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Church must reaffirm its role

Striking leader article from the Scotsman: If Christianity is centrally a religion of renewal then there should be no such thing as a humdrum church, or a routine meeting of the Church of Scotland General Assembly. This could be said to be all the more so in an age when the secular and the temporal have come to sweep all before them at a huge cost to Western cultural life.

This week's meeting of the General Assembly has been prosaic in the main. This impressively democratic body proceeds majestically to work its way through an agenda of the high-minded and mundane, like some huge but intricate timepiece pulled out of antiquity. As with many organisations, it finds it relatively easy to pronounce on political matters not within its direct control, but grows more hesitant and uncomfortably tongue-tied on matters closer to home.

It has said 'No' to nuclear weapons, and 'Yes' to troops out of Iraq. It has chosen to be less emphatic in its condemnation of the dictatorship in Zimbabwe for fear of the adverse consequences for churches in that country. And it has shelved for another day the issue of gay relationships.

There is much important work that the Assembly undertakes, quietly and conscientiously, that does not attract publicity. But the challenge it faces grows ever more daunting: how, with a relentless decline of its membership, it can undertake the work that has been gifted to it. The question is not what a Christian Church should do in this world, but where can it begin in an era that has seen an unprecedented decline in family life, the spread of drug and alcohol addiction, and the ascendancy of a culture of miserabilism and cynicism when there has never been more material affluence nor the role of the state as welfare dispensary so massively developed.

Much of the crisis in western culture, its vulnerability to further corrosion and its susceptibility to other faiths, can be laid firmly at the denial of the centrality of the spiritual in the daily life of the West.

It is a corrosion that has struck right across society and which accounts for the deep unhappiness and lack of self worth with which millions are afflicted. That is what makes the work of those offering the opportunity of renewal all the more imperative. And it is a corrosion that has struck deep within the Christian Church itself and in the dismal secularisation of its concerns. We all want to see a better life and to see good being done, but it is spiritual renewal that is the necessary catalyst. That is why it is at the heart of the Church. It is not some therapeutic extra, but the driver of a wiser behaviour. It is this reaffirmation of the central importance of renewal that the General Assembly and the broader Church now most needs to address.

Full story at The Scotsman.