Living in exile?

Since 1980, churchgoing has halved in the UK.

In particular, churches are losing the younger generation of millennials. I will leave suggesting the answer to this heartbreaking situation to the upbeat bloggers and strategists who always seem to have ‘the solution’. May the Lord bless them – though I suspect a solution will not be found until we humbly confess to God that we don’t know the answer.

A new situation

But the fact must be faced that our situation as Christians in the 21st-century Western world is now one of exile. The culture has changed dramatically. It is as if we have lost our country and now live in a foreign land. At the recent Labour Party conference a poster from a women’s group that declared ‘A woman does not have a penis’ caused outrage among men who wish to be viewed as women. In October an Italian scientist at CERN who stated that ‘men invented physics’ was castigated by women’s groups. Even simple facts have no place in a world where subjectivism trumps objective truth. What chance then for the truth of the gospel? The world is upside down - especially ethically. We are very much out of place.

My point is that the church now needs to learn how to live in exile. And Scripture has much to tell us about how to do this. Whole OT books like Daniel and Ezekiel, and NT books like 1 Peter relate to this subject. God’s famous advice to the refugees in Babylon is given in Jeremiah 29.7: ‘… seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.’ But, thinking about this, the exilic book that captured my attention was Esther. It makes happy history for God’s people far from Jerusalem. The genocide planned by wicked Haman was thwarted by what appeared to be little coincidences. The unmentioned, unseen God intervened. Yet what is striking is where this epic drama finishes. It concludes where we would not expect, with the inauguration of an annual feast, to commemorate the rescue. What is all that about?