The Challenges Before Us

By Terry Schlossberg
Executive Director, The Presbyterian Coalition

Presented November 7, 2005, at The Gathering of Presbyterians IX, in Orlando, FL.

Recently, I participated in a forum in my presbytery. We speakers were asked to address the question of whether G-6.0106b should remain in the constitution or be removed. The Field Director for More Light Presbyterians was the other speaker. When we were introduced, the Moderator for the afternoon gave our organization titles and told the audience that we were ideal representatives of the far right and the far left on this question.

Moral matters of right and wrong, not right and left

That introduction assumed one of the common errors in this debate: that we are in a political struggle between factions on left and right. But that is not true to the reality, is it? We are not debating political extremes. We are into matters of truth and the moral order of the universe that God has created and revealed to us. These are matters that are dealt with in Scripture and interpreted in both the historic and the relatively recent confessions that we say we will be instructed and led by as officers of the church.

So, the proper way to understand the struggle over fidelity and chastity as a standard of ordination in the church is that we live in a time when the mainstream Christian sexual ethic is challenged. There is a historic and universal profession of what is true--and there is opposition to what the church has always said and continues to say on matters of moral good and evil, right and wrong. To think of it in terms of right and left is to badly misconceive the reality.

As Elizabeth Achtemeier liked to say, we bring no new word to this debate. Our desire is to bring the ancient and true word that has been faithfully preserved and passed down to us in trust for our children and our children's children.

When our presbyteries voted on the meaning and significance of marriage three times in the past ten years, they were voting for what they knew to be right and true. They were affirming what has been the mainstream of the Church=s sexual ethic throughout time. We know that to vote for what is right and true does not mean that we are declaring ourselves to be right and true. Many of us cast our votes as acts of repentance for the infidelities of our own lives and out of gratitude for the power of God’s forgiveness toward us. The position we represent as we come together in this place at this time in our church=s history is not our position; it is not the position of the far right or of religious conservatives--or of the Presbyterian Coalition. It is the Church’s position, rooted in Scripture and our Confessions. And we have taken vows that submit us to it.

We are in another troubled time of the Church’s history

Why then, if we hold the Church’s historic majority position, do we feel so beleaguered? Some of us look at the church and see her beset with such deadly infection that we think it is only a matter of time before she succumbs. We think we are fighting a battle we cannot ultimately win. And some of us think the church has never been in a worse state than she is right now.

Is it an apt description of our condition to say, as one writer put it, that Christianity today is taken to be simply one party’s rather rigid concoction, an annoying imposition on the good life? That religion and morality are in a state of collapse? That a distinguishing characteristic of the age is extreme disdain for orthodoxy? And that we are seeing the re-emergence of pagan versions of Christian worship and sacraments? All of these descriptors that are so familiar to our own situation are actually lifted from historical accounts from another time and place in history: from England in the 18th century.

In 1736, Anglican Bishop Butler wrote, “It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity… is…discovered to be fictitious.” Two years later, Bishop Berkeley declared that the state of religion and morality had utterly collapsed, and to a greater extent than had ever been seen in any Christian country. “Our prospect is very terrible,” he said, “and the symptoms grow worse from day to day.” That same year, 1738, Thomas Secker, Bishop of Oxford, lamented that open detestation of religion had become the distinguishing character of the age.” And, across the channel, Montesquieu, in 1730, wrote, “there is no religion in England. If anyone mentions religion people begin to laugh.” In that period, chemical abuse and sexual promiscuity were as prevalent in the churches as in the society. Crime rose while the country was plagued with decline in educational standards, church attendance and overall order in the society.

In that same century, jurist William Blackstone reported that he had not heard a single sermon he could identify as Christian—the preachers might as well have been followers of Confucius or Mohammed as of Christ, he said. And the church was described by another observer as “a damn big building with an organ inside.”

The church has had to be reformed and renewed before

But what could be known only from the vantage of history is that at virtually the very moment when that whole nation was hitting bottom in both faith and moral practice, John Wesley was at Aldersgate where his heart was being strangely warmed, and the Methodist movement was born. A few years later, William Wilberforce was converted and experienced a call to evangelize England as well as improve its moral life. The result was the emergence of a strong evangelical movement of reform that transformed the whole of the Church and the society. It was a revolution that Blackstone and his contemporaries never anticipated and it completely reversed the downward course of the earlier period. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries England was a very different country. The church, which had lost its influence on the society in its own decay, was revived. Christian faith thrived, conversions abounded, Scripture became the common language of the people, and the whole society benefited from the effects. The Anglican Church, which had become almost no church, was raised from its own ashes and a whole nation was revitalized. It was a failed church that did not fail.

There are many times to point to in history when the Church has been more captured by the pagan practices of the culture around it than faithful to the Lord of the Church. The prophets’ analogy of God’s people as an adulterous bride has been a repeated problem.

And now, it is our turn in history. Most of us feel that these are not the best of times for the church. As the book of Haggai says, how many of you were here in the church’s better days? How does it look to you now? Hopeless? Ineffectual? An embarrassment? Worse? But that’s not all that Haggai says. The prophet tells us to take in the full sweep of the decay and trouble and then listen to the promise of God:

Take courage, all you people… says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts….The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.

The challenge of what we will do with the time that is given to us

And so today we face the burden that God has given us to carry in our time. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings you will recall that point in the story when the ringbearer Frodo laments that Sauron had risen to power and brought such evil in his time. Gandalf agrees; he says: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But, Gandalf says, we cannot decide the times in which we will live. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

That, my friends, is the real challenge before us: what to do with the time that is given us at this time in the Church. We did not wish to live in a time of such great peril, when both the theological and moral moorings of the Church are so threatened. But this is the time that God has given us. Most of us did not ask to carry the burden of our times. But, like Frodo, we must decide what to do with the time that is given us. For Frodo, it meant leaving the joy and tranquility of the Shire for a long and dangerous journey that he expected not to survive. It was not a normal hobbit life. And, as it turned out, it was not a normal hobbit life for those who did not go on that journey. The evil outside eventually found its way into the Shire.

We can lament the conditions of extraordinary times. And we can protest that what we are called to in our time is a distraction from the real work of ministry. Nevertheless, as Martin Luther wrote in the 16th century, if we say we are following Christ and proclaiming his Word on every aspect of Gospel except that very place where the world and the devil are at our moment attacking, then we are not confessing Christ, no matter how loudly we may be professing Christ.

As Haggai said so long ago, when we see the ruin of the church, the call to us is to pick up our tools and go to work. A columnist in our local paper wrote last summer that the strongest force in international affairs is inertia. We face the temptation of that force in our life in this denomination. In matters that we view as controversial or difficult, often the easiest course of action is to do nothing. If we do nothing, we will not be able to prevent the slide of the modern church. It is the resistance movement of renewal in our day that is making a difference—the acts of courage against opposition, even with little hope of success, by pastors and elders and laypersons. The challenge for each one of us is to overcome our own inertia and do something about the situation in which we find ourselves.

Some of us feel like little unprepared and ill-equipped hobbits facing Mount Doom. Or like David facing Goliath. If these images sound apt, that’s good, because we know how those stories end--the fictional and the historical. It may be appropriate to quake a little. But the word of Haggai to us is: Take courage, do not fear, for my Spirit abides among you, says the Lord of hosts. God squares off with us and tells us that he and his promises are the source of our hope when hope otherwise seems out of reach. These are times that call us to believe God and trust that he sees—and controls—what we cannot see and cannot control. And here is the challenge from Haggai of what to do with the time that is given us: Chapter 2, verse 4: “Work.” “Work, for I am with you,” says the Lord of hosts.

Terry Schlossberg is Executive Director of the Coalition and an Elder at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC.

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