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The Death of Christendom - Then What

By Alun Brookfield.

If we define Christendom (as the Collins English Dictionary does) as “the collective body of Christians throughout the world or throughout history”, then clearly, as long as there are Christians in the world, Christendom will survive.

However, if we define Christendom (in my view, more accurately) as:

• that religious system which came into being with the alleged conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century;
• which united Church and state in a mutually convenient alliance;
• based on worldly power allied to religious power;
• for the mutual benefit of both;

then, indisputably, in Britain at least, Christendom is dead.

The time has gone when political leaders took notice of the opinions and advice of Christian bishops. Nowadays, the Archbishop of Canterbury has little more than a pastoral role towards those in political and royal power. Prime Ministers may listen to the Archbishop, but their power is not dependent on the patronage of the church, so his advice can be safely disregarded. Bishops in the House of Lords may huff and puff, but nobody takes their advice seriously, because the politicians know that Christian believers, few as we are, will not vote at the next election as a religious power block, but according to which party they wish to govern them.

Where once upon a time, the Catholic Church, and then the Church of England wielded considerable power and received considerable respect, Anglicans in the UK are now little more than one denomination among many. True, the Anglican Church is the church of choice for a large percentage of weddings and funerals, but baptisms (christenings) are becoming fewer and fewer, as we are now, to all intents and purposes about three generations distant from anything which could have been described as an almost universal adherence to any form of Christian faith. The 2011 census, showing a marked drop in the numbers and percentage of UK residents describing themselves as Christian, combined with a marked increase in the percentage describing themselves as being of no religion, has merely confirmed what we already knew – and perhaps dreaded.

So what?

What does that mean for our mission? Broadly, it means that the old methods of mission and evangelism are becoming less and less effective. Even large congregations, with a wide and varied programme of activities for all ages, have to work very hard to generate even minimal conversion growth.

Let me illustrate that from my own experience. I was born in 1950, when Christendom was firmly embedded in our education system. At all levels of my schooling, I received Religious Education, which basically meant memorising passages of Scripture and learning the doctrines of the Christian (and especially Anglican) Church. However, I never went to Sunday School. I had no experience of regular (or even irregular!) church-going until after my conversion at the age of nineteen, when I was brought to faith, almost literally overnight, through the personal witness of my best friend, who himself, only three weeks earlier, had embraced the nominal faith in which he, like me, had been educated.

In both our cases, we knew enough about the Christian faith to have an intelligent and meaningful conversation about religion, so the journey from non-faith to faith was able to be a short one. I often describe it as having been given by my schooling a set of Velcro-pads in my head onto which the idea of becoming a disciple of Jesus could take hold.

My point is that, for the vast majority of people born after 1960, those Velcro-pads are not there. When my friend, John, talked to me about his new-found faith, it made perfect sense to me. When we talk to younger generations now about our faith, they often haven’t the faintest idea what we’re talking about. The best we get is a polite disinterest, or perhaps an expression of anxiety about our sanity!

We’re all affected

At this point, it would be possible for ‘successful’ Free Churches and New Churches to smugly turn the page and imagine that this has nothing to do with them. Brothers and sisters, you could not be more wrong!

All Free Church denominations and New Church groups came into being in a Christendom context, and thrived on the disaffection of the wider population to Anglican and other traditional forms of Christianity. If that is so, then the loss of the Christendom context will affect you too. For one thing, the Free Churches will have to redefine their reason for existence – it will no longer be possible to define themselves in terms of their differences from the Anglicans. For another, the mission challenges of ignorance and disaffection will make mission and evangelism much more difficult for all of us. We are facing a culture of what I call Casual and Causal Atheism.

The Challenge of Casual and Causal Atheism

Casual atheism is an atheism born of not bothering to consider the claims of religious belief with any intentionality. It casually assumes that religion is irrelevant and that science has disproved the existence of God (neither of which, of course, is true).

Causal atheism is an atheism born of seeing the harm done by ‘religion’ in the world and drawing the (clearly erroneous) conclusion that there is therefore no divine entity to be known or worshipped.

I state the situation thus because it roughly sums up the views of, I would guess, most young people and a fairly large percentage of the population under the age of about 50. It’s no good us kidding ourselves that, if we can only make church more interesting, more relevant, more ‘contemporary’; and if we can only make being a Christian appear to be a bit more ‘cool’, then the people will start flocking back to faith and therefore to church.

Not if my experience on 14 November 2012 is anything to go by! I was in the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, for a gig by Frank Turner, a man of whom I have become a huge fan in recent years. Frank is a hugely popular song-writer and recently performed as a warm-up act at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. His songs and performance style are punchy, narrative, easy to learn and sing along to. The themes are the stuff of everyday life, and therefore connect with his thousands of fans. He also has a powerful and attractive stage presence.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, Frank began singing what sounded at first like a gospel song (it had that clearly identifiable naff-ness which marks out so much of what we think is contemporary worship!), but when he got to the last line of the first (and every other verse), the words were that “There never was no God”.

Pedantic readers will notice and comment on the double negative, but the rest of the song left us in no doubt whatever that the statement was intended as a single negative. Looking around, it was clear that that was how most of the other 1,998 people at the gig understood it. There was no hatred or anger – just a crowd of mostly under-40s having a great time singing and clapping along to a song which asserted the non-existence of God. It was an impressive and fascinating display of casual and causal atheism.

Of course, it’s a free country and Frank’s perfectly entitled to say whatever he wants and he’s equally entitled to use his remarkable musical and performance skills to convey that message to his fans. Indeed, I would defend to the death his right to believe or disbelieve whatever he wants, and to propagate those beliefs. But I made a mental note to have a look on the internet for the words of the song so that I could reflect on them at greater leisure.

Have a look for yourself if you’re web-connected (Google “Frank Turner Glory Hallelujah lyrics”). I was both amazed and disappointed. I was amazed because I fully agreed with all the words, except the conclusion that the rest of the song proved the non-existence of God. And I was disappointed to find that the lyrics were basically a list of aunt sallies – cheap shots taken at all the aspects of the Christian faith from which most of us would disassociate ourselves. Let me give you some examples.

O that God the gift would give us…

First, he portrays Christians as kill-joys; as lacking in compassion; and clergy (priests) as ‘overbearing’. Second, he suggests that we blame our failings on ‘imaginary beasts; and that we are finger-pointers, ‘justified by phantoms up above’. Third, he rightly criticizes Jews and Palestinian Moslems for fighting over land and for spilling a lot of blood, but never spilling any love.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I agree with him. The horrible truth is that we are or have been guilty of all those things, and we should be rightly ashamed – I certainly am. I think he’s right to criticize and lampoon the Church, Christians and religious people in general for these things, but none of them prove that “there never was no God”. They just prove that God’s people don’t always live up to God’s ideals and that sometimes we make a spectacular mess of living up to those ideals.

Why am I telling you all this? Because most of what we’re doing in the church at the moment is like moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic. We’re fiddling around with structures, mission and vision statements, worship patterns, styles of music, the ordination of women as bishops, care of our buildings, paying the bills and electing a new Pope, while the world out there perceives religious people as irrelevant, overbearing, judgemental, contentious, self-obsessed and pompous. And the conclusion they draw is that, if that’s what believing in God does for you, they want none of it.

Yes, I know sometimes we’re (mostly!) better than that, but what’s needed is something radical, noticeable and stereotype-shattering. Moving the deckchairs to more attractive positions will serve no purpose (except a despairingly selfish one) on a sinking ship.

Back to the Future?

At first glance, this may appear as though we are in a position not unlike that of the first century church, proclaiming Christ in virgin territory, but that’s not the case. This is not virgin territory at all – it’s derelict land, littered with piles of cynicism, misconceptions, superstition and rejection of what the occupants of the land thought the Christian faith was all about.

Even the basic facts of the life of Christ are at best confused and at worst entirely missing from the minds of the majority of under-50s. A young man in my parish just the other day told me that Palm Sunday was the beginning of Lent! A friend was telling me of a young woman in his neighbourhood who thought that Christmas was when Jesus died and rose again! Such conversations are not surprising when I reflect that I am asked to baptise less than 15% of babies born in my little rural parish. And the other 85% are being born to families which have had no contact with the Christian faith for at least three generations.

This has major implications for our evangelism. Programmes, such as Alpha and Purpose-Driven Church, all of which are aimed at a culture in which our target audience are Christianized, if yet to be actually converted, will have gradually less and less impact. We are going to need to find new ways of reaching people with the gospel.

The only snag is that, since we’ve never been in this position previously at any time in the last two thousand years, we are flying blind. In Westernized culture, we are facing a set of circumstances which are different from those faced by any Christian missionary or evangelist since the resurrection of our Lord. I for one, with a lifetime in mission and evangelism behind me, simply have no idea how to evangelise the ignorance, cynicism, misconceptions, superstition and rejection of the Christian faith which I find among my neighbours. We simply have no models on which to devise new ways of communicating Christian faith. Or have we?

Models from Foreign Missions

Our best hope, perhaps, is to learn, not so much from Western evangelists, as from pioneer missionaries.

For all of my lifetime, we have trained overseas missionaries in cross-cultural mission, helping them to face the fact that, like William Carey over two hundred years ago, we may have to spend many years putting some basic building blocks of understanding in place before we see any new ‘converts’. I suggest that we need to do the same in the communities of the UK.

The traditional pattern of overseas missionary work has been to go to a place and simply ‘be’ there, engaging with the people, learning their language, understanding their customs and culture, then bringing a critique of love and transformation. Along with that critique went, in the best examples, an openness to allow the people to engage with the gospel on their own terms.

A fine and well-known example of this is the ministry of the Roman Catholic evangelist, Father Vincent Donovan, in his missionary work with the Masai people, and documented in his ground-breaking book, Christianity Rediscovered. After years of preaching to the Masai and making no progress, Fr Donovan decided to sit down and listen to them. By doing so, he earned the right to speak. Gradually, they came to embrace the Christian faith, but not very much of Roman Catholic practice, choosing instead to create a way of engaging with God which was consonant with their Masai culture. The whole process took many years, but led to a thoroughly indigenous church which had no need of what might be termed “Parachute Preachers” – clergy ‘parachuted’ in from an alien culture.

I’m sure there are many other equally good or better examples, but they would all make the same point, namely that ‘faith’ cannot be imposed from outside a culture, but only grown within a loving critique of that culture.

Doing it differently

If that is the model we need to embrace, then ministry – whether Anglican or Free Church – will look very different in the future. For one thing, there will be no more five year ministries! Missioners/ evangelists (whatever we want to call them) will have to be prepared to embed themselves in local culture in places where ‘The Church’ is to all intents and purposes absent. And that embedding will often mean a lifetime’s commitment to ministry in one place.

Second, mission will be increasingly holistic, not just focussed on bringing people to faith and getting them to embrace ‘Christian’ values and lifestyles. Instead, mission will be about enabling the people to express the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ in terms of their own culture.

Third, denominational leaders will need to set long-term goals for their front-line evangelists and will need to set them free from the time-greedy and energy-sapping responsibility to tick administrative boxes on behalf of the denomination and to bind themselves to the Vision and Mission Statements of well-meaning, but bureaucratic, objectified goals.

Finally, we will all have to stop thinking about how we get those on the fringes of our churches, or those who attend ‘alternative’ church to engage with the ‘normal’ services. Rather, we need to start figuring out how to get those who attend the ‘normal’ services to embrace the Christian values of those who have engaged with faith through ‘alternative’ church.

I could go on, but I will end at this point. Hopefully I’ve been provocative enough to start a debate among the readers of Ministry Today UK. Please send your thoughts (however brief or wordy!) to us and we’ll endeavour to put them on the website and/or print them in the Journal.