Where do we go from here? -
Paul Thompson
In
1775 when the economist Matthew Boulton went into business with the
scientist/engineer Isaac Watts and started to produce steam-powered engines, the
world was in for one of the biggest changes in its history. The steam engine
revolutionised our farmland economy and the industrial age began. People moved
from the land to the new factories, small weaving families were put out of
business by the large cotton and weaving mills. Large-scale mining became
possible for coal, iron ore, tin etc. Transport began to speed up as trains
appeared, the canals gave up horses for steam, and ships gave up sail.
People’s lives were transformed and many of the old skills were lost forever.
The industrial revolution had begun and for the last 228 years we have been
gleaning the benefits of industrial manufacturing, mass production and the age
of science. It has been an age when the advances of science and technology have
ruled all of our lives. An age which we can now call the modern age where the
watchword might have been ‘if you can prove it then I might believe’ and
when even the churches used the scientific techniques of argument and evidence
to persuade people about the truth of the Gospel.
Today
we are in the middle of a similar upheaval in our society. When I was at
theological college in the late 70’s, there was a computer at Leeds
University. It took up a whole room and was, for it’s day a very powerful
machine. Within a few years powerful computers were being sold that would fit on
your desk, and those of us who have recently bought computers have on our desks,
machines that are even more powerful than the old computer at Leeds. Computers
are replacing people in just the same way that the steam engine replaced people
250 years ago. Production lines are now computerised, whole accounting
departments are run by one or two people with computers. Managing directors have
replaced many of their secretarial staff with computers. The streets are
littered with cameras watching our every move and monitored by computers. We
have computerised cookers, washing machines, cars, dishwashers, and if the
future is to believed even fridges that order their own refills to be delivered
to your door. Computers rule our lives so that for many of us it is difficult to
see how we would manage without them.
In the world
of religion and the search for spirituality the signs of this upheaval have been
with us for some time. For example the ideas behind the New Age movement did not
start in the ‘Boomer’ generation of the ‘hippy’ peace movement. They
were simply adopted by them into the hippy culture. Many of the ideas had come
from ancient eastern religions and had become popular in the west through
organisations like the Theosophical Society of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the
Human Potential movement of George Gurdjieff, and the Thelema Community of
Aleister Crowley. Drawing on the myths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamic Sufi
mysticism, and Zoroastrianism, as well as the western myths of the Knights
Templar, Ritual Magick and
more, these movements of the early 20th century attempted to find
alternatives to the declining Christian tradition of the day. Here, astrology,
drug-induced spirituality; alternative lifestyles and the like replaced what
were seen as the outdated and useless values of Christendom. Even if people were
inclined to return to the churches during the time of two world wars, it is
nevertheless the case that these alternative philosophical and spiritual
traditions were already emerging at the beginning of the 20th century
as people became more and more disillusioned by and alienated from the Church.
Whichever
way you look at it we are in a time of upheaval and change unprecedented since
the beginning of the industrial revolution and when we are honest with ourselves
we can sense it, even if we don’t always recognise what it is. Some of the
truths our parents took for granted seem to be harder and harder to defend. Even
the idea of truth itself seems to be being challenged. Some have called it a
technological revolution because of the obvious difference the computer makes to
our lives. Some theologians refer to it as the second reformation because of the
way that all of this is affecting the Churches. Clearly something is happening
and the widening generation gap which seemed to start with the beginning of
‘Rock & Roll’ in the sixties is just one of many signs of that change.
Something happened in the sixties.
The
young people of the 40’s and 50’s, born from about 1925 – 1940 and largely
brought up during the privations of the war that danced to the jazz of Glen
Millar and later to the rock and roll of Buddy Holly, had largely the same
values as their parents. They could see a world that needed to be rebuilt for a
better future. The damage of the war was still being repaired. Goods were still
largely in short supply. Industry and farming was being rebuilt. These were the
‘builders’ of a new world who saw the beginning of the United Nations, NATO,
the Health service, and a period of prosperity that caused Macmillan in the
sixties to say ‘you’ve never had it so good’.
Then
came my generation. We were the children of these ‘builders’ and to us the
war and all it meant to our parents seemed like ancient history. We had all been
born in that bulge of births after the war and were teenagers of the 60’s
& 70’s. The press called us ‘baby boomers’. Things were going well.
There were plenty of goods in the shops, people had jobs and the institutions
built by our parents we took for granted. The cloud on the horizon for us was
that we didn’t see the point of building for a better future. None of us were
going to live that long! The Berlin Wall, the Cold War, the Cuba Crisis, the
assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the winter of
discontent when all the lights went out, all persuaded us that the world was
falling apart and that we would all probably die in a nuclear holocaust sometime
soon. For some the best plan was to opt out of society altogether, or at least
opt out of its values, and so the values of our parents were abandoned. This was
the age of the drug culture, free sex, long hair, coloured spectacles, loud
colours in our clothes and the hippy movement who proclaimed the dawning of the
Age of Aquarius, now called the New Age.
This
‘boomer’ generation also saw signs of change in the churches. This was the
age of the rise of the Charismatic movement with its emphasis on experiencing
the power of the Holy Spirit and subsequently the start of the house church
movement as individual charismatics began to break away from their churches and
church leaders. Many of those house churches have become the ‘new churches’
of today with their large buildings and congregations that are millions of miles
away from their origins. It was also the age of the deconstruction of doctrine
marked by John Robinson’s provocative book ‘Honest to God’ which questions
some of the ‘supernatural’
assumptions of the Christian faith and by David Edwards’ provocative
statements on television as he told us that the resurrection was ‘more than a
conjuring trick with bones’.
Now,
our children are the teenagers and young adults of today and their world is
about as far removed from the world of our parents, as it is possible to get.
This is the age of the computer, of instant food, of instant news, and instant
pleasure. Information is the great industry of the day and the traditional
industries of manufacturing are beginning to struggle. Machines now do thousands
of jobs which just fifty years ago required a skilled workforce. The turn round
in the British car industry is largely the result of a smaller workforce and a
larger computer force. Free time and what to do with it is a major growth
industry as young people with money in their pockets seek out the latest dance
club, the latest computer game, the latest drink, the latest drug, and everybody
wants to be young. We spend millions of pounds every year on exercise, cosmetics
and applications to make us look and feel young in a world were you hardly ever
hear that value questioned even in Christian circles.
The
philosophers have begun to call this time of change we are in Post Modernism.
What that means in practical terms is that we are in a time after modernism but
we don’t quite know yet what it will be like and it will take time to work
out. One of the key markers of this change is that the processing of information
due to the technology of computers has usurped the role of the machine. Our
economies are now based on information rather than manufacturing. It is a
sobering fact to know that the peak of manufacturing employment was reached in
1950. Since then the number of people employed in manufacturing has been in
decline. Now it is no more than were employed in manufacturing in 1990. As a
result many of the old certainties have begun to disappear and given the
availability of all this information people have begun to build their own
values, lives, beliefs, religions from all that is available and in a way that
suits them best. Values and religious beliefs are acquired in just the same way
that beans and potatoes are acquired at Tesco’s. You have a look and keep
looking until you find what you want. Then you mix all the ingredients you have
acquired into your own unique and special recipe. The only values that become
important are the ones you are comfortable with. In a state of change when all
these things are uncertain it is logical to choose your own. It may not be right
but it is what’s happening and one way or another we are all affected by the
attitude.
In
this New Age or Post Modern Age communication, information and experience is
key. Now it is what you know or can find out and experience for yourself that is
important. With the result that different people will work out different
priorities with different bits of information according to what works for them.
Scientific fact has become nothing more than theories still to be developed.
Morals have become relative, Truth has ceased to be absolute in an era where the
clarion cry is ‘this is my truth now tell me yours. There is an almost
complete rejection of doctrine and dogma in favour of religious experience and
what works for me. Suddenly there is a huge awakening of interest in
spirituality, and at the same time an almost universal rejection of the Church
as having anything spiritual to say about anything. All fed by an ever-expanding
Internet system that brings all the information you might ever need to your desk
at the touch of a button
Meanwhile
in many of our parish churches nothing has changed. Many still use liturgies,
music, and forms of teaching; ways of doing church etc. that have no origin in
any part of the 20th century. The result is ageing and largely
declining congregations and a general feeling that the church is pretty well
irrelevant in our society. Something like 7.5% of people in the UK claim an
allegiance to one church or another, but in Wales that figure is cut in half and
in the industrial heartland of Wales the figure is as low as 2%. The Christian
Churches are just not scratching where the people are itching, yet we still
believe that the timeless truths of the Gospel are effective for all. It’s not
so much that the message is not being proclaimed but that it is not being heard.
Almost as if it was being proclaimed in a foreign language for all the sense it
makes to many people. Rational argument and the presentation of the evidence of
the resurrection do not seem to be enough any more and the reason is that these
are the tools of a rationalist, scientific age that is over.
Of course the
advantage of a rationalist worldview is that you always feel is if you are in
control. As long as we can present the Gospel in rational ways by argument and
evidence then you can control the agenda, even if the argument and evidence
really is a foreign language to those who hear it. It’s almost as if we have
got the whole of the story back to front. In our rationalist view of what
happens we bring people to faith in Christ by our argument and by the
persuasiveness of our evidence. People accept the argument as true and so
believe it. It is a model, which has stood us in good stead for some time, but
it isn’t the only, or even the best model, and it is useless in a post-modern
environment. The model of
Acts 2, on the other hand, is of 120 spirit filled people all speaking in
tongues so that everyone who hears really does hear the Gospel.
No matter what their language, intellectual ability, or cultural
background, they hear the Gospel in their own language through the tongues of
the disciples. In other words the
Holy Spirit allows the hearers to experience the Gospel through the obedience of
the evangelist. The whole
work is the work of the Holy Spirit.
The
clear implication here is that the disciples are not in control – God is –
and that God chooses to act in a completely irrational way.
It is God’s agenda that is followed not the disciples’. There is no
carefully worked out evangelistic programme, the disciples simply respond to the
promptings of the Holy Spirit without question or argument.
As a result, the growth of the early church is hardly less than
spectacular. Here we see a church that is built not on intellectual
understanding of the Gospel but on heart based relationships and responses.
These relationships are worked out in the breaking of bread, the sharing of
goods, the looking after the widow and corporate prayer. The intellectual
working out only really becomes important when it is needed to refute error and
then it is taken up in defence of what is happening in the hearts of the
faithful. In other words the rationalist argument begins as a defence of the
spiritual response to the Gospel. People respond with their hearts and then
engage their heads. This
is the complete reversal of where the church has been for about the last 250
years. We have expected converts to respond to the evidence for the Gospel and
as a result have seen spiritual experience as a bonus. We have presented
evidence and persuasion and have even argued that right belief and right
doctrine are essential before you can belong to the Christian community.
Yet in Acts chapter 2 there are 3000 new converts with hardly any
teaching at all, responding to the Gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit.
These
are exactly the sorts of qualities that we need, in order to respond to what is
happening around us in our society. As the world moves from modernism through
post-modernism to whatever it is that’s on the other side, we can be certain
that spiritual issues and spiritual values will be sought after. People,
especially young people, will respond only if they see that the churches offer a
real spiritual alternative to the various spiritualities of the New Age. If we
carry on using our rationalist tools we will fail. I believe that God has raised
up the whole charismatic movement at this time specifically for this purpose, so
that the church of God can speak in this new environment of spiritual things by
the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense there really is a second Reformation
in progress, but we will have to wait and see how it turns out.
In
practical terms we have no idea where the Church will go from here. Already it
is clear that most of the existing models of church will not survive the change.
Some of the casualties will include parish boundaries, denominational
structures, and probably the whole ecumenical movement. Whilst the conservative
evangelical, the liberal mainstream & traditional catholic are arguing
points of doctrine the rest of the western world is not being addressed and are
finding alternative spiritualities instead. What may survive are those
congregations that are willing to ditch everything but the Gospel in order to
lighten the load as they travel with the cultural change. Already it is possible
to belong to virtual churches on the Internet without ever leaving your desk.
Virtual prayer meetings are almost commonplace on the net. The cell church
movement is appearing in all sorts of guises in many different styles of
churches. Built as it is on
relationships and mutual support it clearly speaks to the post-modern mindset.
Alpha similarly works, not because of the teaching, which is good, but
because of the meal and the small groups. Fellowship
and support are key.
The
Holy Spirit is guiding us towards ways of presenting the Gospel in this New Age,
we have to decide whether we will go with him, freely, even irrationally into
this future or whether we would prefer to stay where we are. If we do stay we
will die. The church will not survive.
If we take the risks, ditch the excess baggage, and allow the Holy Spirit
to be in control then I believe that God will be able to speak directly to the
hearts and minds of this rising generation.