THE CHURCH IN TROUBLE
The bad news
For some 900 years now, the Church in the West has been growing weaker – since the time the religious influence of the monasteries peaked, that is, and Europe’s universities, a secularising influence, began to be established. By now, when there’s a (Christian) spiritual awakening across most of the world, Europe – home of the Western Church – has come to be ‘the unrevived continent.’
Conservative evangelical Church of England bishop, Wallace Benn, in his closing address to 2,000 leaders at the 2003 National Evangelical Anglican Congress, spoke of making mission a priority, and urged evangelicals to confront the challenge of a disbelieving society (Ruth Gledhill, T 24 Sept 03): “I know that in all the groupings of the Church we are growing most,” he said. “But overall, in the hugely secular state of our nation, we are not winning.” That’s the depressing reality: one can win relative to the rest of the Church, but winning in any absolute sense – seeing the transformation of society – still doesn’t happen.
Scotland is no longer a Christian country, the Pope had been reminding Scotland’s Catholic bishops in Rome six months previously. He told them they needed to launch a “new evangelisation” to draw people back to the Church. “We may observe that in Scotland, as in many lands evangelised centuries ago and steeped in Christianity, there no longer exists the reality of a Christian society.” Ambrose Griffiths, Catholic bishop of Hexham and Newcastle in the north east of England, told Catholics in his diocese (also in early 2003) that unless they shared their “faith story” the Church would fade away. “For too long we have looked after ourselves, maintaining the status quo, and getting smaller in numbers as the stalwarts die and are not replaced by younger people. If we continue like this we shall eventually die out.”