Changing World

Introduction: Changing World; Constant Faith (2010)


A: Changes in our World
2010. The twentieth century is over; the so-called Noughties of the 21st century are also behind us. Now we’re in what the media will inevitably call the Teenies. 2010-2019: time for a bit of teenage angst in our culture?...
The world has changed; it has changed enormously. And we are facing a new series of major issues today. The Copenhagen summit is over, but the issue of global warming will not go away. Meanwhile, technology continues to advance. What were your Christmas presents? An iPod? Mobile? Digital Radio? PC? Some DVDs? Or Audio CDs? Game-boy? Or some new vidoe games? Blu-Ray, HD, flat-screen? And the techies in the world wonder whether the technology which has added to global warming will also solve it. Today we are all used to computers, e-mail, the internet, mobiles, and the younger minded are well into blogging, texting, tweeting and the rest. What will another decade of change bring us?
Christians in our country are of course affected; churches are affected. We have data screens, amplification for our musicians and speakers, our computers in the Office and here can access Broadband and so on.
The issues of the world change, and we change with them. What does it mean to be a Christian in such a changing world? We need to gain some perspective as Christians. For I believe we live in a changing world, but we need a constant faith. Our faith must and will help us to adapt and respond to the issues of our times. But what are these changes?
Technological change is so visible we can immediately identify it. But other changes can be more far-reaching. We live in a globalised world: if something happens in one country, others are increasingly affected. If we have major recession, a credit crunch caused initially by problems with the Sub-Prime market in the United States, in short order we are all affected. So far, the actions taken have prevented a major recession escalating into a 30’s style slump. But we are in uncharted territory here. Will we slowly emerge from recession, gradually but consistently rising from economic downturn, or is there worse to come? We don’t know yet. What happens in China may hold the clue to how well or how badly we do in Britain during this decade. That’s a reminder we live in a globalised world now, whether we like it or not.
Globalisation has been affecting the military factor for some time now. In the 20th century we had World War I and World War II; then, from 1945-91 we had the Cold War, a battle fought not directly but indirectly, in Latin America, Africa and Asia – as in Cuba, Angola Korea and Vietnam for example. In many ways that old battle is over. But we have a new global battle today. President Bush called it the war on terror. Others called it ‘the clash of civilisations’. Since 9/11 and 7/7 we have become increasingly aware of the way religion and politics mix in this. What should we make of Islam and the Islamist radicalism which we see in Al Qa’eda, Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the rest of them?
Then if you want to talk of massive change in the last 100 years, think of the changes in the rôle of the sexes. 100 years ago women did not have the vote in Britain, and only among Quakers and the Salvation Army were women equal in leadership in the churches. The changing political and economic rôles of men and women are only part of the chnage of course. We have had massive changes relating to sex and sexuality, gender issues and sexual orientation. These changes shape the world we now live in, and certainly affect us as Christians and in our churches.
Meanwhile, for all the advances of technology, and all the scentific breakthroughs, actually our society is far more uncertain, sceptical even about science. The old certainties that science would blow away all the fog of confusion have not proved true. When it comes to the question of truth, what is true, we have seen a growth in a consumerist culture in conflict with science. Surely the truth is what the majority of people say it is. Right? Wrong? A democratic, consumerist mindset says that the truth is what most people say it is. And  scientists are fighting a reaguard battle against that just as much as people like us, believers in God. You can see this in the debates such as they are, about global warming. If most people don’t believe in global warming, that means it won’t happen?
B: Individualism
We live in an increasingly individualistic age. This affects the whole of life. Choice is the mantra of our times. All politicians tell you they believe in enhancing personal choice, and empowering voters – and they certainly believe in recognising, and the targetting all these multifarious groups of voters! The development of our society in a more voluntaristic direction has been affecting the church and the place of religion in our society since the eighteenth century. But the impact of this change has advanced rapidly in recent decades.
The impact of this growing individualism and voluntarism among non-Christians’ assessment of Christian faith (whether hostile critics or ‘neutral’ observers) was to see Christian faith as one version of that broadly harmless hobby called religion. Lesslie Newbiggin’s writings in the 80s and 90s, above all his The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, expressed and exposed this perception – and its weaknesses and incoherence.
Secularist responses
As we shall see, there’s a new atmosphere concerning this in society, and especially among secularists, as a result of the impact of Islamism, 9/11, the debate over a “clash of civilisations”, and the voices that call for ‘jihad’ on one side, and the response in calling for a ‘war on terror’ on the other, grotesquely verbalised by President Bush on one occasion as a ‘Crusade’! The has led to a growing confusion about the place of religion in society: is it, as complacently assumed in the 90s, a harmless hobby, or is it, as argued by the new wave of atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the greatest threat to the planet? Is religion a valuable part of the rich tapestry of life? Or is it a disease to be eradicated by a concerted radiotherapy of atheist onslaught by polemical scientists and journalists? Well that’s the debate among Britain’s atheists and others.
Christian responses
Christians live in this world, and individualism and voluntarism affect us as much as anyone else. Our response is to seek to live and flourish as followers of Jesus Christ in this, our context. We cannot ignore the consumerism of our culture (another side of the voluntarism). In the West, the consumer is King. Indeed the consumer is god, an idol, a false god, and a particularly hard iold to topple, because this idol lives within our hearts and minds, it is part of the air we breathe.
One effect is that church is increasingly affected by a consumerist mentality, which means that we allow ourselves to develop a default mentality where we assume that what happens in the life of the church is ours to respond to as consumers: is the prodict what we want to have? Formally, of course, we know this setting of ourselves up against the church of Jesus Christ as those who chose what it should be is making ourselves god in place of God himself. Practically, of course, this attitude is so instinctive to us, it is hard to set aside.
Church is also not simply for those who are currently its members. As Archbishop William Temple memorably quipped, The Church is the only organisation that exists primarily for those who are not (yet) its members! Now we are called to attract the people in our society to the truths of the gospel – and in our consumerist culture, we cannot draw people’s attention to the gospel without being heard, and to be heard, what we say needs to attract. If we are perceived as locked away in time warp, lost in a sub-cultural ghetto locked in the past – whether the 1940s or the 1490s – then we will not be heard.
But this is not simply a matter of trying to “update” the church – to update the means of presenting our message, in terms of using songs, art forms, drama, visualisations of the gospel and so on. It is the fact that our society in its individualism, voluntarism and consumerism is so much more diverse now.
C: We are all so different to each other now.
We would not attempt to put on a single radio station, still less a single radio programme, that was supposed to succeed in satisfying the taste of listeners to Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 3, not to mention Classic FM, Saga FM and all the others! But in church we try to put on a service which is supposed to suit everyone. In the future we will have to develop ways that speak to these diverse people. One way, increasingly followed, is simply to develop niche market churches. One would be a Radio 3 church – with classical music and similar cultural elements. Cathedral churches and high Anglican churches most obviously include those nearest to this way of expressing Christian faith, sub-culturally. Another would be nearer Radio 2 – with soft rock mimicking pop music from the 60s to the 80s, with a characteristic worship focus – much charismatic and evangelical worship is nearer to this mould.
The problem for niche marketing is that we are communities. What if the person converted in your evangelical megachurch brings along their grandparents, who are impressed by the way faith has changed their grandchild? The sub-culture may not suit or help them. What if the person drawn to that culturally rich, classical Anglican church brings their children with them? For some children and teens, it may prove off-putting. I have singled out music as an element that we can easily characterise. But there are many other factors just as relevant.
I believe that in the future we will need to learn how to provide opportunities for sharing faith, growing in faith, worshipping together and the rest of it in an increasing variety of presentations and sub-cultural expressions. Church is changing, because the people we are reaching, and indeed the people we are, are changing.
1. Changing Church?
How has church changed? We need to see that the place of Christians and the Church has changed enormously. From about 400 until 1967, the majority of Christians in the world looked like most of us in Hinckley – European; white. But over the last 40 years, the majority now reflect the Two-Thirds World – darker-skinned than us. We tend to think of Christians as a small, dwlindling minority. But in the world, Christians are growing. 2.2 billion people globally see themselves as Christian, over a third of the world’s population. Actually Europe is broadly the only part of the world that has not experienced a global revival over recent decades. There are more Baptists in Burma than in Britain; there are more Christians in China than there are people in Britain! The world is changing.
We live in Britain, however, and what God gives us will help us for our changing situation here. In the 19th century, Liberal ideas grew in churches: people tried to be both modern and Christian by ditching or re-pitching things they found difficult. In the 20th century, that way has seriously declined. Instead we have had various biblical, reformation, evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic forms of faith growing apace. These grew, as believing in something and experiencing something that the secular world couldn’t give was far more relevant than watered-down secularised religion. Now in the 21st century, yes I am sure that elements of this biblical, evangelical and charismatic dimension will shape our faith, but there is a recognition that we will need something new to reach a new post-Christian culture.
2.  Changing God?
It may come as a surprise, but the answer to our need for change – “Change we can believe in” if I can pinch President Obama’s catch-phrase – comes in God. But God is unchanging, we rightly say. Yes. But he is the Creator and the Creative God who can help us respond to all changes. Isaiah 43:19, God says through the prophet: See I am doing a new thing. These words were spoken to a broken, exiled, defeated people. See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. In the place where there is no life, life will spring up.
That is certainly a message for us today. God wants to do a new thing in our lives, in our churches, in our countries, in our world. The old things are no longer good enough. Isaiah 43: 18: Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing!
The most important thing about this is that it is God’s new thing. This is not a call to arms, a call to us to convert the world, to bludgeon an unbelieving world, not a call to us to implement the kingdom of God on earth by our own determination, to enforce a heavenly take-over of the earth, as if such a thing were possible. The new thing is God’s. It is God. First and foremost we need God, need to know God, we need to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind; we need a God-centred, God-focused, God-inspired people. Let us be a people of prayer, a people who love God, a people who learn once more to long for what God wants to give us.
Zecharaiah 4: I did not select that chapter because of the famous words in verse 6 – though they are important too, but for verse 10, which I believe is a word for our times: Who despises the day of small things? In Zechariah’s time they despised the day of small things. “The good old days were far better!” In the olden days, before the exile, Jerusalem was great, the Temple was great, Judah was great. Now it was a ‘day of small things’. But God was rebuilding his people from these small beginnings. We tend to despise the day of small things. Can’t we just have a fantastic new form of evangelism to blast the world with? After all, God’s got infinite power. What could we do with the infinite power of God in our hands to bring in the kingdom of God! It’s because we are tempted to think like this that God is so counter-cultural with us. He will start something, so small we don’t notice it. But he will change the world. He wants us to see that the real changes, the real victories don’t come from us and our big armies, our big campaigns, and our big ideas. Zechariah 4:6: Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord God Almighty.
Gideon had an army of 32,000 to defeat the Mideanites, but God persuaded him to whittle it down to just 300, so they could see it was his work not theirs. 300 people to defeat an entire invasion? Just 120 people on the day of Pentecost. You won’t find it mentioned in the secular histories because it was too small. But through these 120 – and the Holy Spirit – 2000 years later we have 2 billion honouring the name of Jesus. I don’t think if you read the London Times for 24 May 1738 you would find any mention of a meeting at Aldersgate Street, or of an unremarkable Anglican priest named John Wesley, but that day, one of God’s small things changed the world: Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed and the revolution that God brings about, the change of a man’s life happened. And through him thousands were changed. And God is acting today.
3. Fresh Expressions
Time does not permit me to do more than simply flag up some headlines. In dozens of churches God is starting a new thing. These are too small to catch the media’s atention just yet: Fresh Expressions of church, pioneering experiments in new ways of reaching people who are spritiually hungry, but disconnected from church in both its traditional and its contemporary charismatic and evangelical forms. New experiments with unlikely names – like “Mind the Gap” (a group in the North-East) – reaching out to people in all sorts of imaginative ways.
We’re all so different now. And one response to this is to recognise that a ‘one size fits all’ version of church won’t attract anything like the number of people the diverse approaches will. There will be a few megachurches, because some people will be strongly attracted to and helped by such communities. But far more people will not find them helpful. And we need to learn to diversify. One way will be to support a range of new Fresh Expressions.
In the last month Costa Coffee opened up in Hinckley. They have ben open to their places being used for Café Church, as have Starbucks. Already some Christians in Hinckley are talking about attempting to have a go at a kind of Café Church here on Catsle Street. Will it happen? Will it succeed? We don’t know yet. These are today’s questions.
But another response to this need to diversify will be to diversify within worship. Already you can see within Spring Harvest. If like me you went along in the 80s or early 90s, you will have seen a major Big Top service, and smaller versions of the same thing on the site. The only diversity came with Family Services. But by the “Noughties” a growing range of worship services and opportunities was provided, including the Celtic approach, and so many others.
I believe that in our church, both through the week and within Sunday worship, as the 21st century progresses we will find it helpful to diversify – as much as our resources permit.
And in all this, we need to keep the focus absolutely dead centre on God. I have found that if you want to stay true to God and do what he wants, you need to look at what he is already doing. What is God doing? What is the Spirit already doing? What is God already blessing?
Here in Hinckley Baptist Church, we have found God profoundly at work. He is already at work among our young people; let’s pray for more of that, and pray that the rest of us can see and know the Spirit powerfully at work in our lives too. He has strongly blessed us through our Pathways Centre. Let’s see what God is saying to us through that, and join in his work.
D: Sex and Sexism
Introduction
How do we live as Christians, true to our faith in Jesus in this world, in a world where so much has changed in relation to sex and sexism? The way we relate to each other, the way women and men relate to each other in family life and in society has been changing – and it’s been changing for a long time.
In 1895, H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. But imagine he had actually built a real time machine, and he had been able to take the 76-year-old Queen Victoria from 1895, to today. What would surprise them most? Not I suspect all the new gizmos and inventions. I believe it’s the changes in these issues of sex and sexism.
Now, contrary to popular prejudice, sex wasn’t invented in the 1960s, and the move against sexism wasn’t started in the 60s, even if the pace of change quickened then. In practice, if we look properly at things, we can see that on both issues there has been a major liberalisation every decade since at least the 1890s. 
1. The changes in sexism
As for feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft first published her A Vindication of the Rights of Women way back in 1792, arguing for equal education. But it took 100 years for women first to be given the right to vote: in 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in Parliamentary elections. The following decade, the suffragette movement started in this country, and following World War I in 1918, women over 30 were given the vote, the following year the first woman MP was elected.
As for the churches, the 1920s also saw the beginnings of women ministers in some of the major denominations in Britain, the Congregationalists and the Baptists following the lead of the Salvation Army and the Quakers, who had long had women leaders.
Two Baptist ministers had been killed in World War I, and their widows had taken charge of their late husbands’ churches, and had been recognised by the members as pastors. But in 1926 Violet Hedger who had been trained in my old college of Regent’s Park was ordained and inducted in Derby as the first trained woman Baptist minister.
In 1928 all women over 21 were granted the vote, and the following year Margaret Bondfield became the first female cabinet minister in Briatin.
In World War II, women once again found themselves treated more equally, active in all sorts of rôles normnally restricted to men, but after the war, many of these advances for women fell back. However, in 1948, voting rights for women were established as one of the universal rights adopted by the United Nations. But in some of the Gulf States, like Kuwait and Oman votes for women have only been granted in the last half dozen years, and there’s still no right for women to vote in Saudi Arabia, though even there it is being actively considered.
However it has been since the 1960s that the modern feminist movement really got underway. Many women campaigners pressed on for the next slate of reforms, to try to use the democratic system to pursue equal pay for equal work for women, in equal rights campaigns (which officially came in 1975). The election of Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s first female Prime Minister in 1979, and the doubling of women MPs to 120 in 1997, dubbed as “Blair’s babes”(!) like all politics have been controversial.
Feminism has included people campaigning for legal change to improve things for women bit by bit (Liberal Feminism), but others in the 60s followed the Marxist take on society, campaigning both against the oppression of working class people and the oppression of women. Some of these women decided to so-called revolutionary men were just as old-fashioned as everyone else, and became radical feminists, who defined men as the problem. There are other, less strident voices, seeking reform which seeks the best for both men and women in our changing society. And that’s the way for us as Christians to go.
If you want to take a thorough evangelical Christian look at this, Elaine Storkey shows the way. The key book to read is her What’s Right With Feminism. She shows that of course, there are extremisms at the fringes, so we can’t agree with the doctrines of Marxist feminism or radical feminism. But there is a Christian take on this, a reforming approach which is deeply Christian. We are called to be in the world but not of the world, as shown in the words of Jesus’ prayer in John 17. That means we don’t make a Christian ghetto separated from the world, nor simply go along with whatever the world comes up with next. We are called to live out the values of the kingdom of God, and in our society that means helping to work for strong, positive relations between men and women in society, seeking the best from each and all, reforming laws to facilitate the best for all in our society, regardless of gender and the rest of it.
2.  The changes in sex
The changes in attitudes to sex and sexual relationships have also changed every decade since the 1890s with the Moulin Rouge and the can-can, the theories of Sigmund Freud, arguing that chaotic suppression of sexual desire lay behind many neuroses, and the campaigns of Havelock Ellis and others for more tolerant and positive attitudes to sex, the shortening of skirts in the 20s, and the rise of glamourous film stars watched by millions through the 30s and 40s and after. The bikini was invented in the 40s, the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953 changed perceptions of sexual behaviour, and by the 50s, pornography, which had existed underground for centuries, started becoming appearing publicly with the launch of Playboy, and the permission of publication of books previously banned as obscene like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the 60s in Britain and elsewhere liberalising reforms accelerated. Here the law was changed permitting regulated abortions homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private, and removal of film censorship. In 1969, Sweden and Denmark brought in laws to end more or less all restrictions on pornography, and this pattern gradually swept through all Europe, including Britain in 2001, as the government claimed the Internet made regulation of it impossible. I don’t think I need to go into detail here, because we are all very aware of the major changes.
3. Conflict between sexual liberation and sexism
Before we move on, it’s worth seeing that these two changes are not two parts of the same thing. Both changes sexual liberalisation and the drive against sexism have gathered pace. And both raise massive issues for all people including us as Christians. But actually these changes are in conflict. During the strongest wave of women’s rights, in the 70s, many feminists campaigned against sexual exploitation of women in pornography and in tabloid models and so on. Groups like “Women Against Violence Against Women” arose, campaiagning against the treatment of women as sexual objects, because that also encouraged violent abuse of women. But that was the 70s.
By the 90s, feminists like Germaine Greer and post-feminists like Camille Paglia started to take a different approach, arguing that women should not be prudish about things, but be both anti-sexism and pro-sex, even pro-porn. That attempt to support both sexual liberation and equality has shaped things till now. But seeing where this has led, a new reaction is just beginning.
A recent survey of over 1,000 girls asked what their ideal job would be. They were given a range of options, including such careers as becoming teachers, lawyers, doctors and many other possibilities. However over 60% said of these girls said that their ideal job – note it’s their ideal job – would be to become a glamour model. Not just a model but a glamour model. And over 25% said their ideal job would be to be a lap-dancer. [This Week (BBC), 4.2.2010. See the researches of Dr Linda Papadopoulos on this issue published at the end of February 2010.]
Do not think that this is something irrelevant to us. It affects teenagers in church. Who are their female rôle models? Not their local doctor or teacher, or Mrs Thatcher or Hilary Clinton, or even sportswomen. They’re more likely to name Jordan (Katie Price) the page 3 model or some other celebrity glamour model.
And as more girls identify their self-esteem more and more by their appearance, and sexual appeal, we see a growth in eating disorders, and the use of plastic surgery for women and girls of younger and younger ages. Respect and self-respect are inescapable issues.
4. Achilles Heel
All these changes we seen gathering pace over 120 years and more. We must expect to live as Christians in this challenging world, without expecting a lurch back to Victoriana. But we are right to recognise that today’s hyper-sexualised world is ultimately unsustainable. It has an Achilles heel. Achilles, like the modern world, seemed invulnerable, but there was one part of his body hidden away where he was vulnerable. It was the part of the body we call the Achilles heel, the back of the ankle just above the foot. And it was by being struck there that he was killed. And the Achilles heel for our modern, hypersexualised world is children.
Swedish MPs voted in 1969 to remove all censorship apparently because MPs were too embarassed to discuss the issues, saying this thing should be legal, that should be illegal. They said, Let’s just abolish all censorship of pornography; people will be reasonable.
But people were not reasonable. And just nine years later Swedish MPs were shamed into acting. By then they were confronted with child pornography featuring sexual assaults on children as young as 2 or 3 on sale all over the country, and child pornography going from Sweden across the world. Finally, they acted to ban child pornography. At that time, our own government and others also acted to single child pornography for a clear ban with heavy penalties.
But today the Internet has provided a new opportunity for child pornography, and grooming of children by predatory men and indeed predatory women, as the increasing criminal cases show. And sex tourism and sex trafficking often engages in promoting paedophilia. That’s one side of things: our children are vulnerable to predators.
But it’s not just paedophiles. Our culture has normalised access to pornography for children. It’s estimated that the age boys most commonly first see pornography is now ten years old [Big Issue, 2007], and girls are just as aware of porn as boys. Children now usually see porn long before any real relationships with the opposite sex, and porn shapes their assumptions and behaviour.
This is a downside of our democratic freedoms, which has fostered a deregulation of protective norms that used to operate in society. And the things adults promote so much for themselves affect children and teenagers massively. So this conflict between freedom for adults and danger for children will continue. Our culture thinks in terms of rights and demands. But the truth of the gospel shows we need to start with values and responsibilities.
5. Christian responses
So what’s the Christian response? The temptation is to be negative, to say what we’re against. That plays into the clichés about Christians, and doesn’t help. In any case, sex was God’s idea, even if, like all else in life, we humans too often abuse it. If we major on what we’re against, we play into the hands of our critics. Instead, we should major on what we are for. If people catch our positive values, then everything essential will change.
Love. That’s the most positive value of all. Everything else is commentary. God is love; not romantic love of course. We are not called to fall in love with God. Jesus said love your enemies, not fall in love them!. No, the love of God is compassion, kindness, care, that’s how God acts towards us in Jesus, his life, death and resurrection. God is for us. And we are called to follow suit, to show the same compassion, kindness and care, the same consideration, the same giving of respect
Mutual love.  And if we are to understand the words of Ephesians 5 properly we must have that introductory sentence in verse 21 at the head of it: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. There’s a mutual side to this right at the heart.
Respect. This includes respect, mutual respect. But the word ‘submit’ is even stronger. Somehow, Paul says, in marriage, we are not simply to have one person dominate and the other submit; both are to submit to each other (Mutual submission). ‘How is that possible?’ you might ask. Paul is just as radical and egalitarian in 1 Corinthians 7. Now Paul was celibate, and he reminds the Corinthians about that, and that perhaps makes what he says even more surprising. In verses 3 and 4 he says: The husband should fulfil his marital duty to his wife, and the wife likewise to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. He makes it clear he is talking about sex within marriage, and that husbands and wives ought to treat each other equally, and also not try to be super-spiritual as if either was above the need for sex, otherwise one or other could slip into temptation.
Self-giving love. Ephesians 5 defines relationships between husbands and wives on the basis of love, the love expressed by Jesus himself. Verse 26: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... and verse 28: In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself... The love of Christ is the ultimate sacrificial love. This is the model for a husband’s love. It’s not “Wives submit to your husbands; Husbands dominate your wives!” Husbands, love your wives. But ah, yes. Why is it ‘submit’? Why should wives alone submit? That’s how we often ask it. But actually that’s neither what Paul said, nor what he meant. As we’ve seen, he starts with Submit to one another, so it’s not one-sided. So why does he then say, wives submit? He has a reason. Paul knew what the Greeks taught each other about family life, the rules for everyday living in domestic life. This is what the Greeks typically said: “Wives submit to your husbands; children, obey your parents; slaves obey your masters!” Paul is taking what they believe – and Christianising it. And we must do the same. Their rules were “wives submit”. Fine, says Paul: submit to one another; wives submit. But the he adds something to turn this conventional wisdom into a Christian approach: “and also husbands, love your wives, just like Jesus loves the church – enough to die for us!” That changes it completely. It’s the same with children and parents: not only ‘obey your parents’, which Paul adopts via the ten commandments, but also “Fathers, do not exasperate your children”. Don’t abuse your power. Instead love your children. And the same Christian switch comes with slaves and masters.
Commitment. That’s another side of love. We are committed to one another, as God is committed to us in Jesus Christ. We don’t just act when it suits us, we commit ourselves to each other. That shapes our lives, it shapes our love and it shapes marriage and family life – that’s our calling.
Forgiveness. That’s another way God acts towards us that provides a prime value. We believe in forgiveness. It may be hard sometimes! But we know it’s right.
Our age has changed out of all recognition. But human beings have not changed so much. And real, God-like, Christ-like, compassionate love, respect, commitment, love, that will never date, and always provide the real thing people need.
E: Fast-Food Church?
Introduction
We live in a fast food society.
Check it out if you can: how many takeaways and restaurants did your town have 25 years ago, and how many does it have now? In the town I lived in, from the 1980s until three years ago, the number of such outlets almost trebled. If you forget the number of restaurants, and ask hom many more takeaways there are now, the growth is even greater.  Hinckley/Burbage is not that large [2001 census population: Hinckley & Burbage: 44,246], but there are too many such places for me to count them all. And then we have all the pubs which have now become restaurants as well. The biggest and most well-known of all these newer fast-food outlets is of course McDonalds.
1. Fast Food Culture
We cannot doubt that we live in a fast food culture.
McDonalds as we know it has existed for less time than I have, but it has become rather more famous! A survey of children in the United States a few years ago showed that 96% could identify Ronald McDonald – second only to Santa Claus!
Just in case you’re wondering where this sermon is going, I am not going to centre on the food issues raised by McDonalds and similar places, nor on the domestic factors that have led to the rise in convenience shopping for food, but the effect on the typical marketing practices on life on the churches and on all of us. If you want to learn about all the scare stories about the dodgy processes in fast food and all that, then read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. If you want to hear about how it would be more healthy to eat fruit and veg than fast food, then listen to your doctor! That’s not what I’m going to home in on, in this piece.
2.  Fast Food Economy
We have a fast food economy. The way we do business and life, in the marketplace, in health and education, in the church and the rest of it, is increasingly like the way the fast food giants operate.
If you like the fancy words sociologists use, then here’s a word you won’t hear in everyday speech: it’s “McDonaldization”. That’s a word invented by sociologist George Ritzer, and it means the way McDonalds and similar outfits do things. These places are extraordinarily successful for a reason. They know how to do fast food in a way that works, that customers like and return to in droves. Ritzer pointed out 4 main factors at work:

Let’s be clear, as a business enterprise McDonalds has been fantastically successful. It serves about 47 million customers in 31,000 restaurants every day, making $23 billion annually. Of course it’s not alone: many imitate. The vice-chairman of “Toys Я Us” said, “We want to be thought of as a McDonalds of toys.” Imitators have become just as strong. Indeed, some of its competitors like Subway have now overtaken McDonalds in global size.
There have of course been many critics of McDonalds, from vegetarians, through environmental campaigners, to health care campaigners, and critics of the processes of globalisation.
For all this, the engines of change seem irreversible, as the rise and rise of fast food outlets everywhere shows.
But it’s not just the question of food. In 2003, McDonalds attacked  Webster’s dictionary. The dictionary?! It was the dictionary item “McJobs”, which the dictionary defined as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.” I think you can see why McDonalds didn’t like that!
McDonalds has an effect on both its employees and its customers, and its this that George Ritzer was on to. Everyday life in business, health, education and elsewhere is increasingly under pressure to follow the same four principles and become efficient, calculable, predictable and controlled. An example I heard of this week: A McDonalds employee was sacked for giving something extra to a customer. She added a slice of cheese. McDonalds complained that made the burger into a cheeseburger, and sacked her. The tribunal declared McDonalds over-reacted. They should have just given a written warning. But McDonalds want control and absolute predictability, no variation by staff, being creative or generous. It goes against their strict way of doing things.
Now the problem is that this McDonaldized way of doing things all too often just squeezes the life out of life. And of course it’s not just in fast food chains. Across the board, we are now an increasingly and excessively over-regulated society. The demands of business models of success are everywhere. Where can people recover their humanity and be truly free?
3. Fast Food Church
It was John Drane, a Scottish Baptist, with a long track record of challenging Christians to treat spiritual searchers and spiritual searching with greater urgency and sympathy who saw this this is a big challenge to church life today.
Too often church – even in its most successful forms – follows this fast food path. We are seeing what John Drane called The McDonaldization of the Church.
The key point is this: there is a place that we should be able to go, a place where we can be free, a place to be spiritual, to be creative, to grow as people, without being turned into cogs in a machine. And that place should be your church. But what if your church has become too predictable, calculable, controlled with mechanical efficiency? It may seem a good business model, but it will not be a place where people grow spiritually. And that means it won’t last. It won’t be a place of salvation, of freedom, of spiritual growth. Richard Foster’s words at the start of his classic Celebration of Discipline are as true today as ever. He said this:
Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
Challenging isn’t it? It’s Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sharp challenge to our age in the words we have just sung: we are rich in things and poor in soul”. In our drivenness, as John Drane puts it, we end up in a kind of ‘iron cage’ which robs us of our humanity and our spirituality. In the interests of reversing decline, and bringing about church growth, we have too often managerialised the church, making our main aims the same ones as the fast-food chains: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. It’s all gone further in the United States of course – but what happens there quickly comes over here. So listen to one of his stories of how this is affecting ministers and people in churches.
This is what John Drane says:
“I recall the founder opf what came to be a significant mega-church in the USA telling me how, with hindsight, that this transition from people to building, while highly successful in one sense, had actually led to the spiritual diminution of the people because, as he succinctly expressed it, he had been forced to adopt a ministry style which was ‘geared towards filling the building, instead of filling the people’. He had started with just seventeen people, and ended up with more than 3,000, but in the process the church had become a depersonalized machine – against the self-consciously articulated theological aspirations of the original group, and without anyone really understanding what was happening until it was too late. Growth led to increased numbers, which required a bigger space to contain them, which called for fund-raising and building projects, which necessitated a mortgage to pay for it all, which demanded efficient marketing and sales techniques to maximise the attendance in order to raise enough money to meet the payments, and on and on in a visious spiral of cause and effect. When all of that came together, it created a system that, in terms of human relationships and real spiritual growth was pathologically self-destructive – but which was apparently necessary in order to maintain the trappings of ‘success’. When I met him, the founding pastor of that church had left what was in effect was his life’s work (he had been at it for over twenty years), disillusioned by the monster he had helped to create, and feeling that his own spiritual energy had been sapped in the process. He had discovered the hard way the reality behind Ritzer’s warning that we should ‘avoid the routine and systematic use of McDonaldized systems’ because ‘habitual use [of them] is destructive to our physical and psychological well-being as well as to society as a whole’.” [John Drane: The McDonaldization of the Church, p.40; citing George Ritzer: The McDonalidization of Society, p.182.]
The problem with the fast food business way of doing church is that while it may look like good business, it squeezes the life out. There’s no room for variety, for innovation, for a new move of the Spirit.
4. Church in a Fast Food Age
The age we live in maximises the drive to commercialisation and bureaucracy, and like everyone else, we in the church are vulnerable to the pressure to conform. The drive to streamline life is getting more intense, and in everyday life, people often feel trapped by all this. Do you remember being told we are entering the era of the paperless office? But I want to ask you, if you are in the workplace, has the amount of paperwork you have to read, fill in and work through increased during your working life? All those targets and plans you have to write... In the schoolroom, the hospital, the workplace, and – this is the question today, in the church – there is more and more pressure to make what we are doing fit someone else’s model of how we should be doing things. Originality, creativity, freshness, these are all under pressure to be removed from pre-packaged business models.
But God has given us creativity, which we lose at our peril. The prophet Hosea, challenged the nation of Israel about the long-term effect of their short-term wrong judgments, the catastrophe they were driving themselves towards. He put it this way: They sow the wind – and reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).Well we, too, can sow the wind of human attempts at efficiency and control in the church. Or we can let go and let God surprise us with creative moves of his Spirit.
The danger is that we become ‘fast food Christians’ – people whose lives are shaped most of all by business and work, and faith is made to fit into a business-world model. On that basis, God is supposed to turn up whenever it suits us. We make ourselves “God” by that outlook, and the real God becomes the ultimate BigMac that we can order to suit us. But God is not a convenience product. And any spirituality fed on such an empty diet will fail.
We need the real God, the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, not the convenience god, the god of our fantasies, the god we invent to suit our demands. We need the real God, the God who will challenge us and change us, according to his sovereign purpose.
So let’s turn our backs on mass-produced spirituality, borrowed faith, convenience gods. Let’s give up Fast Food Church, the McDonaldized Church. I mentioned John Drane earlier. He’s written a new book which I’m half way through: After McDonaldization. Fresh Expression or Emerging Churches are raising some of the same questions, he says. But let’s avoid just ‘trainspotting’ some new feature of today’s world and adding it. We need to be on the train, on a journey, a spiritual journey. But where’s this train going? The biggest thing about this is that it is a journey with Jesus. The key thing today is ‘identifying with Jesus’. If we are going to grow as Christians in today’s changed world, we need to turn to Jesus above all else. (See Joh Drane: After McDonaldization pp.47-50.)
5. Bread of Life Church
Jesus said that what we really need is what God alone can give. Jesus said: ‘...it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. The people asked, ‘Please give us this bread from now on.’ And so Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.’ What we need is not a fast food church, with instant, copied, cloned, packaged products, but a place where people who are spiritually hungry come and really get fed.
Do you feel spiritually hungry? There are lots of people in church and lots of people not in church who know they have a spiritual hunger. They want something that helps in relation to the deepest needs and deepest questions of life. A meaning to life which doesn’t just make sense, it guides, fills and empowers everyday life. They are hungering for a place where questions about joy and peace, hope and despair, life and all the puzzles it raises – a place where all these things can come out into the open, and they can revceive something that really satisfies. Not some pat answer based on some manual, but real-life experience, real help, real love.
Jesus is the bread of life, and it is in a real relationship with him that we can begin to enter a life-giving Bread of Life church. Then we will see what Paul called the harvest of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fideilty, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23: REB).
F: Changing Truth?
The way people feel about truth is changing fast.
1: How New is New?
The General Election campaign has not started – officially – but in reality it has! Have you noticed how, whenever you see David Cameron making one of his set speeches, you see the caption “Year for Change”. Last year, the Conservatives were already paving the way for this slogan with a similar banner saying “Time for Change”. He’s borrowing an old trick. 15 years ago, Tony Blair started talking about something called “New Labour”. Get that idea into people, so they associate you with something new, fesh, changing, modern.
But that reminds us of something a bit odd. We don’t hear the phrase “New Labour” as much as we used to. Sometimes words like New and Modern become so familiar they seem like old hat. It’s not just politics that suffers. The New English Bible (New Testament) came out in 1961, and its language was new then. Indeed far too new for some. But its use of the word ‘Thou’ in prayers made it quickly out of date, so a new version was needed. But what to call it? The new New English Bible? The Newer English Bible? The Very New English Bible? Well they settled for The Revised English Bible. Meanwhile, the Revised Standard Version was updated the other way round for similar reasons. So we now have The New Revised Standard Version (and a very good translation it is, by the way).
2. The Modern Age
But it’s not even the names of things. For about 300 years or so, our whole culture has lived under the label, New, or Modern. Go back further: that period of time from, say, 1066 to 1500, what do we call it? The Middle Ages. But they didn’t call it The Middle Ages back then! That’s a modern label; a nice piece of Victoriana: History is divided up into eras, we’ll call them the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Classical Age, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. And the Modern Age is pictured as brand new, wonderfully modern, unlike all earlier ages which are ancient, primitive, barbaric, old-fashioned and out of date. This modern age, this age of enlightenment, this age of science, of the discovery of truth, was seen as a march of progress, the steady sweep of science to sweep away all ignorance, superstition and folly. Atheism is a typical child of that modern, or indeed, modernist, assumption that in all previous ages people were superstitious fools, but today, with science, reason, logic we can progress to the future that every enlightened person will see one day. Richard Dawkins carries on that modernist attitude that used to be second nature to academics. Liberal theologians followed a similar path. What did the ancient or medieval world have to teach us? We needed a modern faith, in which science, scientific history and reason and logic cleared away all the old superstitious rubbish and gave us a faith for modern people.
That modernist assumption hit its peak in the nineteenth century. Since then, there has been a growing doubt about all this, which is getting deeper and deeper. Back in the Edwardian era they were so sure that the great European Empires would conquer the world, banish ignorance and superstition, and bring civilisation to all. But that modernist certainty has completely gone.
3.  Postmodern Age?
We’re in a new age as different from that age as the modern age was from the renaissance. And with deliberate irony, it’s sometimes called the Postmodern Age. I don’t suppose for a moment people in 100 or 200 years will call it that. But things are changing, and among the biggest issues for us as Christians is that at the heart of this change is the question of truth. We’ll come back to that. But let’s size up the changes as they affect us.
a) Change in institutions. One way of showing this is to spot the institutions that shape our times. As for those institutions from which people get their values, in the 17th century and earlier, people looked to the Church and the Bible, with a shift to the Bible in the Reformation. People believed you could discover the truth, and you would find it in the Christian faith, and from the classics of ancient Greece and Rome. In the modern era people still believed in the truth, but the balance shifted, for the facts, values, beliefs, meaning, they looked more and more to the Universities and to the science labs. Oh yes, they started earlier, but dominated in the modern era. Today, it’s changed. In our more postmodern era, the major, dominant institutions are the media and entertainments industry.
b) Change in ideas. As Christians, we’ve long been aware of the impact of this modern scientific world-view, the view that science explains everything far better than religion. Two or three hundred years ago, it was just intellectuals, who were “cultured despisers” of religion [a term first used by F. D. E. Schleiermacher in 1799, in many ways the founder of Liberal Theology to describe people like Geothe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, the intellectual élite of his day], but today, the proverbial man in the pub is just as sure. The poet Alexander Pope expressed this feeling that after Sir Isaac Newton, science will reveal the truth for all: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
Now that belief that science has explained away religion is still there, and many people remain firmly committed to it. But many others just select this commonplace as a convenient prejudice, and will quote science one minute and something very unscientific the next – often without realising the switch. That’s how you get people sounding off one moment about how science has disproved relgion, and the next moment telling you that UFOs are real, and that aliens have abducted them, or tell you of the power of psychic chrystals and so on. The change in ideas is a change from science, truth and certainty, to one of doubt, unfocussed scepticism, conspiracy theories and the rest.
You can see both of these in the class room. Teacher Mark Roques mentions some of the comments he has heard in his RE classes. One of his year 9 (that’s 13/14 year olds) told him, “We’re all animals, sir.” Well that’s a slogan from the old, scientific modernism. “Science gives us the facts, sir.” However in another lesson, he was talking about the question of life after death, and was speaking about the belief (which goes back to the Platonists), that after death souls are freed from bodies, and he mentioned difficulties for it (like the question about whether our personalities can be so easily separated from our physical experience of life), and drawing attention to an alternative answer (the one spoken in the Bible), the idea of “looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth,” when a year 8 (age 12/13) girl aggressively interrupted him with the claim “Heaven will be exactly what you believe it to be!” Now that’s postmodern: that reality is made up by us, the people who interpret it.
c) Change in perceptions. I spoke about this to the men at our “Bigger Balti” (men’s meal) a week or two ago. Our culture has switched from faith, through the focussed questioning of science, to today’s unfocused doubt. One sign showing how this unfocused doubt has spread like wildfire is the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Oh yes, they existed long before the Internet, but the Net acts like a strong wind on a forest fire. So, welcome to a world where the Moonlanding was a fantastic NASA hoax, where President Kennedy was assassinated not by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald but as a Mafia reprisal for failing to launch a coup in Cuba, and where the Mafia killed Oswald to cover it up; where Oswald only fired and missed at the President, while the real Mafia assassin fired the fatal shots from the grassy knoll; a world where Marilyn Monroe didn’t kill herself by drugs overdose, but was murdered by communist agents supposedly in the pay of Robert F. Kennedy the President’s brother; a world where Diana, Princess of Wales was of course killed on the orders of Buckingham Palace, specifically the Duke of Edinburgh, because she was pregnant with Mohammed al Fayed’s grandchild; where Pearl Harbour was not the unprovoked attack of Japanese bombers, but the work of President Roosevelt himself, manoeuvring the Japanese to strike and bring the US into the war; and a world where 9/11 was not the work of Osama bin Laden, but took place on the orders of the CIA and the White House, so the US could invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Above all it is a world where, according to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, there has long been a worldwide conspiracy by Jews in league with Freemasons to take over the world. Oh this is not “harmless nonsense”. The Protocols of Zion were a forgery produced by the Tsar’s secret police and released to discredit the Bolsheviks. But they were dynamite in Germany, where Adolf Hitler and others seized on them to prove that Germans were not to blame for their failure in World War I – it was all a Jewish conspiracy. And we  know where that led: 6 million Jews and 50 million others perished in World War II because of that lie. This lie is not dead. President Ahmedinajad and many others firmly believe it to be true – because they want it to be true. And this change in perception where people exchange lies they want to believe in is as dangerous now as when it led to the rise of Hitler. The truth matters.
d) Change in values. You can see the changes here very clearly.
Fact/Value: 400 years ago or more, people took facts and values as equal parts of the truth. You got the truth by a mixture of experience and reason together with the truth shown in the Bible and Christian teaching from it. When people said it was wrong to steal or commit murder, they knew that was true because the Bible taught it.
In the modern era, they separated facts and values. Science taught truths you could prove, but values like honesty and integrity could not be proved. All you could say was that lots of people agreed with these opinions that it was wrong to lie.
In today’s postmodern world, doubt increasingly overtakes both facts and values. You can see this, when you look at issues like climate change, which John will focus on next week. How do we make up our minds on this? Do we listen to what the scientists say? Or do we listen to what the bloggers say? Is the truth what the experts say, or what the majority says?
e) Changing Values: But there’s a second side to this. We believe values are important. But so did the modernists.  Values were not facts but they were still vital. The old secularists 100 years ago and more believed largely the same values as the Christian. In fact that was their challenge then: they said you can be just as good without religion. You could have the Ten Commandments, and you didn’t need to go to church to prove it. In fact, 100 years ago, people believed that our European civilisation had the best values in the world, and it was our job to teach, to impose our values on an ignorant, barbarous world. And those values were colonial, imperial, patrician and patriarchal.
But in this postmodern age, that’s all changed. Values are seen as far more flimsy, far more up for grabs, far more just the shared opinions of the moment. Today, our society has turned right around on much of this. We reject that colonial past, and say it’s wrong to interefer with other cultures – even as Coca-Cola and McDonalds engage in neo-colonialism. We reject that patriarchal past and promote equal rights for women and men – but then get very confused about whether to promote such equality in different cultures like Iran and Saudi Arabia. The biggest changes have come in sexual behaviour and morality. This is the place most of all where you will hear the slogans of our postmodern age: “What I do is up to me!” “What’s right and wrong is just a matter of opinion.” “No one has the right to criticise anyone else.” “All forms of behaviour and relationship are equally valid”; and so on.
f) Change in stories. Is there a big story of the whole of history? Before modern times, people believed our big story. You know: God created the world, he acted in and among his people in Israel, and then in person in Jesus, now he’s acting through Jesus’ followers, until Jesus comes again and wraps up history. But in the modern era, people started to tell different stories. Darwin’s story of evolution, the scientific picture of the big bang and all that. Modern philosophers told new stories, like Comte with his story of progress: people growing up from religion, through modern philosophy and on to a perfect future free from war, because we’re ruled by science and  sociology, rather like the fantasy future of Star Trek. Hegel’s story of progress through conflict of ideas, was turned by Karl Marx into a story of class war, with the ultimate conflict between bosses and workers, followed by the heaven on earth of a workers’ state. Well, Stalin’s Russia was not heaven on earth, but the most terrible tyranny. And the modernists lost their faith in such futures, and invented postmodernism, a world where there are no big stories of history, no future, but just unfocused scepticism, doubt as default. But people need their lives to mean something, so instead of big pictures we have small pictures (or if you like the jargon, instead of meta-narratives, we have micro-narratives). Today people get meaning for their lives from being part of fan clubs like Manchester United, Leicester Tigers, or Star Trek or Elvis, and a thousand and more hobbies, interests, fads and fashions all over the Internet, as people blog together, and use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the rest to create meaning, to write stories into which they fit.
4. Christian Responses?
a) Fear not! That’s the most important thing. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the propaganda. God is not frightened by it – and so nor should we be. We should not be slaves to the fashions of thought, the current mindset, whatever it is. Let’s remember that old truism, “Those who marry the spirit of the age will be widowed in the next!” Jesus prayed for us – that we stay true as his people in this world: My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. We are to remain in the world, embedded within today’s community. We need to be able to understand the driving forces of people around us, so we can connect with people who live in this world, but we do so in a counter-cultural way, in a way that subverts the confusion of our age, by living the truth. In a cynical world, we live out the values of the kingdom of God, we live as those who know we are loved, who know we have received mercy, who know we are forgiven, who live as people who are empowered to love, to help, to care for others, to forgive as we are forgiven.
b) Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mould – that’s J.B. Phillips translation of Romans 12:2. Let’s tackle this head on. Where postmodernism has hit hardest is in sexual morality. Our age is one of relativism – the belief that values are not true at all, but just flimsy preferences. And relativism has run deepest in sex. Today, most people assume that no sexual practices can be challenged, it’s all just personal taste. Or they think they do. But as Christians we need to challenge all this. It’s sloppy thinking. It just isn’t true. If people say that sex is a part of life where people can just do what they like, just ask them if they feel it’s alright if someone commits adultery with their partner! Or just ask them if it’s OK for paedophiles to do what they want! I bet you the answers will need censoring! In an age which is supposedly blasé about adultery, you will find that the vast majority of people – 98% 99% – are not indifferent to whether their wife or husband or partner is committing adultery with someone else. All this pretence about moral relativism does not go all the way down to their hearts. It’s a mask. It’s a pretence. And the truth needs to be unmasked. And when it is, what we see all too often is just a sophisticated version of selfishness, people simply saying, “I want to do whatever I want to do.” They don’t want others to behave the same way. They just want to be selfish themselves. That’s the oldest lie of selfishness.
You can make the same challenges with what people say they believe and what they really believe about property and life. But in practice no one wants to be burgled or killed! Morality is fine when it comes to other people!
c) Follow Jesus. So despite all these giddying, disorientating changes, what we need to do is to hold fast to the truth shown and lived personally in Jesus, and shown to help us in the Scriptures. Those who say they can make do without this are actually full of contradictions. You know, lives based of shifting sands tend to sink. As Christians, let us hold to the truth in Jesus, and let us pray for spiritual renewal and revival, so that we might reflect that truth with our lives in convincing power.
G: End of Postmodernism?
Some may ask: Isn’t post-modernism just a 90s fad now itself out of date? Even in the 90s people were already talking about post-pomo (i.e., post-postmodernism). Of course an elastic, evocative term like that was so useful it got used in so many different contexts. It started as a word in architecture and art, and in that sense, post-modernism as a short term artistic reaction against mechanical images in favour of more organic ones has been superceded several times. But it came to be used as a description of a major, epochal, cultural change, as big as the change from the medieval to the modern world. It is in this sense I have been using it. “Post”-modernism is deliberately ambiguous, though: is it the continuation of modernism, the next thing that develops it further (i.e., hyper-modernism), or the end of it and the replacement with something utterly different (ex-modernism)? To me it is both. But if obliged to choose, I would see it as more hyper-modernism, more modernism adjusted than modernism replaced. This is clear by the attempt people make to have the fruits of science without its costs.
There is a critique of postmodernism which I broadly follow, that the best way of understanding what is going on in postmodernism, is to see it as the cultural product of the development of our capitalistic society from its essentially bourgeois form in the nineteenth century to the current consumerist form.
But if it is asked if there has been a faltering in the march of postmodernism in the last decade, my answer is that there certainly has. And here we move on to the next aspect of cultural change – the effect of 9/11, or more precisely Western responses to the factors that led to 9/11 and 7/7.
H: Faith Today in our Post-9/11 World
Introduction
At the Chilcot Inquiry on the war in Iraq recently, Tony Blair said that for him the bottom line was 9/11. For him, everything changed as a result of 9/11. Not that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the attack on the Twin Towers. But Mr Blair was saying that before 9/11 he did not see Saddam Hussein as dangerous to us, but after 9/11, such dangers were now big dangers: he changed his mind. Whether you think Tony Blair was right to go along with George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or like me think it was a catastrophe, the worst foreign policy disaster since Suez, or Munich – whatever your opinion on that – I think we can agree that 9/11 changed Tony Blair and changed world politics.
But it’s not just world politics that’s changed. The whole mood of society has changed in Britain and across the world. And before we look at how things stand today, and how we as Christians should think and act in today’s changed world, I just want us to go back a bit, and see that:
1. The Religious Debate in our Country has Changed
Back in the 1960s and for a while before that, the main religious debate in this country was whether Christian belief in God was true or not – were believers right, or were atheists who rejected the whole idea of God, or agnostics who said we could never prove it either way. It was all about beliving in God – or not. The atheists of the day saw themselves as men or women of science, philosophy, reason, and they saw their aim as proving that all religion was nonsense.
Over the next 30 years, four things changed.
Christians changed. We moved away from thinking that the question of belief was the big one. As a result of charismatic renewal and other factors, Christians started to say much more strongly that our identity as Christians was not so much that we had a set of intellectual beliefs – in God, in Jesus and so on – as that we had a life-changing relationship with God in and through Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. We were in effect saying, Don’t just judge us on whether you find our beliefs intellectually compelling, try praying, trying worshipping, try experiencing God in the power of the Holy Spirit, and find that Jesus changes you for the better in a way scientific rationalism never can.
Religious Minorities The second change was in the make-up of society. Afro-Caribbean workers started coming over here in big numbers at the end of the 1950s in response to governments adverts. In those days we had under-employment in Britain. But there were also people from the Indian Sub-continent, and in the main that meant especially Hindus, and also Sikhs and Muslims. In 1972, Idi Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda and many of them came to Leicester. For the first time we had big numbers of people with religious faith that was neither Jewish nor Christian. In those days, Hindus were by far the largest religious minority in Leicester, and the tolerant inclusivism of Hindus has helped shaped Leicester’s distinctively positive inter-faith and multicultural experience. Since the 1990s, the growth in the number of what are euphamistically called ‘failed states’ like Somalia has added to the number of refugees, and most (though not all) of these people fleeing from war and persecution are Muslims, so that in today’s Britain, there are far more Muslims than Hindus.
Radicalised religion. The third change since the early 70s has been in the radicalisation of religion. The old atheists thought that faith would quickly die out, but instead, among the major religions in many ways it’s grown stronger. And it’s grown strongest among the more radical forms. I don’t mean more extreme. In a secular world, the Christian church is growing fastest where it provides something that the secular world can’t. So vague, wishy-washy, uncertain forms of religion are declining. If your vicar or minister is vague and uncertain about whether he believes in life after death, well a lot of people don’t both with such forms of religion any more. But where can you go for hope after death? Only in churches where faith in Christ and his resurrection is robust. So it is churches that have a strong and clear faith in Jesus that are growing. That’s true here in Britain, and it’s even more strongly true across the world as a whole, whree the church as a whole is growing strongly.
In a book written 20 years ago (The Revenge of God), Frenchman Gilles Kepel showed how among the major faiths, especially Christianity, Islam and Judaism, it was those forms of faith that were clear and traditional that were growing, while those that were more secularised were declining.
Multiculturalism The fourth change, from the late 80s until about 2005, was a change in mind-set and approach by the secular establishment in the adoption of multiculturalism. Secularists had a new problem: religious people weren’t just Christians, any more. All these people from the Indian sub-continent were religious, they were Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. So you could no longer deride religious people, because it would sound racist. Multiculturalism helped secular opinion formers in local or national governments and media to solve their problem: instead of deriding religions as wrong, and belittling religious people as superstitious fools, multiculturalism, an approach where people would affirm one another in their cultural – and religious – differences. One example I am well aware of, an atheistic mayor decided that for his Civic Service, rather than a traditional event at a parish church which he didn’t believe in, he would set up an inter-faith service with all religions. Now you and I might say, ‘Well, he doesn’t believe in all the other religions either,’ and that’s true. But he does believe in people working together with courtesy. And this gives a good, typical example of what atheists thought and felt. They switched from opposing all religions to wanting to try and put us all together as one great big happy family! – ignoring all those differences we feel.
Theoretically, this played to the changes among Christians, emphasising the experience of God. More obviously, it seemed to help the secularist with religion, saying: let’s celebrate our different experiences, our different cultures and different religious experiences. Instead of being prejudiced against difference, let’s experience each other’s cuisines, cultures and religions. This was the new “Chicken Tikka Massala” Britain, defined by the combination of ethnic and British ingredients in something creative and new.
Multicultalism was supposed to foster courtesy and respect – and in many places it did. But in some pleaces it fostered separatism and a growing ghettoisation. It is because of this, and the shock provided by 9/11 and even more for us in Britain by 7/7 in 2005, that many people are now rowing back from that multicultural approach.
Today’s debate is not simply about Christianity and other religions, the place of Islam is now seen differently to all the other non-Christian religions. This is closely tied up with a second strand of issues: the question of terrorism. While there are radicals among Christians, Hindus, Jews and others, there are a whole set of reasons while radical Islam has developed as a case apart. We have people sometimes called fundamentalist Muslims, radical Islamists, Islamic extremists or jihadists, and with them we have groups like Al Qa’eda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Al Mujahiroon (Islam4UK and its next label now it’s banned). So in today’s debate there are several very confusingly inter-twined issues about Islam, radicalised Islam, terrorism, religious freedom.
Another major shift that I’ve mentioned before is that the hard-line atheists have come out of their lairs, not just those scientists and journalists with their hostile new books, but the National Secular Society, a half-dead, pointless organisation, while atheists were affirming religion in a humanist, multicultural way, but now highly vocal, and often heard, in a new crusade to banish all religion from Britain.
2.  Responding to Islam
As Christians we need to know how to respond to Islam, to Muslim people we will meet, and also to the phenomenon of Islamism. Now I don’t claim to be an expert on all this, but I have done both reading and personal research. And one of the things we need to recognise is that, Yes, Islam is a religion, and that is an important part of it. But it is not just that. There is also an Islamic culture and there is a politicised Islam, and that’s what I will concentrate on.
But the bottom line for our relations with Muslims, all Muslims – and indeed for that matter, with Hindus and Sikhs – is that the best thing we could possibly do is have such a real strong relationship with God, that they can tell God is close to us. If we seem to be just followers of a mildly engaging hobby called church, that won’t impact. But it’s not about how fanatical we are about our faith. That’s off-putting. It’s whether we love God so much, that they feel it.
You might think this is all theoretical. We will never connect with any of this. But it will happen faster than you think! Over the years, I have had my opportunities to build relationships with the people from the heart of the Islamic world, engaging in a variety of positive conversations, which I will leave out from detailing online. From my personal experience some of these encounters can be positive, others may not be. If we were to have such a group in our church, what impact will we leave them with? Will they remember, amidst all the challenges and prejudice they face here in the West, the Christians as those who cared for them, who were their greatest friends? What will Muslim people think when they spend time with us Christians here: the Christians were the best people over there? Or the Christians moaned at us for the way they did things, how they left our kitchens or whatever? The Ayatollah Khomeini spent many years in the West, in Paris, but he returned to Iran with no positive experience of Christians to communicate. The next person to have a major impact on the Islamic world may be living among us right now. What if he were to go back to his world, with a positive experience of Christians, shaping what he was going to do in his country?
Jihadist Islamism. As the 7/7 bombers showed, the radicalised Islamist, the jihadist, who is ready to blow you and himself up, can be the otherwise ordinary person brought up in an Islamic family here in Britain, a person who was been radicalised. Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist was just such an ordinary person brought up as an ordinary Muslim who became radicalised. Reading his book gives the inside view on how things have changed for Britain’s Muslims.
Today’s Muslims look different, of course. We can see this by comparing how the late Benazir Bhutto appeared when she was a young woman (for example on that extraordinary phiotography of her together with her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then Prime Minister and Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India). She has no headwear. But later, she took to a headshawl. After the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the hajib became a symbol for women of rejection of the West. In the 90s, young Muslim women were increasingly influenced by the more conservative Saudis, and started wearing the niqab.
In Islamic societies and especially more radical and/or more traditional ones, men and women tend to develop separately. And while the women were influenced by the Saudis, the radicalised men looked to Egypt. 40 or 50 years ago in the Middle East, with all the conflicts there, a lot of radicals in the Arab world were influenced by Marxism-Leninism, and for a while that secular left-wing approach was popular there. But in Egypt a new approach in the 60s started by a man named Sayyid Qutb combined some of the revolutionary passion of Lenin with Islam. His ideas are the bed-rock of Al Qa’eda and other jihadist groups. They are not particularly religious, they’re political. To get the feel, imagine something which is a mixture of a hard-left Marxist group like the Socialist Workers Party or the Maoists, mixed with a separatist religious cult like the Moonies, and placed within Islam. That’s jihadism.
And that gives us the clue on how to respond. Like all cults, both political and religious, jihadism is a kind of spiritual tyranny, and people lose their freedom, their souls in such groups. Ed Husain wrote his book because he broke free from it all, and what broke the spell for him was when all the things he had been promoting led one person to murder another. He realised he had lost his way. Eventually, after a long journey, he found his way to a moderate and religious form of Islam. But on the way, he realised that for all his radical political promotion of Islam he was far from God. The thing to realise is that a lot of these people, for all their loud and violent promotion of their way of religion, Osama bin Laden and all the rest of them, they are far from God. And some of them know it. They don’t want to know it, but they do. They are like the religious leaders in the days of Stephen, they are like Saul of Tarsus, deeply hostile to anyone who gets in the way of the implementation of their bigoted principles for imposing their version of religion on everyone else. But if you look carefully at what happened with Saul of Tarsus and with Stephen you can see something big, which is for our world today. In Acts 22:20 Paul has given his defence before a hostile crowd. He’s chosen his words carefully so that they hear him out. Towards the end, he’s telling them what he said to God, when told to leave Jerusalem, and when he is arguing with God, he says that when the blood of your witness (your martyr) Stephen was there, I stood there giving my approval and guarding the clothes of those who were killing him, God told him to go, that God was sending him far away to the Gentiles. He knew that would cause the explosion of anger in the crowd, which is why he left it till last: he was being sent to the infidels. But that word about Stephen gives a clue. It shows that Paul (or Saul as he was then) was a top flight bigot – a man prepared to ensure these Christians got murdered. But it also shows that Stephen’s witness left its mark. Stephen, before the lynch mob attacked, saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and said, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, and even as they were stoning him, prayed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord, do not hold this sin against them. For all the fury of that mob, and indeed for all the anger of the crowd hearing Paul, and shouting, Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live! – for all that, some, like Paul himself, will see the one vital thing that is missing in their lives: a real relationship with the true and living God. What Muslims, including these radicalised politicised Islamists need to see is Christians who have a real, tangible, utterly spiritual connexion with the Lord. If God is in our hearts, not as a marginal influence, but in life-transforming power, that is what will speak, and that is what will save some from the emptiness covered up by loud political and religious rhetoric.
In a post-9/11 world, we need the Saul of Tarsus people of today to meet with such Christ-centred, God-transformed Christians, that they see the God they are missing, and become, like Paul before them, apostles of love.
I: Changing Churches
Introduction
I am a Baptist – but I am not here to bang the Baptist drum, and claim that Baptists are the only true Christians and so on.
There was a time when much Christian discourse followed that pattern. The Church history books tell how all our different churches and denominations arose. We could go back to that massive event in terms of self-definition of Christian orthodoxy which separated mainstream Christians from the Nestorians and others in 451. We could point to the division between Eastern and Western Christians which came a head in 1054. We could point to the changes in the Reformation. As with the earlier divisions there were issues of principle, but there were also geographical factors: the Reformation lands are grouped in north Germany, Scandinavia, parts of the low countries, Switzerland and Britain.
The emergence of Baptists provided a non-geographic development: believers churches, and that leads us to recognise varying major pictures of what the church is.
1. Three pictures of Church
a) the Christendom model
There is a tendency, stronger in some eras and some countries, to think in terms of identifying nationalisty with denomination. This says, if you are Polish you must be Catholic, if Swedish then Lutheran, if Georgian, then Georgian Orthodox, if Scottish, then Presbyterian, and if English, then Anglican. This idea goes back to Christendom, and is a version of it for denominationally divded Christendom. In the first three centuries Christians suffered episodes of heavy persecution interspersed by periods where the pressure lessened. But then when Constantine became Emperor, he had just become a Christian, and put his success down to his faith. The Roman idea of religion held that it helps hold society together, and a Romanised development took place as Christians switched from being persecuted to being favoured. From 313 when Constantine became a Christian till the end of that fourth century the number of Christians in the Roman Empire increased from an estimated 12% to an estimated 75%. After the fall of Rome, the common faith still held societies together. As the so-called adrk ages gave way to the so-called middle ages, we saw the development of the worst excesses of the ambiguous combination of church and state in Christendom, with the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the development of persecution of religiously different groups in the increase of anti-Semitism, and the persecution of surviving folklorish pagan practices as witchcraft. “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” as Lord Acton famously said. And in the Christendom puicture of church, there has been corruption.
There has also been nominalism. If people become Christian, because Christians have political power then not only does the faith get corrupted, it also gets diluted. Faith, denominational faith, is seen as a mark of national identity.
b) the club model
As Baptists, that Christendom model is far from us, and we’re not characteristically corrupted that way. For uis the challenge comes from treating church as a kind of holy club.
Since the 18th century the idea has grown ever stronger of treating faith as a kind of voluntary association, religion as a brand of club (as golf is) with the different churches and denominations expressing local branches and networks of these clubs.
Church is not necessarily for everyone (according to this model), but for those who like hymns, songs, prayers and that sort of thing. Is that how we see it?
The massive problem with all that is that it makes God an option. Our little god, our plaything, our toy. It devalues the church as well. The church meeting then becomes the club meeting, where club members have a vote and sort out what they want. 50% want this – when then it happens! Or an issue might be seriously divisive (choosing leaders for example) – well let there be a 66% vote needed. This is a big temptation for us as Baptists, because it is so close to our way of doing things. But we are not voting, and the rest, in order to determine the desires of the majority of members, but to discover and test what God’s will is for us. The great problem here is not nominalism, but superficiality.
God’s not our nation’s icon, he’s our club’s mascot!
c) the covenant, community model
Our own tradition – and that of Mennonites, Congregationalists and other dissenters – is different. Being a Christian is not a matter of where you are born, or who your parents were. Nor is it a matter of your personal choice. It is discovering and confessing Jesus Christ as Lord, and hearing him call you into a covenant relationship with him, which also impels you into a covenant relation with others, with those who are called to follow Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
The call, this response to the call, draws us into a covenant community. You can’t really have Jesus without his church. And the church is Jesus’ church. That changes everything we have just been describing. The church meeting for example is no longer the attempt to discover the majority feeling among the club members, but the attempt by the community committed to Christ to discern what Christ wants for us in relation to the issue in question.
This picture is not without its problems, too (we are all fallen human beings – including Baptists!). If the problems elsewhere are nominalism and superficiality, the problem here is with a possible over-rigorous self-righteous exclusivism – the attitude that we alone, in our little group, are the only truly righteous believers. That we must consistently resist as much as we can.
2. Church Unity
Jesus called us to be one. But there has been far too much division. However, there is now increasing growth in spiritual unity among Christians. We are on a journey, and we know that in John 17, Jesus prayed for his followers (including us) to be one – with the deepest spiritual unity (that unity he has with the Father).
But how do we play our part in fulfilling this?
a) only one denomination?
The oldest way was to say there is only one true church – ours! Only sects continue that line now.
b) make one denomination
The older way was to seek to reconstruct one structurally united church: “grand organic unity”. It has failed every time.
c) local ecumenical projects (LEPs)
These have varied enormously in their helpfulness and effectiveness. In my personal experience, those local ecumenical churches that have been constructed on the Buggins turn principle collapse under the weight of their contradictions; those which grow with their own identity usually flourish.
d) selective ad hoc unity
This is a lesser model than the LEPs, but more common. Churches learn to operate together in developping unity in various projects – and even better, in spiritual relationships, in praying together. I have found that when Christians start praying together for real, God blesses it; and when we do so for the sake of the community in which we are placed together, God blesses it big time.
e) deep spiritual unity
The unity Jesus calls for goes beyond all this. He calls us to have the same unity he has with the Father, and to express this unity with all other Christians. It’s hard enough sometimes within the local church! (That’s because we see more clearly the actual spiritual cost of such spiritual unity!) But where we are inspired by Christ, we will see this growing spiritual unity among Christians.
That is clearly my prayer here in Hinckley, and for Christians generally. For that is our calling: to enter full unity with Jesus Christ, and that includes unity with all who are so united with Christ.

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