everything. Young people are growing up more narcissistic than ever - the sociologist Dr. Jean Twenge has written about it extensively.
This has been going on for a long time now. Look at what C.S. Lewis said in his customarily insightful fashion in God in the Dock:
Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met [to sharing the gospel] is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin … The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.
Not only was he right, but things have only worsened as we’ve passed into the 21st century. Most ancient peoples believed in at least some sense of sin - that’s why they had so many gods. They knew that they had to keep the gods happy, or their crops wouldn’t grow (etc). The world was full of suffering - death was much more a part of life than it is today. Many mothers and babies died in childbirth, for example. Today, most people simply don’t accept that there could be anything morally wrong with them.
I was really struck by this while watching this interview with Katharine Birbalsingh:
Near the end of the interview, Katharine talks about the resistance she has encountered from just about every quarter. No-one wants to emulate Michaela and duplicate their methods elsewhere. Why should this be the case, especially given that it is one of the best-performing schools in the country? I say the reason is because she believes in something like ‘original sin’ - that children are not born as little angels, but need training and instruction in how to live. The reason people hate her is because they will not hear what she has to say. In the words of John’s Gospel: “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed” (John 3:20).
Why is this such a big issue for the church? This is perhaps THE core issue that the church needs to understand to make an impact. The reason is, if we are preaching the gospel message as: “Jesus died on the cross for your sins,” then people aren’t going to hear what we want them to. They are going to think “isn’t that nice. Jesus died for my sins, so I can live my life however I want and not worry about going to hell.”
The penny only dropped for me on this relatively recently: at my old church we had many services which were designed for visitors, and every time we preached the message: “Jesus died on the cross for your sins, and if you say sorry, God will forgive you.” But it didn’t seem to have the impact we hoped for. Why were people so lacklustre, why did people not want to come back to church? Why were people not being challenged and ‘getting it’? Eventually I realised that the message we thought we were preaching was different to the message people were actually hearing.
If we do not explicitly call people to repentance, they won’t see the need to repent. It’s as simple as that.
The age of desire
The second way the world has changed is the way that people are motivated more than ever by desire. We want more now, as a whole, than any society in history. This is due to many of the changes which happened in the course of the twentieth century. To name but a few:
Wealth: Most people didn’t have much in the way of disposable income or leisure time prior to the last century. For many people, the goal of life was survival rather than pleasure.
Technology: washing machines and other appliances have freed up a lot of time which was previously spent on domestic chores.
Mass media: We can now see the kind of lives that people lead beyond our immediate community. We can see the lavish lifestyles of the rich and famous. On TV you can see beautiful and attractive people doing things which are far more interesting than your mundane job.
Advertising: We are now bombarded with advertising designed to make us dissatisfied with our lives. Because mass media - especially the internet - is all-pervasive, we cannot escape advertising.
The pill: one of the biggest effects of the sexual revolution was to decouple the idea of sex from reproduction. Sex came to be seen as something which could be enjoyed for its own sake. People stopped wanting to find someone who they loved and who loved them, and instead went looking for the best possible sexual experience.
Pornography: I wanted to include this on its own because the effects have been so pernicious. Pornography has so warped people’s desires that it is jeopardising ordinary relationships.
The net effect of all these developments is that we are now a society which is governed by desire. If we want something, we should have it. The idea of self-sacrifice and putting the needs of others above ourselves is largely gone.
You can see the difference across generations in the Royal Family: think about the late Queen Elizabeth II, who desired to serve and put her duty to the country first. She set aside her own desires in order to serve. Contrast that with the way that Harry and Meghan have behaved. It seems to me that their ‘needs,’ i.e. what they want, come above just about anything else.
How does all this impact on the church? It’s a problem because the church is still proclaiming a message of abstinence: “stop doing this, stop doing that, and say ‘no’ to everything you want because those desires are wrong.” That message might have worked in days when there wasn’t so much temptation shoved in our faces all the time. But it has got to the point where the world’s temptations are overwhelming. If the only message we have is to simply say ‘no’ to temptation, we’re not going to make any headway.
This comedy sketch does a very good job at caricaturing the problem in the church’s approach. If you haven’t seen it before, you might find it cuts much too close for comfort…
We can’t say “stop it” to people’s problems and temptations and expect that to make a difference. If someone has a desire, saying no to that desire won’t get very far. It might have worked to a point when we were not surrounded by temptations every day, but it doesn’t get anywhere in a society which is dominated by desire. If we want to make a difference today, we need to offer people something that they want even more.
Of course, I am not saying anything new. For example, Thomas Chalmers said it 200 years ago:
THERE are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love of the world - either by a demonstration of the world's vanity, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it; or, by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection for a new one.
My purpose is to show, that from the constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual and that the latter method will alone suffice for the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that domineers over it.
The problem is not that Christians don’t know this. The problem is that we haven’t really taken this message to heart. The church is still largely operating under the ‘STOP IT’ model of sanctification. The message is ‘stop sinning,’ rather than ‘stop sinning, turn to God’s ways of righteousness, and discover the goodness of God.’ Repentance is not just a turning away from evil, it is a turning towards God and his ways. Think about David, who discovered that the law of the Lord was “sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10).
Life with God is meant to be life as it was supposed to be. Christians are supposed to be modelling to the world how wonderful life is when we live it in the way that God intended, with him. Instead, it seems to me that a lot of Christians simply model the fact that the Christian life is rather a drudge - you turn up to church, say your prayers, don’t do any ‘fun stuff’ in life, and then get eternal life at the end as a reward. This is not the Christian life!
The church needs to show people how good it is to walk with God. We, in a sense, need to do a better job of advertising than the advertisers. We should want people to be able to look at our lives and say “I want some of that.” That’s how Jesus lived: he lived a perfect life, and people were drawn to him because of it. We are not Jesus (obviously!), but if we are united to Christ by faith we should expect something of his goodness and love to shine through us. That doesn’t mean everyone will respond well to us - some will hate us, as Jesus said (Matthew 10:24-25). But there will be some who do respond and turn to Christ.
How the church should change
I’ve said that the church has two things it really needs to do to respond to the way that the world has changed:
To call people to repentance, rather than preach that God will forgive us regardless of what we do.
To show the world that God’s ways are better and more desirable than anything the world has to offer.
The first thing is something that the Book of Common Prayer did well, and it’s something which churches can learn to do by following its example. I’d like to focus on the second thing, which is more tricky. How do we show the world that God is more desirable than what the world has to offer?
This is where turning the clock back to what the church used to be like isn’t going to help. The solution to the mess we are in is not doing church in the way that they used to do in previous generations: turning up on a Sunday, singing some hymns, listening to a sermon, saying your prayers, and so on. All of those are good things, don’t get me wrong! But we need more. What we need is intimacy with God.
One of the spiritual practices I recommend to everyone (if I could, I would make this mandatory) is to read a Psalm every day. Simply read a Psalm, along with your daily Bible reading. Start from the beginning, and read sequentially - if it’s a long Psalm, split it into smaller chunks. When you get to the end, go back to the beginning. It’s really is that simple!
Why is this such a helpful practice? Because the Psalms help you to build intimacy with God. Look at these verses:
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God. Psalm 42:1Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalm 34:8Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4
I could go on and on. Let me ask you a question, and be honest with yourself: do you have the attitude towards God expressed in these verses? If not, why not?
I believe that we need to know God like the psalmists did. They didn’t merely know information about him, they sought him and they knew him. And, through their words, we can get to know him too! We should keep reading them and keep praying them, and gradually they will start to shape us.
This is why I believe that we need something deeper than a return to traditional ‘prayer-hymn sandwich’ style church. If that was working the church wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in right now. We need to go beyond techniques, and beyond forms of service, to seek the Lord in everything we do. We need to get to know him better, to know his ways, to know his goodness.
As I said in my post on revival, we need to be prepared for God to show up and teach us things about the way that we do church. Perhaps there are things we should be doing differently. He will show us! All I know is, an encounter with God will leave us changed. That’s the way it should be - and he is the one who can lead us into the future.