Stewart Weaver

The question posed by a member of the congregation this week:

What relevance does Christianity have in 2010?

Worldwide: one could suggest that worldwide it has huge relevance.  Christianity is the largest religion with the most adherents.  It is prominent in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the US.  World leaders have Christian backgrounds: Obama, Gordon Brown (son of the manse) and Tony Blair as immediate examples.  Charities such as Christian Aid, TearFund or Cafod do fantastic work around the world.  We could point to present day saints: Tutu, Bishop Romero to name a couple.

Let’s focus the question a bit more:

What relevance does Christianity have in Scotland and Western Europe in 2010?

A very fair question.  Recently the Church of Scotland announced that it would be seeking to reduce the number of ministers significantly.  There simply isn’t money to pay for them anymore.  The Glasgow Herald reported that the Church of Scotland are considering the sale of 1500 buildings.  On a given Sunday about 3% of Edinburgh attend worship.  Hardly a success story and hardly relevant.

Yes, but.  Surely there is some relevance?

Churches are still called upon for the rites of passage: baptism, marriage and funeral.  These are hugely important within the intent of the Church of Scotland’s parish system: to provide the offices of religion to all people in Scotland.

Recently I was called by a member of the local environmental group asking about contacts within the Portobello/Joppa area.  When I mentioned that in total the churches represented about 3-4,000 people he was amazed.  In December there were buses from Porty to Glasgow to demonstrate for an agreement at Copenhagen and, given the percentages of Christians in the area, the percentage of people with church connections was exceedingly high.  We get involved.  Ditto the community council.  At St. Philip’s we can have 1,000 people through the halls in a week: that’s a service to the community.

OK, so there is some relevance.  But people don’t really believe, do they?

Fair enough.  One need only think of Matthew Arnold’s poem about the sea of faith going out, perhaps never to return.  We live in a world of the self: autonomous, absolute, individual and so often atomised.  Where does a community of faith and a belief that challenges the individual fit into this???

There was a report in the Economist recently.  Studies in the US reckoned that teenagers spent about 6 hours a day in front of a glowing rectangular screen in 2000 (computer, TV, Xbox, iPod, etc.).  But, add into this number the multi-tasking (phoning from the mobile while watching TV) and it was 8 hours a day.  Now, it’s 10 hours a day of consumption.  10 hours in front of a glowing, rectangular screen.  How, oh how, can a faith based on the human, on interactions and conversations, ever hope to survive in this environment?

Let’s take it deeper.

People just simply don’t believe in God anymore.  At least not in the traditional sense.  In some vague manner, perhaps.  But it is not part of the worldview as it was even a couple of hundred years ago.  And that in itself is a far cry from Jesus’ day. 

Perhaps we would hear God or sense God or intuit God if we weren’t in front of glowing rectangles and so busy.  Perhaps we would, at the very least, achieve a sense of wonder and quiet and stillness.  This leads to a sense of mystery and humility.  And this may be the groundwork for God.  Virtually impossible in this world.  Perhaps ministers and priests should abandon computers and websites??

What relevance do we have?

A space to think and pray about ultimate questions: how we live; how we die; what is our purpose.

A place to challenge the autonomous self: we cannot be slaves of the self and serve God at the same time.

A place that provides the essential underpinning for community: what else really binds us one to another as brother and sister? Do we want to go back to rabid nationalism?

A place that allows us to know ourselves: can we truly know ourselves if we don’t take our selves out of ourselves?  Where can we do that so hopefully and constructively and so honestly as in a community of faith?

Quite.

But doth the lady protest too much?  Am I trying too hard to convince?

Seamus Heaney wrote some years ago about the power of poetry.  Its very power, he argues, is in its very irrelevance.  It is relevant to virtually nothing.  There are no aims, goals and objectives.  There are no strategies or business plans.  There is no attempt to persuade another with heartfelt or tendentious reasoning.  Poetry simply is.

Let’s go the other direction.

Christianity is relevant in its sheer irrelevance.  Christianity is poetry lived.  It takes us to the depths of the heart and the heights of our vision-orientated souls because of its sheer, breathtaking beauty.  It is imbued with heaven before it is practical on earth.  It is.

Let’s live in that beauty.  Let’s live in that irrelevance.  Let’s grasp it and love it and embrace it.  Then, in the great paradox of faith, it miraculously becomes relevant. 

Is Christianity relevant in 2010?  Yes: utterly and fundamentally so in its apparent irrelevance.