When I went through Knox College (1939-1942) and received an ordination from our then Toronto presbytery, I could go to work with feelings of hope and significant usefulness.
Nowadays, the climate is disconcertingly foggier. Some of our best ministers are on the verge of quitting in nonplused despair. In terms of lifestyle in Canada today, on matters of daily behaviour, shopping, political opinions and voting choices, it is pretty hard to tell Presbyterians from their non-Christian neighbours. When the churches do come out of their sanctuaries and speak truth to power (like Kairos’ position on Palestine), our federal government bully boys and their civil service advisers are astounded and savagely punish the offenders for daring to intrude into public issues such as international justice. Professor Charles Fensham is among those seeking to awaken us to the looming of a new Dark Age.
A friend gave me a copy of Gene Marshall’s “The Reconstruction of Christianity.” This essay interprets what has evolved in my lifetime as “living the down slope of industrial civilization.”
I find Marshall both extraordinarily insightful as to our situation and helpfully constructive about appropriate action. He gets his message across in 42 pages and he does this in refreshingly plain English.
Are you among the readers of the Presbyterian Record who mourn the internal shriveling of our church’s formerly robust discipleship? Or its external loss of voice and loss of impact on the public conscience?
Are you hungry for help to understand the causes, to account for this deep-seated loss of health? And for clues to action that can confront and counter-act those causes? Let me commend Marshall’s perceptive essay.
It both warns us against underestimating the gravity of our situation and gives us ground for believing we can do something therapeutic about it.
Marshall starts by laying a succinct but in-depth foundation: an illuminating analysis of our world’s post-Christendom reality as the context for any relevant action: “From its dim origins some 53 centuries ago, civilization has been a top-down, hierarchical organization of humanity that placed royalty over peasants, wealth collectors over the poor, and human society over the Earth. It has not been without its worth … But now, hierarchical civilization has become like a fast-moving train carrying us, all of us, toward chaos and doom.”
On what is needed: Asking serious questions about the pandemic hardening of our religious arteries and other adhesions. Marshall proposes a contemporized church polity which he labels the Christian Resurgence Circle. He identifies three qualities of the life as essential for these CRCs:
* The members of these circles are students of the 20th-century theological revolution (forged by Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the feminist theologians, et al).
* A CRC is a down-to-earth communion of saints who meet together regularly in a disciplined fashion.
* This body of people is engaged in the transformation of the entire life of humanity.
Is it frivolous to believe our congregations could find start-up personnel for such circles?
