future?

The last part of Christianity: A History today was presented by Cherie Blair - wife of the former Prime Minister, Roman Catholic, and leading human rights lawyer. Like the others, it was really frustrating, but also challenging.

First, she painted a picture of the church in the UK (and the rest of Western Europe) as being in sharp, and continuing decline. Her perspective was decidedly Catholic - as was her concern about the reasons why the church is seen as being out of touch with society - but I guess that many similar issues apply to the rest of us. The largely unspoken question at this stage was to ask whether the church has a future.

Despite a couple of references to the continued growth of the church in the developing world, she took as her counterpoint the church in the USA. We were treated to some interviews with very inclusive Methodists in Chicago, a chat with Laura Bush ("of course George and Tony didn't pray together when they met for summits" Hmm? why "of course"? If you share faith, and believe in its transforming power, why not bring it into professional life? I grant that I've so far largely failed to put that into practice myself, but I do have it as a goal), and an extended visit to Willow Creek, interviews with Bill Hybels, and the rest. Oh, there was an interview with Jessie Jackson, too.

Her point, then, was that the American church is going strong, and this is not least because it adapts its style and practice to the prevailing culture in a way that the British church has failed to manage. She argued, at some length, that there is no crisis of faith, but a crisis in the way it is practiced. This seems, well, naive and simplistic.

I'm not well-placed to know whether her analysis of the American church is right, but everything I read suggests that it is heading in the same direction as the western European church, just a couple of decades later. That's not to say that there are not encouraging signs (signs of emergence?), just that they do not necessarily point where she thinks. I have this awful fear that people of her generation (even if she's only about 15 years older than me) don't quite grasp how far things have diverged.

Of course, I'd have loved for there to be a final episode after this one, with interviews with McLaren, Bell, Driscoll, Kimball, Jones (x2), and so on. It seems as if there's a great deal more to be said. But perhaps that would be premature.

A way of believing is perhaps only ever one generation away from extinction. There is something quite alarming about the way the practice of Christian faith has collapsed in Western Europe. Even in the face of an age when more people on the planet own the name of Christ than ever before, is there something about social, economic, and cultural development that makes eventual decline inevitable?


[Oops! I lost this post: I wrote it weeks ago, but forgot to publish it! Here goes...Oh. Blogger inserted it at the date I wrote it. Will anyone see it?]