‘Anything for a quiet life’ is a phrase which sums up much that is characteristic of contemporary attitudes and one which many of us quietly adhere to as Christians.
A 100 years ago, when the Marxist revolution was about to engulf Russia, Trotsky is said to have remarked that whoever longed for a quiet life had been born in the wrong generation. His comment certainly has resonance for us Christians today.
Last month we identified the danger of the church living in its own comfortably sealed environment, running its activities, developing its agendas and often vying internally for influence and power, but failing to make any effective impact on the secular culture.
Worldly religion
Honest observers have known that to be a problem for some time now. By and large, it has been met in one of two ways. The first is accommodation, where the church offers, in a religious context, what is already available in the world outside. This can take different and opposite forms, from the entertainment value of much youth work, to the club mentality of some homogeneous congregations. Hoping to reach the culture, our individual and corporate Christian lives have drifted subtly into being largely indistinguishable from it, but with a religious over-clothing, the point of which the culture largely fails to recognise. to be In his 2008 book The Courage Protestant, David Wells describes his experience of listening to a sublime rendering of choral evensong in a Cambridge College chapel, only suddenly to catch sight of the choirmaster, ‘resplendent in scarlet and white robes, but protruding beneath these robes were his blue jeans’. He is not making an aesthetic judgement, but sees in this anomaly a parable of how religion is viewed in contemporary society. ‘It is something resplendent, put on just for the occasion. But it is just as easily taken off. And beneath it are the same old street clothes that have been there all along.’ The book is full of penetrating observation and analysis and I warmly commend it to you.
Ghetto faith
The other way of dealing with secularism is to pull up the drawbridge entirely and retreat into a pietistic introversion, where energies are increasingly devoted to internal church matters, doctrinal, devotional and relational, almost as though there was no world out there, no wider human context.
Authentic Christianity
Either of these options may provide us with a quiet life, but will prove to be disastrous for the cause of the gospel. No church can hold out the message of truth to an unbelieving world, if it is merely a reflection of that world and its values, or if it lives in splendid isolation from it, apart from the obligatory hit-and-run evangelistic raids. There must be a better way and of course there is, but it is not a quiet life. It calls for a robust faith which has the courage to be distinctively different, which the apostle Paul summed up as ‘truthing in love’ (Ephesians 4.15). This is where our literally ‘incredible’ message begins to intersect with the deepest longings of the human psyche. But to stand apart from the universal norms of secularism to demonstrate God’s authentic counter-culture is challenging intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.
The only reality
In a world that no longer believes in truth and yet longs for certainty, we have a message which is ultimately the only reality, because it is the revelation of the God who is there. The secular culture may deny any such centre, any over-arching explanation of life in this world, but that does not mean that it no longer exists, only that it has become invisible. In the words of Francis Schaeffer’s memorable book title, ‘He is there and he is not silent’. We urgently need to regain our knowl-
photo: Ebay.com
edge of God’s truth and recapture the conviction that all truth is God’s. We do have truth to speak into the moral and philosophical vacuum of our popular culture, with its aching desires for answers in the areas of evil and suffering, values and integrity, purpose and significance. Yet in many Christian circles there is little awareness even of the attributes and character of God.
However, Christian truth cannot be authentically proclaimed, if it is not yoked to love. We are not merely repeating a mantra, but living out a message. In a world where people are starved of relationships of trust and integrity, let alone love, and therefore turn increasingly to the barren sterility of a ‘virtual’ existence, we have a revolutionary alternative to share, concerning a God who not only loves, but who is love. Truth and love – so central and yet so little experienced. Next time we must begin to think about how, in God’s grace, change may begin to develop. But it won’t be a quiet life!
