St Cuthberts Saltcoats Parish

Dear Friends                                                                                           October 2009

I have included in this month’s magazine the most recent Current Issues to come from ‘Parliamentary Prayers Scotland’. I think that we are living in very dramatic times. Britain and Scotland are changing in ways which would have seemed unimaginable only fifty years ago. The Christian faith is no longer taken as the obvious or normal belief for people to hold. Many other beliefs and religions are now firmly established. Christianity is now existing in a ‘market place’ of faith. No longer self evidently true, Christianity has to learn to compete and fight to be heard. In popular culture the Christian faith and Christian values have all but vanished. They have been left behind in our most popular TV programmes. The most influential programmes, watched by millions; Coronation Street, Emmerdale. East Enders, and Hollyoaks, are making bigger impacts on everyday life than the Church. Science fiction and fantasy, films and programmes, may in themselves seem reasonably harmless, yet they are having such a huge influence upon collective thought that it is becoming quite easy for fiction to be treated as if it were fact. Science fiction can imagine a race of aliens coming to earth and being responsible for the beginning of life or the seeding of DNA. For many this is more plausible than belief that God is responsible for life on earth.

So now the Church has to reach people whose hearts and minds are won by fiction as well as alternative beliefs and philosophies. We now have to persuade people to discard outlooks on life which are quite imaginary, yet seem as real to their adherents as everything else. That is to say, our modern sophisticated generation is being sucked into modern sophisticated superstition. The advance of rational scientific thinking coupled with the collapse of rational thought and established Christian faith is spawning a new generation of superstition. Our modern age has supplied endless bites of disconnected decontextualised information which we weave together with imaginary wisdom to produce a compelling array of insights. We have successfully merged reality and unreality into a new hybrid, a ‘chimera’, a new mindset. We have succeeded in mixing oil and water. We have achieved the impossible without realising it and without noticing the impossibility of it all. We hail our new found wisdom as genius.

The Bible sees it for what it really is – blindness. In our excitement and awe at our prowess, in our superstitious naivety we do not spot the obvious, that God is becoming increasingly frail in the collective consciousness of our society. He is either fading away as a ghostly image from the past or He is blamed for all the ills of our modern world. Whether we have killed Him or put Him in the dock, God is between a rock and a hard place in modern Britain.

God is excluded from the classroom when origins of life are taught. His ways are unheard of when governments plan policy. Family life has lost the source of its inspiration and support. Our society has been built on sands which are now beginning to shift rapidly. The political process seems to have lost much of its integrity, and our financial institutions have crashed. Our families are struggling with so many pressure, our communities and cherished values lie in tatters, regulation in so many walks of life has failed. Former autocratic political regimes discovered the failure of over regulation to control peoples’ beliefs and actions, yet modern government vainly increases regulation, currently trying to challenge freedom to speak out on moral and religious issues. We have become more superstitious and have also failed to learn the lessons of the past.  Is this not a measure of our folly as a nation? Again the Bible speaks with a simple and convincing clarity: “there is nothing new under the sun”.

In this increasingly broken Britain the modern Church is set. Surely the Church has to be different. Modern man may see God as a wraith or a wrong doer, but this is symptomatic of blindness and folly. The church has to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, neither blind nor foolish. If we follow modern trends we will certainly become both. John in his first letter in the New Testament comments; ‘the world does not know him (Christ)’. But as Christians we do. How can we rise above the worldly influence around us? John answers, ‘Jesus said “I have overcome the world”’ and ‘he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God overcomes the world. It is in this faith that we have victory’. It is in faith and through faith that the blindness and foolishness of the modern world will recede and the reality of the immensity and certainty of God’s being will unfold. In this revelation we will see the goodness of God in Christ, the love of God in Christ, the justice of God in Christ, the future from God in Christ and the mission of God in Christ. In this revelation if we live by it, we will know the peace of God in our lives, the transformation by God of our lives, the purpose from God for our lives and the power of God through our lives. We as individuals and we collectively as a church, have all the resources of God at our disposal to enable us to make a real difference for good, and for God, in our own lives, in the church, in our homes, and in our society. We can combat the superstition and folly of a dark and dangerous world and emerge victorious. We can ‘declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his glorious light’.

The issues highlighted in the Parliamentary Prayers Scotland report makes disturbing reading. The solutions have an elegant simplicity. We can pray about these issues and ask God to lead and direct the decision makers. We can pray for those who are facing discrimination because of their Christian faith. We can write to MPs and MSPs. We can share our concerns with others.  We may find other ways of engaging in practical action. In all that we do however, we know that God IS sovereign. We know that he does care for our land. We know that in defending his ways we are doing his will. And we know that God works through the prayers and service of his people.

We know that in Christ we can make a difference.

Yours in Christ

Brian Oxburgh