Volume 8, Issue 2, November 1998

A CLUE TO THINGS TO COME

There is an urgent need for a renewal movement within the Christian churches today if they are to survive. The times are dictating that a new page of Christian history needs to be written. For the first time since the Reformation Christians are being brought together not on the basis of creeds and doctrines, but because some of them are beginning to hear the voice of the Spirit calling them to work together in the street and alleys, factories and offices, hospitals and legislative offices of a world in need of sacrificial service and dedicated commitment.

Therefore, in these days of uncertainty over the future of the church, I wish to engage in a little speculation, even prophecy, on the shape of things to come in the Christian churches.

There is a hunger for spiritual wellness in people today - but never on Sunday. The continuance in so many churches of an observance of worship to an external deity, a God "up there," a three-tier universe of earth, a heaven, and a hell, antiquated theology, and too much conservatism of belief, is losing the churches younger membership at an alarming rate. Strangely, most of them fail to recognize why their membership is dropping and they are seen as little consequence in the contemporary world.

The saving factor for the churches is that Christianity has moved beyond the walls of organized Christianity and become the dispersed church of people living their faith in their daily lives on their own, experimenting and testing their faith in a secular world where the human is creditable and the supernatural is not.

Today some are learning that the church is a happening. It is becoming fashioned from the real and everyday world, a world it celebrates, probes, and comments upon. The church where it is alive and functioning today "happens" where we are sure it cannot, and it happens whether you believe it or not. Like grace, a church happening is one of the spiritual surprises we call "God," and we seldom can predict it. It doesn't happen the same way twice and it is shaped tremendously by the people who perform and the space where it takes place.

Recently I was the guest speaker at a small morning coffee-club group in a rural Anglican church. I spoke about the thrills, the strong senses of elation, we can experience in our religion. The group did not appear to have experienced much of this recently. Then one older farm-woman told with tears in her eyes of "the beautiful Jehovah Witness prayer of grace" that her daughter had given at their Thanksgiving family dinner. This woman found the strength to share her "thrill" with her (disapproving?) friends.

The church of the future, if there is to be a church, must be outreaching, learning to say, "Here we are. We are going to be with you right where you live. We're not going to pull you out of your environment; we're not going to make you a part of an institution to keep the institution going. And if we have to let the old temples and institutions go and just witness to the fact that the Christian spirit of love must work through us in the world, we are going to do just that."

Christians of the "dispersed church," those of us who don't attend, at least regularly, the conventional church of today, can say to a person, you are now in church. We are right with you where you are. We will be the instrument of God's reconciliation to you here. We can say we are the church, we are that miracle of God's grace. Of course we don't say it just that way, but this is the conviction that will have to be expressed.

The church of the future will not take seriously just the "gathering," but the going forth. Think of the freedom such a congregation would have - its mobility, with almost none of the paraphernalia or baggage of the institution - with all its energy available for its mission.

The clue to the church of the future will be inclusiveness. It will make little distinction between "true believers," inquirers, and non-believers. There must be an openness to develop a community of humankind that includes Christians, agnostics, atheists, persons of faith and unfaith. The touchstone of the community will still be the Christian gospel of love, which will continue to wait and seek to do its work.

Perhaps a forerunner of this kind of church is the present Regional Multifaith Committees For Spiritual and Religious Care in Ontario. The committee of which I am a member, the Brantford/Hamilton/Niagara RMC, is composed of eighteen different faith groups, including Christians, Baha'is, Muslims, Hindus, even the Wiccan Church. The committee is a focused group, works in harmony at its tasks, and enjoys the respect and contributions of each of its members. We share in worship, in learning, in supporting one another, and in working together. There is fellowship and a comradeship that is distinctive.

The secularized Christian community, deprived of its religious activities, spiritual games, and holy calendars, will be freed to discover the new shape of mission in terms of human need and the social structures given by the world.

It was thirty-six years ago, Bishop John Robinson, in his book, "Honest to God," stated "...that Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be servant of the world." (Page 134).

Let us recognize that the church will never again be as it was in our childhood memories. Technology and the post-modern world has changed that. Society is moving so fast and gaining knowledge so rapidly that we have to keep abreast with it all if we are to give and exchange information and ideas with the present and future generations.

At present the churches are too institutionalized to permit significant changes to take place. Those of us seeking to create renewal within the church find ourselves marginalized, rejected, and silenced. Then it is we become exiles, part of the "dispersed" church, which today in many of our communities is larger than the organized, institutional church. How this new form of Christianity will redesign itself I do not know. Perhaps it too will disappear. But I think not! I am a strong believer in Love as the motivating power for actuality and good within us and in the world. We must let this power, this force loose in our lives and the world. It will enable us to become fully our human and spiritual potential.

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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.