Volume 7, Issue 3, January 1998

BEHOLD A NEW THING

The context of Christianity is always social,the content gospel.

Canadians crave meaningful spiritual lives. The latest poll, conducted for Maclean's magazine indicates this.

The poll shows also that most Canadians are sympathetic and willing to assist neighbours in their need.

Too much organized Christianity has belaboured a message that calls for penitence with the promise of a better hereafter. Many churches appear as a "bland island of serenity" rather than being a vanguard of God's people carrying Jesus' word of love and justice into the controversial corners of the world.

Long ago a Hebrew prophet, known to us as Second Isaiah, spoke out to the people of Israel who had suffered defeat and exile as a nation and reminded them that their belief to be elected by God as the people and spokespersons for God in their time was an election, not to salvation, but to service. To be a nation and to be God's Servant was pretty much one and the same thing for Israel. Israel was to survive the Exile because they were to serve the world.

Isaiah spoke of the urging of the divine spirit and declared: "I am about to do a new thing." He spoke in terms of revival of faith and service and characterized the movement as "rivers in the desert."

Today there are discernible signs that the institutional forms of Christianity are being replaced by less organized, more spontaneous, independent, personal witness to the faith by individuals in their daily lives with little regard to belonging to a specific organization. Many of those who do maintain their membership and activity in the church and its programmes are openly sharing their faith and beliefs in concert with other churches and faith groups as they find possible. This speaks well for the future of religion among us.

Christianity, at its heart, calls persons to take seriously the shape and structures of society, and
the changes that are taking place in them, not to apply some pattern of rigid church forms to a new situation, but actually to let the forms of society shape the new forms of church life. Today there is in our society an incredible diversification of the areas of responsible decision. The church as an institution is finding it very difficult to free itself from its inherited forms to be present in these areas of decision in such a way as to disclose within its institutional life the mandate of the Christian gospel.

Today there is in a real sense a scattering of the church and a Christian witness being given by those "dispersed."

The Christian gospel engages persons in their daily and common life to articulate and embody God's reach for humanity. It is not a challenge to moral living, nor an invitation to thinking dogma, nor a call to membership in the institutional church, but news of personal, spiritual fulfillment. It is good news for the homeless, the lonely, the forsaken, the aimless, the broken hearted, the faltering and the dying.

The divine spirit of love is not confined within any edifice, but is free in the world, working in homes, in schools, in businesses, in people's pleasure, in politics, in law - an invading of all the social order, including the lowest. It delivers a freedom to leave illusion and to step into reality.

We are now in an age of "secular Christianity," The term "secular" has taken on a new meaning today, defining what is being of our own age and in our own world. In other words, we will arrive at a fully Christian understanding of Immanuel - God with us - our secular God. Some of us can say today that the world is our church or, with the words of the late Bishop John Robinson in "Honest to God", "The charter of the church is to be the servant of the world."

The "new thing" in Christianity now means the readiness to take off the swaddling clothes of fixed norms, the removal of the scaffolding of "Christendom" and the "establishment" and the deliverance of Christian fellowship into an "open" world where witness to the love and teachings of Christ has to be given through a "style of life" in which ultimate meaning is disclosed in the midst of the struggle for free participation by all people in the life of the realm of God.

The gospel for Christians insists that both the gathered life of Christians in worship, and their scattered life in the world, must be truly "in" and "for" the world, and for the "outsider" and their whole culture.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.