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December 05, 2004
Only Presbyterian?
Surfing around the blogs, I found this hilarious yet serious post on the Rev Mike's House of Homiletic Hash. Titled "Your church might be Presbyterian if ..."; it could be a commentary on the wider church, particularly in the developed nations.
It is a sad fact that since the "Age of Enlightenment" dawned in the late 18th Century, the Church (in the widest context) has been under siege both from without - those who have challenged the existence of God through "scientific" analysis of the scripture - and those within who, through their blinkered refusal to open their hearts and minds to the true Word of God, have given Christianity a bad name - and a reputation for bigotry. You have only to look at the argument between "Creationists" and the scientifically proven position of "Evolutionists" to see what I mean. Personally I find no conflict - after all, God can use any mechanism He chooses to create us! And He hasn't finished yet; evolution is still in progress - a fact that can be verified by examining the skeletons of our own ancestors - and comparing the differences between them and our own!
The youth of today have been fed a diet of Hollywood pseudo-religion and the Humanist mantras from the Age of Enlightenment. Coupled with the plethora of material things around them - and which most of the developed world now regards as essential to decent living - is it any wonder these young people have no desire to get involved in a religion that they see as irrelevant, tied up in "rules" and demanding that they pay respect to some unseen and - to them - unknowable God who may or may not (according to the Politicians and the Social Workers) exist? They see a Church full of "old" people, run by "old" people, and would rather not be involved - thank you very much. These are a generation that have been taught that the world "owes" them respect, but they are not expected to give any themselves - unless it's to a soccer star, film star, pop star, or the boy or girl who is the toughest, nastiest, and/or most violent in their group.
Church simply doesn't enter into it.
All things have a starting point and I would suggest that this situation is the result of a very long running struggle for the soul of the Gospel - one which, for the Western half of Christianity at least, goes back to the Reformation and the fanatical activities and preachments of some of the more extreme reformers. Among these I would include John Knox and Calvin with, on the Catholic side, the leaders of the Inquisition and probably quite a few more. Certainly the response of Queen Mary I and her husband, Philip II of Spain to the reformation - burn them - didn't endear the Catholic community to anyone. But then, neither did Knox's offensive and rude pronouncements on a wide range of things. The Protestants were pretty good at stoning and burning as well - the "Witch burnings" were inspired by Protestant Witch Hunters and a lot of those were simply folk who made the mistake of expressing a desire to return to the Catholic certainties.
The bumpy ride of Christianity with its complete polarisation into two equally fanatical camps in the 16th to 18th Century meant that the Gospel message of love and consideration got buried in the tide of hatred and fanaticism. Reading the Visitation records of the Bishops of the period you could be forgiven if you wondered where the Gospel had got to under them. They show no concern for the teaching or propagation of the Gospel, being concerned with finding out if any of their clergy showed "Papist" sympathies. One wrote to all the Churchwardens demanding to know if any of the clergy were prone to wearing a surplice or any other idolatrous garment of the "Papist Style." Readings of sermons, read from a book inherited from an uncle or a predecessor - and which lasted for a minimum of an hour and a half - were not unusual, so it is also not surprising to learn that, in this period, it was common for the menfolk to turn up for the beginning of the service, stay for a short period and then filter out "to take a comfort break" - ie: escape the boredom. Woe betide any serving man or wench who tried to follow the Master's example, though; they were forced to stay for the duration! Little wonder then that the working classes found something else to amuse themselves as soon as the yoke of the Master and Mistress was no longer so tightly binding them to their employers! Equally, the pomposity of the Parson and his self-righteous and often bombastic approach to anyone he regarded as a social inferior (everyone except his Patron!), soon drove the better educated and moneyed classes to seek an alternative to the stilted and bigotted views expressed Sunday by Sunday in the Churches.
Enter the Age of Enlightenment. If the God proclaimed in the Churches was such an oppressive and repressive personage, if the Parson and the rest of the clergy would not acknowledge the advance of science and the changing society around them, then a new vision, a new "God" was bound to find more appeal. The Churches all fell into the same trap - everyone not inside the Church was doomed to Hell (probably most within it as well!) in their twisted vision of the Gospel, so the seekers after enlightenment, who by now had access to other sources of information, philosophy, and thought could look elsewhere - and did. Out of this was born the "Humanist" Theory - man is basically good, but corrupted by his environment. Nature versus nurture.
This started the decline in attendance and the decline in religious belief, but it doesn't necessarily mean that people no longer believed in God - the growth of "spiritualistic" activities testifies to something else. The Church also lost moral authority and credibility in its inability to deal effectively with the slaughter of the first Great War and then in its inability to address the horror of aerial bombardment in the Second. Why would the God of peace - the Creator and "Gentle Jesus meek and mild" of the hymns allow this? Why did he not answer prayers for it to stop, to keep Tommy, Uncle Dudley and all alive?
The children of the war - particularly those who survived the blitz on the major cities and ports and who did their growing among the death and the rubble - came to believe that there was no God. Not one that they could identify with anyway! And for this, the Churches must accept the blame, indeed, they still fall into the same trap today - they either attempt to obscure the truth - or try to oversimplify it.
Look at the attempts to persuade young people to come to church. You hear all the buzz words - "relevance" - "exciting" - "youth centred" - "uplifting" - "inspiring" - and yet, when you look around, the few young people there look embarrassed and the over thirties (actually usually the over 50's!) are waving their hands in the air and trying hard to make the trite choruses into something meaningful. Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe that we have to reach out to children and young people - I simply do not think that approaching it like some 1960's campfire campout is the right way. These young folk are intelligent, they are educated, and they have some serious questions. If you try to fob them off with trite answers and platitudes you will convince them (are convincing them!) that there is nothing in the Christian Church but a bunch of silly people who get high on silly songs and mutual hysteria.
This is further reinforced by the condescending attitude of the media - and the glee with which any Vicar who is caught acting out of the expected po-faced piousness is "exposed" in the press. Anyone would believe, and this is probably another legacy of the pompous piety of the 16th to 19th Century clergy, that putting on a dog-collar instantly converts the wearer from normal human being to some sort of pure and perfect version of super human. I can only think of one man in that league - and they nailed him to a cross on our behalf!
So, the church today suffers from the legacy of the power struggles of the 16th to 19th Centuries and the hangover of the worst of the Reformation - including a lot of very suspect theology and Biblical understanding - and the derision which accompanied the growth of the Humanist philosophy of the Age of Reason. The late Medieval Church needed reform - it needed to be kicked out of its closed vision of a "saved clergy and everyone else in Hell". it needed to rediscover its origins and re-establish contact with the true message of the Gospel. Neither wing did so - and now we have to start out afresh.
Returning to the points raised in the original post which started this rant. We have to find a way for Christians everywhere to put aside the differences of opinion in how we worship. We have to find a way to actually rediscover what and who we worship, and we have to rediscover our real roots. I for one think that the Jesus who walked the roads of Galilee, who ate with his friends, and who died on the Cross would not recognise any of the rituals or practices we currently use. He probably would not recognise our interpretation of his teachings, either - and may not have much sympathy with our understanding of them! We need to move our belief, nay our faith, out of Churches and buildings and heirarchies and into the family unit. Worship for Christians needs to return to where it is in Judaism - in the home and in the family. We need to restore the daily rituals around the evening meal, the learning about our faith from our parents, and the practice of our faith in the community. Then the Churches will begin to refill.
Changing the worship patterns may produce a quick fix, it may increase the numbers, but it is almost always short term. The fun wears off, the joy fades, and we are left with a shell, because the worship is not about the actions or the songs or even the excited and incoherent prayers, the gabbled readings. It is about God, it is about worship, and about the message of the Gospel - Love your neighbour as yourself. When we can understand this, when we can actually face up to our lack of knowledge and understanding of God, when we can openly debate tricky issues and admit our ignorance, when we can explore and seek genuine understanding, then we can worship properly.
The young people outside the Church don't want a Church that is always trying to pretend that they are "happy" and "joyful" all the time. They are not fooled, they know this is not the human condition. What they are looking for is something honest, something which offers them a genuine vehicle in which they can explore what they believe and why, which offers them something spiritual which is not fleeting and false. They see the Telly Evangelists and think - false, money-grabber. It is this kind of religion which gives all Christians a bad name, and it is this image that the media and the anti-Christian factions revel in promoting. It is an image we have to break!
If the Church wishes to attract the young then it has to start by stopping the peddling of what Pratchett calls, in "Science of the Discworld", "lies for children". It is time we stopped clinging to outdated and childish images of an unbelievably wimpish Jesus and a God who intervenes to respond to our every whim. He does answer our prayers - but by giving us what we NEED, which is not necessarily what we want. This is not the image conveyed by the average Sunday School lesson, or the average sermon, and least of all by the Telly Evangelist and his false appeals for money - which any but the terminally desperate knows will wind up in some new extravagance for his own comforts!
Religion is not about superstitious practices, it is not about being on a permanent "happy" high, it is about getting to know and understand God and our own spiritual growth. This means opening the Church up to re-discovering the mystical nature of the origins of its beliefs, of learning to be open to finding new ways to understand the scriptures - and of finding ways to explore what worship is really all about.
If we don't, our faith, Christianity, will dissappear as these congregations age and slowly dwindle into nothing. If we do not tackle this boldly now, we will have a lot to answer for in due course - and the thought of confronting God's sorrow at my failure frightens me more than anything else I can think of.
Posted by The Gray Monk at December 5, 2004 10:59 AM