Continuing The Thread

I’ve been thinking further about the concluding couple of paragraphs of my essay on ‘Beauty’ below.  About, I suppose, the way religion, which of course should be a force for good, can so easily become instead  a thing to cramp and imprison its members, and a cause of conflict and division.

I found myself reflecting on this truth: that human pain and heartache, whether inflicted on our own selves or imposed on others, so often has its origin in a dogged insistence on defending or seeking to preserve structures, organisations and modes of thinking that have in fact had their day and served whatever purpose they may once have had.

And might the Church (capital C) be one of those structures? Well, clearly it can be.  The danger of any organisation or institution, however worthy its aims and the vision of its founders, is that it becomes an end in itself.  It is not surprising then that, for many of its members, the most important thing about Church is that it should never change.  I can think of so many small and dwindling congregations whose only approach to the challenges of the modern world is that they should keep going as they always have for as long as they can manage.

Now there is of course an honourable and indeed Biblical role in being ‘the faithful remnant’, and I do feel bound to salute the loyalty and faith of those who do and give so much to keep their local church or chapel going.  I am bound to observe, though, that if the miracle of restoration should happen, it is likely to happen despite them rather than because of them.  The Gospel is an unchanging message, the same yesterday, today and for ever - but the way in which that message is presented, celebrated and proclaimed must change, if it is to be heard and received.

So has the Church had its day, and is organised religion really on the way out, for all its present power and influence?  There are those who, looking from the sceptical and secular West at the noisy impact of religion still within our current affairs, nonetheless would claim that what we are seeing is in fact its death throes.  To be honest, in part I would want to agree;  I’d like to think that those distorted forms of organised religion which preach hate and division might indeed be on the way out (and though I may find myself instinctively looking towards the Islamic world as I write this, let us not be fooled into thinking the same is not true of Christians, Jews, Hindus, even supposedly peaceful Buddhists).  Surely we are capable of building a better world than that?

But I also see how secularist freedom, for all its promise of human fulfilment, can so easily turn into a self-serving libertarianism that is itself hugely destructive of society and community;  and secular political philosophies are every bit as capable of fomenting hatred and conflict as religion has been and is.  The sad truth is that anything we believe in strongly can be used to bad ends, and that exploitation and indoctrination take many forms.  So the answer to my own question - has the Church had its day - must I think be "no". 

For me, the organised Church continues to have power and point in the world, and to be a creative and positive force, often in new and surprising ways, within human society.  But only so long as it consciously frees itself from the shackles of the past,  and is alive to the danger of what I could call the ‘preservationist tendency’, and of becoming something that exists for its own ends.  For in fact a Church which is in tune with its Founder will need to be a community rather than an institution, with its members pilgrims travelling together rather than settlers putting down roots.  A Church that can become careless of its own appearance, and that is capable of understanding its structures (and even its hierarchies and orders of ministry) as essentially provisional, in service to the Gospel, will be able to re-create itself constantly as it seeks to take a servant role in the image of its Lord.