Recently a friend, a leader in his denomination, recounted an experience he had in hospital. In the next bed was a gravely ill elderly man. One morning while being given a bed bath, he collapsed. The nurse repeatedly pressed the alarm bell to summon help. The alarm didn’t function. The nurse began calling for help. My friend jumped up, rushed into the corridor and called a nurse from the nurses’ station. Within a couple of minutes the ward was flooded with nurses and doctors. A crash cart was wheeled in as they tried to resuscitate the patient, but without success. The elderly man had died.
Any dispassionate examination of the health of the institutional Church in the UK today would have to admit that it is on life support and the prognosis is bleak. The symptoms are all there, my friend said; ‘we see slow decline, congregations dissolved, small, faithful groups of believers labouring for the Lord, but minimal conversion fruit, a dearth of younger families and an ageing profile of church membership.’
A remnant
Ecclesiastical organisations such as the Church of England assure us that they can see the green shoots of recovery, yet they are whistling in the dark. Research about how the C of E is perceived indicates that ‘very many people have no real sense of who or what the Church is, who it is for, or how it operates’. Many people, it found, ‘do not think about the church at all’.
The question confronting us is: How are we to live as a remnant in an increasingly hostile environment?
We know that God can make dry bones live (Ezek 37), however, we are forced to acknowledge that we can’t. We have to accept the reality that the Church today is a steadily shrinking remnant. The question confronting us is: How are we to live as a remnant in an increasingly hostile environment?
Our responsibility
Kathy Gyngell wrote ‘I was thinking about Christian survival through the last “dark ages” recently and the role of monks. We do seem to be heading towards a new “dark ages” and if we are to survive and emerge from it we will need to develop some form of accepting and supporting community.’
To do this we have to accept our own responsibility. We ‘mere Christians’ too easily shrug our shoulders and think it the responsibility of church leaders to see us through any crisis. When the officer corps defects to the enemy the rank-and-file turn to guerrilla warfare. We have to hold firmly to the understanding that we are the foundational generation for the future shape of the Church: how we live and act today will shape the future of a Church which will face difficult times. The decisions we take today will affect our children in the faith for generations.
New communities
It is hard to face a crisis or endure pressure on your own: faithful Christians need each other, and will do so increasingly in the days ahead. Denominational loyalty is a luxury we can no longer afford; most of their distinctives refer to systems of church governance which is a poor basis for unity.
We have to abandon those attitudes we inherited from the mainstream as no longer fit for purpose.
The congregation of which I am part belongs to one of the more conservative of the UK’s denominations. Life-long denominational members are in a minority in our small congregation. We have believers from at least eight other denominations. What drew us was not the question of church governance but the congregation’s biblical stance and the deepening fellowship. We have to abandon those attitudes we inherited from the mainstream as no longer fit for purpose. We must seek God and then look for others who are serious about God and join with them.
A new monasticism
Bonhoeffer said: ‘The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this.’ He wrote that in January, 1935. Nearly ninety years on we are no further forward.
Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option has made many aware of the need for a new monasticism. Forming new communities may be fine for a small handful of groups in the USA, and even a few in Europe, but most of us are not going to uproot everything in order to live in proximity to others. I don’t believe this is on the cards unless we have a very specific calling from God which is authenticated by the leaders of our congregation. The vast majority of us will have to work out how to deepen our fellowship where we are, where God has placed us.
The vast majority of us will have to work out how to deepen our fellowship where we are, where God has placed us.
As long ago as 1982, the Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote: ‘What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.’ As we look to the building of communities, of necessity we have to start small. Don’t run before you can walk.
Being something
As Solzhenitsyn says, if you are powerless to change the major currents of society, you can at least live with integrity, preserve your family, and help your neighbours. ‘We must recognise that God does not want us to do anything, He has things pretty well in hand. He wants us to be something. It is who we are where we are which matters.’
This is no retreat: it is the living out of Jesus’s shortest parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough’ (Matt 13:33).
Elsewhere it is said that ‘it takes three to make a revolution, you, me and someone else.'
The Rev. Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister; now a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Check out his many incisive articles on his blog,A Grain of Sand.
