There’s an incredible thing happening in the Australian Christian church. It’s growing.
For anyone who’s followed the annual National Church Life Survey, as I have for years, it’s largely been a depressing affair. Each year the Sydney Morning Herald writes a story about how the mainstream Christian church is declining and become irrelevant. This year was different.
Saturday’s SMH carried this piece by Linda Morris, the paper’s religious affairs writer. It begins: “CHRISTIAN churches are attracting new blood, with up to one-third of all churchgoers recent recruits, but the new messengers of faith are demanding more than passive Sunday worship, a national snapshot of church life shows.”
I believe this is wider recognition of a grassroots revival that’s already taken hold. Christians in this generation in Australia want an authentic faith, not an adopted one. There are two telling paragraphs buried down the bottom of the article:
“More churchgoers say the church experience is one of inspiration, joy, awe and mystery. Higher proportions say they are serving others by visiting the sick and donating to charity.”
“A survey researcher, Dr Ruth Powell, said: “Churches are reclaiming what they said they could always do: to provide meaning and purpose in people’s lives.”
To me, this couldn’t be more encouraging. We’re talking about rediscovering the first principles of the Christian church (as recounted in the Book of Acts). It’s the social gospel. Jesus wasn’t interested in talk for talk’s sake. In arguments about the colour of the church’s carpet. He couldn’t care less about whether we have a Bible reading before or after announcements on a Sunday morning or whether you wore shorts.
A line from the book of James (ch 1:27) springs to mind as I write this (my emphasis): “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” That’s the social gospel.
The National Church Life Survey article was packaged on page 3 by a story about Joel Houston, the frontman for Hillsong United, the youth rock band from Hillsong Church. He’s also the son of senior pastor Brian Houston.
Here’s how he articulated what’s happening in the Christian church, and why the youth have flocked to Hillsong: “What they want is living a life of truth – it’s not about throwing the law down their throat, it’s about saying you have one life to live, but it’s all about loving God and loving others.”
There are some Christians who might argue this sort of quote isn’t strong enough – not emphasising the “saving work of Jesus on the Cross” or some equally confusing jargon open to misinterpretation by people outside the church.
But no, Houston’s got it. People want an authentic faith, and an authentic experience of God. A relationship with a God who is alive. How to discover this relationship and authenticity is fodder for another day. But the point here is there are plenty of people discovering God for the first time. For example, the Houston article itself talks about “record levels” of enrollments at the Baptist Church’s Morling College (where I studied one semester a few years ago, coincidentally).
Curiously enough, the counterpoint to these two stories was located in a different section of the paper called Spectrum, and teased from page 1 of the paper. That story was titled “How God’s soldiers poison the well of life.” (The copy is not on the SMH site because it was a book extract.) The essence of author Christopher Hitchens’ argument is not a new idea: that religion is “to blame” for all of the world’s (read: peoples’) problems. Hitchens’ instead places his faith in all sorts of things like literature, our inquiring minds, and French philosopher Blaise Pascal who said “I am so made that I cannot believe.”
Man, you get depressed reading a story like this – there’s an undercurrent of anger and a perspective on life that’s overwhelmingly negative. The world’s problems are too great, the injustices too large, and “religion” will forever be to blame. As a guiding philosophy and approach to life it feels heavy, and I suspect it takes a lot of energy to stay that mad for the duration of your life.
“The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made,” Hitchens writes.
A great Christian scholar called Ravi Zacharias said something I’ll never forget, and it serves as a great rebuttal here: Christianity is the only religion that man could not have made. Why? Because Christians don’t have to do anything! Instead, we believe. We believe that Jesus died in our place for all of the offences we have caused God since the Garden of Eden. That means we don’t have to earn our place in Heaven. All we have to do is tell God that we believe in Him, we’re sorry for causing our maker offence (sin), and that we believe Jesus died in our place (the penalty for sin) and rose from the dead to prove that he is more powerful than even the worst thing most of us could imagine (death). If Jesus can conquer death, surely nothing else is impossible…
In contrast, every other religion I can think of requires some kind of action on the part of a person in order to achieve its goal (elightenment, peace, etc.) - an offering, a pilgrimmage, sticking to a long list of rules, or taking a bath in a sacred river. Ravi argues that given the fact we are all self-centered, why would we create a religion that at its core takes our own efforts out of the picture?
To wrap this up, here’s another cracking quote from James that provides part of the explanation for the church revival we’re witnessing.
“As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead,” James 2:26.
Put another way, Christian faith is not authentic unless it is expressed in the social context I’ve highlighted above. As people convert faith into deeds, or action, it helps to deepen that faith.
And finally, another big idea that’s at work here. Christianity gives true freedom. Here we have a counterpoint to the false idea that Christianity is oppressive, or a set of rules that inhibits growth or self-expression. Galatians 5:14 in The Message version of the Bible explains how your faith in God can deliver freedom from negativity and the burdens of life because you put other people first:
“For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom.”
Dare I say it again: Hello social gospel!
