Things look bleak for our country and our world as the Summer months lie ahead. Many chickens are coming home to roost – the profligate spending of borrowed money by all the major economies , the ruptures to trade caused by the particularly long covid epidemic in China and of course, the war in Ukraine, surely one of the vilest and most disgusting episodes in recent history. But underlying all this is the wholesale abandonment of the Christian faith in the West.
The Old Testament is crammed full of instances where God abandons His people because of their unfaithfulness, even though He is always willing to have them back if only they will hear His voice and obey it. In our own national history we see the immoral and godless society of the 18th century, abandoned to the spiritual death of the Latitudinarians of the Church of England and the soulless routines of nonconformity. All seemed lost until John Wesley and George Whitfield woke the country out of its rebellious slumber and preached repentance from sin and faith in Christ. And out of this great spiritual awakening came the huge burst of evangelism through the Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society that took the Gospel to every continent across the world.
Is all lost? We are certainly in much the same position as was our country then, except that by denying the realities of science and becoming hooked on the lies of philosophy, we are in an even more parlous state. And yet we know that God’s power is made perfect through our weakness and if we have the faith of only a grain of mustard seed, it can move mountains.
The recent statistical researches of a Christian mathematician reveal that the Church of England will disappear over the next thirty years, with the Roman Catholics and Methodists declining even faster. He puts down this drastic forecast to the fact that their adherents are not “infectious” – they seem incapable of passing on their faith to those around them. An ecclesiastical counterpart to the classic English trait of keeping one’s opinions and feelings to oneself. That has to change.
But alongside this spiritual dumbness is the debilitating effect of a church leadership that is unsure of exactly what it believes and allows itself to become embroiled in worldly controversies which are designed for the sole reason of blunting its effectiveness and clouding its message. Here the effects of a university-educated priesthood and episcopate and an increasingly university-educated population are having their dire effects. These institutions are now teaching people to have closed minds to anything except unbelief and self-centredness – they are even denying universally acknowledged scientific fact. For the moment, this may be a time to change our priorities.
Wesley and Whitefield – and William Grimshaw later – proclaimed the Gospel not to the rich and influential, but to the poor people of this country. Remember those tears running down the black faces of the coal miners at Kingswood as the great preacher from Lancashire proclaimed Jesus as their Saviour? Or the child workers in the lead mines of the Fan in Mid Wales, who spent their lunch break praying and singing? Such people are the very ones that the Psalms teach us to love in Christ’s Name and their minds are not so easily distracted and warped by the complications and conundrums in the affairs of this world. Interestingly, it was said of Jesus that the common folk heard Him gladly.
The Bishop of Burnley is surely right when he urges us to devote our energies to taking the Christian message to the many social housing estates of the country. But that will never happen if we dissolve parishes, shut churches and remove clergy from these very places, abandoning them to the devil, as many dioceses like Leicester, are doing right now. This is not only an idiotic strategy, but also a deeply faithless one. We might ask, like the Old Testament prophet, “Can these stones live?” but God will never fail to give the resounding answer “yes!”
