If you read certain newspapers, even church ones, you might get the impression that the Church, especially here in western Europe, is in a state of crisis, imminent death even. It may not be an acute problem for us at St Ursula's, and it is not a new problem either. But it is still a problem. Why do people not flock into church?
As Christians, we should think seriously about this. And we should not only ask ourselves, but we should ask people outside the church. For it is wrong to misinterpret the plain words of 2 Corinthians 5:14: "One has died for all" to mean that Christ's death and resurrection only concern an in-group, a holy remnant, "the saved". All means all!
Not many people seriously doubt the events that underlie our faith. Like Stonehenge, Christianity is there for all to see. Some of the details are unclear, and made even less clear by the efforts of people through the ages to pin down "the facts". Just as we can never know exactly when, how, or why the stones of Stonehenge were carved from the Welsh mountains, brought and set up on Salisbury plain, there are details of Jesus' life we can only speculate about, and never know. But that is no reason for denying the Christian faith, just as it is no reason for denying Stonehenge's existence.
But Stonehenge has little relevance to our life today. Our problem is that many people feel the same about the Christian faith. In today's multicultural Switzerland, people can see that there are many faiths. Christianity is only one of them, and people see there are many versions of that, too!
We believe that Jesus Christ was God, "handed over to death for our sins and raised for our justification." (Rom 4:25). We believe that Jesus fulfilled all the expectations of Judaism, and we lay more stress than Muslims do on the need for human suffering to pave the way for our reconciliation with God, but we share with Jews and Muslims a belief in a God of mercy, of peace, of strong and constant faithfulness, who seeks our love and service.
Many people today are aware that there is something outside the material world. But not so many people are aware of God as someone, as a person. And even fewer, it seems, feel a need to worship God - or at least, not in the way we worship God in western Europe.
This is not their fault. Indeed, it is not a fault so much as a problem. Despite the attempts of politicians to reintroduce the concept, few people see the world in terms of good and evil (and even the politicians have failed to reckon with Jesus' warning in Matthew 12:45 - that the removal of one evil does not mean that good will take its place!). And even fewer people see the world in terms of sin and virtue.
At the end of the 18th century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment developed the idea of rights and duties, and since the middle of the last century, people have tended to see human relationships and human activity in terms of respecting or infringing people's rights. This is a different language from the language the Church normally speaks. And it is a language which lends itself much more readily to discussing the burning issues of today than the language people imagine we use in church.
Environmentalism, gender and racial equality, nuclear weapons and power, the treatment of animals, drug abuse, the well-being of body and mind, all these are themes at issue today. We can discuss them much more easily in terms of rights and duties than in terms of sin and virtue. Yet Jesus died for the drug abuser, for the power station architect, for the undervalued employee. God suffered - and suffers - for all.
This does not mean that we should do a quick modernization makeover on our worship (of the type that would replace We plough the fields and scatter with We plough the fields with tractors). It means we have to listen more to the world around us, and respond far more radically to its needs.
The Church cannot die - we have Jesus' assurance of that. But just as in Acts (17:23, for example) we see Paul adapting his message to his audience, we too need to present the Good News in a way that is compulsive and relevant to those who fail to see what is Good about it. And then to look again at what we do in Church (and when and why we do it). For what we do is not for us. What we do, we do for all.
HD