Living in exile?

Since 1980, churchgoing has halved in the UK.

In particular, churches are losing the younger generation of millennials. I will leave suggesting the answer to this heartbreaking situation to the upbeat bloggers and strategists who always seem to have ‘the solution’. May the Lord bless them – though I suspect a solution will not be found until we humbly confess to God that we don’t know the answer.

A new situation

But the fact must be faced that our situation as Christians in the 21st-century Western world is now one of exile. The culture has changed dramatically. It is as if we have lost our country and now live in a foreign land. At the recent Labour Party conference a poster from a women’s group that declared ‘A woman does not have a penis’ caused outrage among men who wish to be viewed as women. In October an Italian scientist at CERN who stated that ‘men invented physics’ was castigated by women’s groups. Even simple facts have no place in a world where subjectivism trumps objective truth. What chance then for the truth of the gospel? The world is upside down - especially ethically. We are very much out of place.

My point is that the church now needs to learn how to live in exile. And Scripture has much to tell us about how to do this. Whole OT books like Daniel and Ezekiel, and NT books like 1 Peter relate to this subject. God’s famous advice to the refugees in Babylon is given in Jeremiah 29.7: ‘… seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.’ But, thinking about this, the exilic book that captured my attention was Esther. It makes happy history for God’s people far from Jerusalem. The genocide planned by wicked Haman was thwarted by what appeared to be little coincidences. The unmentioned, unseen God intervened. Yet what is striking is where this epic drama finishes. It concludes where we would not expect, with the inauguration of an annual feast, to commemorate the rescue. What is all that about?

Lord’s Day and ethical teaching

We have many ‘exiles’ living in Britain these days – people from various countries who have often had to leave their homes and try to find a better life here. We have friends, for example, involved in the Eritrean community in London. We have a Chinese fellowship in our own town. These ‘exiles’ get together, often once a week, with the purpose of looking after each other in a foreign land and remembering their culture, language and traditions. This, it seems, is part of what is going on at the conclusion of Esther. Another feast is instituted to remember what God has done, which will help the Jews to maintain their distinctiveness in a foreign land.

With this in mind, we see the importance of the local church and of the Lord’s Day in a new light. It is to be our day as Christians ‘in exile’ to come together to support one another and remember our true country (heaven), our true culture (holiness in Christ) and our language (of thankfulness and worship). 1 Peter, written to the Christian diaspora has emphases on coming together as God’s chosen people to declare God’s praises and on Christian ethics. The church’s need is well grounded ethical teaching not just evangelism. The ‘gospel centred’ strapline (narrowly understood) for everything in recent years was well meant but seems to have wrong footed us in our new situation. Christians must live differently and know why they do so.