“Could the last person to leave the church please turn out the lights.”
At the time of writing this article I’m sitting in the restaurant of IKEA in Glasgow, just having consumed the obligatory cup of coffee and slice of chocolate almond cake. The quote comes from the front cover of the New Scientist magazine, 3 May. I spotted it on the drive up to Glasgow – my wife Pam and I are visiting our daughter who now lives in the city. The visit also affords a break from parish life – a time to reflect on life in general and the things going on in society. The past months have been fertile ground as far as the press and national debate on religion is concerned – one minute we’re declared a Christian country by David Cameron, the next we’re hailed as a progressive pluralist/secularist nation with no place for the Christian faith in public life.
The way society is shaping up is all pretty interesting really. I’m actually on the side of those who say that we are no longer a Christian country – you only have to take a look around at the numbers in church on a Sunday to know that. Yes, we broadly live lives to Christian principles, but a pursuit of God and faith is largely lacking. The New Scientist article, written by an atheist, is quite helpful here – it defines four kinds on atheism: Mind-blind – those who can’t comprehend religion; Apathetic – can’t be bothered; Incredulous – isolated from extreme acts of faith; Analytic – those who explicitly reject religion. According to the article the largest growth in effective atheism comes from the Apathetic category, with not an unsurprising correlation between this growth and the more prosperous and stable that a society gets – “One of the main motivations for abandoning god is that people increasingly don’t need the comfort that belief in god brings”. The article observes that when all is well you don’t need a security blanket. The article is a good observation, but….
When I was in my twenties my father was ill, suffering from asbestosis and being treated in a hospital in Essex. I was working in London at the time and had a call from my family to say that things weren’t too good. I still remember walking down an aisle in a telephone exchange and looking at a clock on the wall – 2.16 pm. There was something in that moment – something significant had happened. Later, on arriving at the hospital I learned that my dad had died at 2.16 pm. Such an occurrence doesn’t confirm the existence of God, but it does speak of something beyond what we see with our eyes, something supernatural beyond our natural understanding. I think most people would intuitively subscribe to there being something beyond ourselves, even if it’s just a sense of there being both good and evil in the world.
That experience with my dad didn’t make me become a Christian or ignite an interest in God – that came much later with a few other experiences that pulled me up sharp and stirred me to investigate further. Down the years I’ve seen many things that convince me not only of the existence of God, but that he is for us and that the things of Jesus are true. If as a society we want to reject the Christian message and faith, we must also reject the notion of eternal life in heaven; I don’t see much evidence of people generally wanting to reject that idea, but sometimes you find that the populace will follow the non-Christian agenda without thinking things through. Jesus achieved much on the cross for both this life and life beyond the grave.
In my experience God never forces people to believe. He never forces nations to become Christians. It’s always an invitation to seek and find. It takes courage to step into the realm of investigation and trust in something that you cannot see.
I scan through the remaining pages of the New Scientist magazine – another headline catches my eye: “It’s time to give up on dark matter”, with the subtext “It supposedly makes up 80 percent of the matter in the universe, but we still have no direct evidence that dark matter exists”. Seems like science and Christianity have much in common.