I and the staff attended this Special Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in August. The programme consisted firstly of evening worship and talks given by Ajith Fernando, National Director YFC Sri Lanka.  The talks were mainly based on the early chapters in Acts and he challenged us to see the missionary thrust of the early church and the confidence that they had in the gospel. The gospel has real power to change lives. Christ is supreme and we see the church on the move and things changing as the gospel reaches into individual’s lives. In his second talk he gave us a masterly overview of the mission of the early church and the different foundational elements for mission. I will return to this later.

The morning sessions consisted of three main talks by three local ministers and then by seminars on a variety of topics. The three morning sessions were Confident in Christ in the face of global change by Stafford Carson, Confident in Christ in the face of social change by David Bruce and Confident in Christ in the face of the church on the margins by John Woodside. All were excellent and again helped to reaffirm the power of the gospel in the face of a changing world and a changing Ireland. Again I will come back to this.

A variety of seminars were held and I attended ones on Militant atheism, re-imagining church and spiritual disciplines.

The Context for the Special Assembly

The context for this Assembly is a changing western world, a denomination in decline (but also a western church in decline), a post Christian and post modern mindset, increasing secularism, a failure of confidence in the gospel and a church that has lost its distinctive flavour.

All this seems very negative but it is realistic. I think the conference was key in highlighting the threats and challenges to us as a church, our need to be alert and not complacent and also the confidence that we have a gospel that can still change lives today. Because the good thing about this conference is that it widened our horizons. It got us to look up and outwards and to see that the church world-wide is growing and has largely moved south and east. The gospel is powerfully at work and we can learn from the faith and optimism of the African church, the church in Korea and in S America. This was a very good aspect of the conference, it gave us a global view.

The challenge in the West still remains, we have a growing secular society. Half of couples are living together unmarried and half of children now born outside of wedlock. Sundays are now transformed from a worship and rest day to a recreation and shopping day.

David Bruce reminded us that four massive shifts have occurred in the west and here now in Ireland -

A - a generational change with 20-30’s largely absent from church and with a different outlook to previous generations.

1 Live in real time (little patience with archives and history)

2 Work globally but live locally

3 Transparent (Reality TV; openness of the internet)

4 Expect things to be cheap or free

5 Want to be entertained

6 Worry about environment

7 Luxury lifestyle

8 Pro business but anti multi-nationals

9 Media savvy but struggle with books and linear thinking

10 Naturally “me” but want to be “we”. Struggle for community but diff. to find it. Maybe because this generation is so self obsessed and self focused it is not prepared to make the sacrifices to attain true community.

Other shifts –

B - Knowledge shift. No longer believes in absolutes. No one foundation upon which lives are governed. Each one doing what is right in their own eyes. Popular consensus rules.

C - Church shift. Some stats. In England currently about 15% attend at least once per month by 2020 prob. 1% church attendance. In Ireland falling every year – Rep. of Ireland 60%;  in NI 40%. More muslims in Rep of Ireland than protestants.

Plantation history of PCI – ministers especially more like chaplains than missioners. PCI pretty much staying east and north. Needs rather to move south and west. This is something that not only our denomination but all Christians need to be aware of. Mission on our doorstep needs to become an absolute priority.

D – An economic shift esp. In Rep of Ireland but here also as the recession bites. But we have been used to getting luxuries, we have become very materialistic and this I believe has had an impact on our spiritual power and energy.

Confident in the gospel

John Woodside in his address suggested that there are three temptations in addressing this crisis – get nostalgic and long for the good old days when churches were full, or even go further back to the days of revival and bask in those stories but do little else; hype up the message and make it more entertaining or promote a health and wealth gospel (and many today are running hither and thither trying to get the latest fix and change churches like consumers do today); the third temptation is to remove the offensiveness of the cross, and take out references to sin and other non PC terms, to water down the ethical standards so that it becomes attractive to the world. But actually, as he highlighted, the answer is not any of these things but to faithfully live as salt and light. To be confident in the gospel to change lives and to be missionaries into a world that is becoming more and more like the 1st century.

Mt.5:13-14 “You and you alone are the salt of the earth; you and you alone are the light of the world”.

When we take seriously our distinctive calling to live according to different standards from the world that has an attractiveness to it. When we take seriously the gospel and the power it has we can start to share it more boldly and we can begin to invite people to church and we can have a new confidence in our faith as we share informally with friends and work colleagues.

We need to rediscover what two verses proclaim – 2 Tim.1:12 “I am not ashamed because I know whom I have believed and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” Romans 1:16 – “I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes..”

As Christians we need to rediscover our confidence in the gospel and not be ashamed or embarrassed about it. These may be the days of small things, of much hardness of heart, but we are called to be faithful and obedient and to take this gospel – the hope of the world – to live it out and share it around.

The church is not a cosy club, we are on a rescue mission and we are about changing lives that are sin soaked into lives that are Spirit soaked. This will focus our priorities as a church – it will mean we look out as well as in. It will mean rediscovering some of the basic qualities of church that were present in the 1st century church in Acts that have gone missing in general in our institutional and conservative church. Ajith Fernando reminded us of some of these qualities: obedience to the commission, martyrdom, bold witness, breaking of barriers, leaving comfortable situations to reach out to others, encouraging one another and being bound together in real fellowship, a commitment to pray, the sacrificial giving to mission, the releasing of the best of the talents for outreach rather than holding on for the benefit of the local church. But over all there is a commitment to going in the strength of God and not being ashamed of the gospel and then seeing God working even in signs and wonders and miracles.

As Christians today yes let us enjoy life and all the good gifts that God has given, but overall and above all let us be passionate about Jesus Christ. This will mean that our faith in Jesus gives our lives purpose, direction, meaning, and it will impact how we relate to each other, to our families, to the people who work with us. It will impact how we spend our time, our money, the books we read, the films we watch. Rather than Jesus being an interest or a hobby he is at the core of our lives. Rather than the word of God being an add-on to our lives it becomes foundational to our lives and we spend time reading it and allowing it to shape us.

Human Longings

Part of the process of restoring our confidence in the gospel will be the growing realisation that we have the truth and we have the answers to men and women’s deepest longings. The sociologists tell us that every human being has three fundamental and core needs.

1.The need for transcendence – the need to appreciate someone thing or someone bigger than them (we have a spiritual side). In other words people need God, it is an inbuilt desire that they either suppress (hold down) or else deny and fill that longing with other things that become their god.

2.Secondly there is the need for significance, for meaning. The gospel story gives us the great plot line of history.  The Bible gives us the mega picture, the meta narrative – creation, fall, redemption. The Bible makes sense of our world and when people open themselves to the bible they see that it makes sense of all that they see around them. The truth is not in us, it is outside of us first and foremost and it resides in a person – Jesus Christ.

3.The third need we have is for love, for community. We have a need to belong. Again God has provided two types of communities for us – the family and the church. If you like we have a natural and a supernatural family. For many people their natural families have been a disappointment and they have been let down. For many also a church family has let them down. But it need not be this way and we as the church family have so much to offer to people today who are rootless, lonely, confused. Church is to be a community of grace and love which accepts people for what they are and where they are. However it does not necessarily leave them there. Also it is a community that is truly diverse which crosses barriers of class and race and gender.

The gospel offers transcendence, significance, love. Society may change in some respects and yet we can be reassured of this, and this gives me hope – although we may have to repackage what we do and present it in slightly different ways in our culture and context, at heart people are essentially the same in the 21st century as in the 1st century. Not only are people the same and their needs the same but the gospel is the same, God is the same and, as he made us, he knows what is best for us. In his time Jesus called society a sinful and adulterous generation. A harsh but true word; is today any less or more a sinful and adulterous generation? I suggest it is exactly the same. Again Jesus found many of his words falling on stony and hard ground as we will too but he was faithful, and the early disciples were faithful and little by little and one by one the kingdom of God began to grow and lives where changed.

I found this conference inspiring. It was what I needed to hear for I fear that I had lost confidence in the gospel, I had lost confidence in its power to change people. Not just change non christians but also to change Christians. For I think we have failed to see the power of the Holy Spirit changing Christians. Too many church people are becoming like the world, imbibing and drinking in the world’s standards, following the world’s ways of doing things and our power has gone. We are not living distinctively different lives, we are not attracting the world because we have nothing different to offer the world.

Standards of holiness are slipping and just as the children of Israel became like the surrounding nations so we are in danger of this too and we have swung from one wrong extreme to the other. From being totally separate from the world we now identify too much with the world so that we have become like it. There is all the difference between the boat being in the water and the water being in the boat.

So as we stand on the threshold of a new season of church life. Do we look ahead with anticipation in the strength and power of the gospel and wanting to know our great God better, or do we look ahead bowed down with our busyness, our distractions, our fears, our idols and having lost our vision and our hope in Christ?

Let us move forward in His strength and in His power and give ourselves to Him afresh and who knows what He can do through us.

Bookmark this page with: (what is this?)