This is a sample article featured in the March 2001 issue of Quadrant

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DEATH OR A FUTURE?

                At the beginning of this century Peter Brierley’s The Tide is Running Out made fairly bleak reading.  Regular readers of this publication will be familiar with the conclusions justifying Brierley’s almost apocalyptic title: Sunday church attendance in England down to 7.5% and falling, young people leaving in droves at ever earlier ages, and indications of crisis across all theological and liturgical traditions.  Now, a year later, a book has appeared from a rather different source which confirms the soundness of Brierley’s research conclusions and even manages to match the gloominess of his title!  I refer to Callum Brown’s study, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge).

Industrialisation and Secularisation

                Callum Brown is a social historian based at the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.  His book is interesting because it rejects many of the common historical and sociological assumptions concerning the decline of Western Christianity.  According to Brown, the churches in the United Kingdom actually survived the era of modernity rather well and Christianity continued to be a very significant cultural force until well into the 20th century.  Secularisation is not to be located in the onset of industrialisation and the growth of the great urban centres.  Nor is it true, as is so often assumed, that the churches failed to recruit among the poor and disenfranchised in the Victorian period.  Christianity and, in particular, Evangelicalism, can look back on the modern era as a time of considerable success in evangelistic and missionary terms. 

Crucial turning point

                According to Brown it was the decade of the 1960s when, very suddenly, organised Christianity went into a downward spiral ‘to the margins of social significance’.  Brown’s conclusions, which are based on solid research, make even grimmer reading than Peter Brierley’s.  The centuries-long cycle of inter-generational transmission of the Christian faith has been ruptured, with the result that a ‘formerly religious people have entirely forsaken organised Christianity in a sudden plunge into a truly secular condition.’

                In reflecting on these analyses I have been forcibly reminded of my own family experience.  In my extended family - mine, my wife’s sister, my brother and sister and our spouses - we have nine children, all now in their mid- and late-twenties.  Despite being nurtured in Christian homes and attending Sunday schools and Christian youth groups, only one of these young people confesses the faith of Christ.  This translates the researchers’ statistics into flesh-and-blood reality and, I need hardly add, causes a good deal of heart-searching.  Yet, despite an awareness of personal shortcoming and failure, conversations with colleagues suggest that our experience is far from being unique and that the opening of a chasm between the generations has something to do with factors far beyond the control of particular parents or families.

How do we respond?

                This is, of course, the crucial question.  There are various possibilities.  We might simply conclude that we must redouble our efforts, perhaps devise another ‘decade of evangelism’ or pin our hopes on the next programme to cross the Atlantic with the guarantee of solving our problems.  Such activist responses are, I suggest, wearing a little thin and most of us will admit to a growing realisation that this kind of ‘more-of-the-same’ solution is futile.

                Alternatively, we might focus on the need for revival, hoping and praying for a recovery of a living faith among the thousands of people who, as Brierley says, once went to church but no longer do so.  Yet even this response, hallowed as it is by its association with genuine spirituality, seems not to confront our problems today, indeed it may even be a way of denying the true nature of the situation uncovered by the researchers.

                Where then should we turn?  I propose that our most urgent need is to discover a biblical-theological perspective that would enable us to make sense of a time of unprecedented and extremely disturbing change.  Where can we find in scripture the kind of resources that would enable us to accept the findings of the historians and sociologists?  It means admitting that the long era of Christian dominance in the Western world is finished, and then recognising that this ending of the world we have known is willed by God and fits His purpose.  For myself, the answer (or one of them) is to be found in the experience of Israel in exile.  The great prophets in this period enabled the Jewish people to come to terms with loss and change, helping them to discover that the experience of pain and anguish is actually the doorway to radical newness and fresh hope.

                To put it bluntly, when Peter Brierley, Callum Brown and others, announce that institutional Christianity in the West is in crisis, it cannot be right to shoot the messengers!  We must at all costs avoid slipping into denial, but rather must search the Bible to gain a theological perspective on sociological reality.  That way lies the path of true renewal, the discovery of radical new ways of being church and a future which, while utterly different from that which Christendom has schooled us to expect, will lead us to quite new experiences of God’s grace and truth.

Rev Dr David Smith,

Co-Director,

The Whitefield Institute,

Oxford

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