I read recently that the essayist and statesman Lord Macauley (1800-1859) said that the world’s greatest democratic nations had a life expectancy of about 200 years.
In a letter to a friend he wrote that they go through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back into bondage. If Lord Macauley’s assessment of the rise and fall of democracies is true, it is not hard, in general terms, to see where our country is located in that progression. What amounts to the criminalising of Christian morality by the House of Lords decision in January to accept the Sexual Orientation Regulations, underlines where we are.
But having mentioned this at a conference, someone asked if I could be more specific about where we are on the downward slope. At that time I could not be more precise.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …