As the clever professor said on the BBC one Sunday recently: 'Religion has become relatively unimportant in this society.' And he is right, isn't he? Our society is going further and further from God, with increasing speed. No longer is there even a nominal understanding of Christian things to which we, as Christians, can relate.
We can now boast the highest level of unmarried teenage mothers of any developed country. Abortions are performed here at something like 500 a day! We have the largest prison population of any European country. An estimated million of our young people are using drugs. The great city of London is advertised in America by our Tourist Board as 'the gay city of the world' - and they don't mean that it is a city full of mirth. I needn't go on, for you can add more and more facts like those yourselves. Religion is relatively unimportant in our society.
Yes, I know that we have also become very clever: we know how to play around with genes; we can make babies in test-tubes; we know how to walk on the moon; no longer do missionaries in jungley places have to wait months and months to communicate with home - they can do it now at the speed of light. Science rules, OK?
But that also confirms to the popular mind that religion has become relatively unimportant in this society. And in the future it will become even more unimportant, because society will become even more corrupt, apart from some merciful divine intervention. The law of Entropy ensures that. So that is the bleak future into which we look. In tomorrow's world, as I see it, the unimportance of churches will steadily seem to increase. So how will churches react?
Nothing I say now must be taken to belittle the need for continual prayer for urgent divine intervention. Nothing that I say now must be taken to suggest the precious work of the Holy Spirit is less needful now. And if Christ should come again, everything I say now will be irrelevant! I do not doubt the over-arching sovereignty of God in these matters. But, equally, I am concerned that our responsibility is also involved. So, on the level of our responsibility, here are two possible scenarios of the future.
1) God our non-contemporary
First, there will be churches which sincerely feel that they must ignore this wicked world, and instead concentrate on keeping themselves as a kind of spiritual ghetto, preserving unchanged much-loved patterns of the past. The language used in their meetings, often including arcane terminology, will not be that in common use today; their hymns will be strictly from the 17th and 18th centuries; their style of meeting will be that of 100 years ago, and always restricted to monologue preaching to a silent, captive audience.
For a while, such churches will grow, because older folk will come to them from other churches that are struggling with the need to be more contemporary in the style and language of their meetings. And, make no mistake, for those who gather in such a traditional church there is spiritual ministry and Scripture comfort; for happily, they understand it all.
Two problems they overlook, how-ever. First, the great gulf between the ethos of such a church and the ethos of our society becomes steadily greater as time passes, so that that church actually contributes to the fact that religion is thought unimportant to society, for it is not intelligible to that rapidly changing society, at any level. Consequently, that church is not adequately 'preparing God's people for works of service' in the real world.
Secondly, and worse than that, such a church is also failing to represent its divine Head accurately. For one in-escapable truth about the nature of God is that whenever, wherever and however he revealed truths about himself, the expression of that divine truth was always, always, locked into the precise culture, location and time into which it was sent. God has always been meticulously contemporary in the manner of his revelations. He is a contemporaneously relevant God. Therefore, not to be meaningfully contemporary in our worship and witness is to misrepresent him.
That is one scenario I fear will develop in the future, because the beginnings of it are already here. It is a scenario which troubles me personally because it seems to me biblically so indefensible - it troubles me that such a church is doing what is a comfort only to themselves, rather than being a meaningful light to our society. I find it difficult to think there can be long-term success in that, though, at the same time, I cannot but love the sincere folk who feel that is the way they must go.
2) Changing culture
But there is another scenario which I see developing for the future. Thank-fully there are examples of it beginning to take shape already. There are some churches grappling with the concept of biblical change. How then do churches remain relevant to the changing cultures around them? They must do so by observing the Pauline principles of Christian communication. You know his words: 'I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews, I became like a Jew. To those under the law, I became like one under the law . . . to those not having the law, I became like one not having the law. To the weak, I became weak. I have become all things to all people and I do all this for the sake of the gospel' (1 Corinthians 9.19-23).
In other words, Paul was determined to remove every possible human obstacle preventing the unbeliever from listening to the gospel. Only one obstacle would Paul allow to remain - the offence of the cross. The Holy Spirit can deal with that!
There are some churches among us already beginning to work out the implications of these principles; please God in the future many more will. It seems to me this is the only attitude which holds the promise of rightly representing the contemporary relevance of the great Head of the churches, and so preventing churches from becoming anachronistic in their day and age. As one octogenarian once said to me: 'John, we've served our day; now the younger people must work out how to serve theirs.'
It is never easy to struggle with this need to be biblically contemporary. But struggle we must, for the sake of the gospel. Older folk may find it hardest; they know the old hymns and the Authorised Version so well. Younger folk must be patient and spiritually gentle, even though they find AV language strange in today's world, and Victorian hymns oddly sentimental. There must be so much pastoral care, one for the other. If older and younger can handle these issues as though they are both sitting at the foot of the cross they both love, change can come with spiritual profit and blessing to both. As another octogenarian said to me a while ago, after singing one of the better Graham Kendrick songs: 'John, all my prejudices have been swept away.' Gadsby and Kendrick had both been a means of blessing to him. Think of that!
This is not to say that being contemporary is the panacea to correct lack of church growth in any church. Nothing, but nothing will ever take the place of a lack of the Spirit of Christ so obvious in a church that everyone coming in will be forced to say: 'God is with you.' At the same time, however, the meetings of the church must make it obvious that the God who is with us is contemporarily relevant, and not the God once relevant in an ancient time-warp. This, too, is our responsibility.
I want to finish on this matter of being spiritually gentle - for if we fail to find the secret of that, situations will polarise and break up. There was a time when I, as a young man, knew the answers to everything. And I could detect an Arminian at 100 yards' distance, and declaim vigorously against him.
Now that I am older, I've had time to realise that what I was doing (so freely, then) was speaking harshly of another member of my Lord's earthly Body. Something has gradually made me realise that when I speak of another whose faith is also in my Lord, I must do so with spiritual gentleness. I must speak clearly about anything which is biblically wrong. But to be harsh is not the same as being clear.
One thing I fear, as the future unfolds, is that we will begin to talk in a brutal way, as worldlings so often do of each other, of believers who differ from us. That possibility troubles me, for it has the effect of setting in concrete situations which can only bring damage to churches. When believers talk like worldlings about each other, it will be sadly true that religion has finally become unimportant, not only in our society, but also in the church. The glory will have gone!
John Appleby
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