Fight the Good Fight of Faith 

How the Church is hiding from the real conflicts it should be facing

Rising Islam

A prominent feature of Islam is that Muslims tend to staunchly imbibe the teachings of their faith and seem relatively untouched by the secularism of the West. They continue to believe every word of the Koran and try to live out its teachings in their daily lives, while at the same time demand that the non Muslim majority also adhere to these same beliefs – as evidenced by the ongoing attempt to criminalise criticism of Islam.
 
Those who inwardly, or even outwardly, reject the Islamic faith give it lip service at the least. They appear to consider religious community cohesion to be of greater value than greater community cohesion. Or just as likely, they are simply afraid of Muslims and the Islam faith. And if they are moderate-Muslim graduates of our prison system, they are liable to have had a crash course in fundamentalist Islam. They are likely to come out with a strong faith.
 
Ersatz conflicts
 
Contrast this with the relatively few Christians in the post-Christian West. The mainstream Church has lost its devotion to a transcendent God and replaced Him with a therapeutic deity who is sure to forgive and who shares in the zeitgeist of our age, that generosity and acceptance is all and that truth and distinctiveness are to be avoided in case they disturb the neighbours.

The mainstream Church has lost its devotion to a transcendent God and replaced Him with a therapeutic deity who is sure to forgive and who shares in the zeitgeist of our age ...

We have seen the feminisation of the Church – the elevation of those attributes traditionally described as feminine and the downplay of those traditionally understood as masculine. Thus, we have the instruction to ‘do the loving thing’ without the injunction that the loving thing might be to sensitively inform the other person that they are wrong and imperilling their own immortal soul – which they are if they believe and follow the false religion of Islam.
 
Many within the mainstream Church, particularly the hierarchy, are conflict averse. They are quite willing to indulge in ersatz conflicts; the fight for climate justice, racial harmony, sexual equality and inter-faith reconciliation, all ‘fights’ supported by the bien pensant right thinking orthodoxy of our day. Such is not conflict, no matter how righteous the cause may be; it is merely a camouflage, a means of reassuring themselves that they are fighting the good fight whilst hiding from the real conflicts the Church should be facing.
 
Luther’s legacy
 
In the apocryphal Martin Luther quote, the priest is supposed to have said, ‘If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him.’

The responsibility for the parlous situation facing the Church and Christianity in our land lies squarely with those who are entrusted with the defence and spread of the faith.

It does no good complaining about cultural Marxism, George Soros, Davos Man or any other bogeyman when we allow the real culprit to escape. Our favourite scoundrels are just doing what scoundrels do, they are being true to themselves and following their own agenda. The responsibility for the parlous situation facing the Church and Christianity in our land lies squarely with those who are entrusted with the defence and spread of the faith.
 
Church’s silence
 
At a time when the UK is facing a knife edge situation of growing fiscal crises, with their consequent economic hardships and ever-increasing tax burdens married to political incompetence, the mainstream Church concerns itself with debates about sexuality and provides helter-skelters and pitch-and-put in cathedrals. Is it any wonder that we face cultural decay and societal disintegration when the defenders of the cultural roots have abandoned any hope of meaningful intervention in the precarious state of the nation?
 
To quote Luther accurately, ‘You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say’. And our church leaders - many of them - are silent. They are silent on the slaughter of babies in the womb and the consequent demeaning of life. They are silent when Christian preachers are harassed by police for the crime of reading and preaching the Word of God in public. They are silent when a Christian is arrested for the crime of praying silently in certain streets. They are silent as our Christian heritage is demeaned, debased and deleted from our island story. They are silent.

Jesus, the crowning example of peace, knew the division that he would bring.

Not peace, but a sword
 
Now, the Christian faith is a faith of peace, we follow the Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6), who taught His followers ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ (Matt 5:9). But Jesus, the crowning example of peace, knew the division that he would bring. He caused division by offering the world His peace, and the world did not want it then, and it doesn’t today. ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword...’ (Matt 10:34ff).
 
The Christian faith, with its gospel of peace, is not intended for the risk-averse, for comfortable onlookers; it’s for those willing to stand up for what they believe and stand against those who oppose it. The risk avoidance attitude prevalent in much of the Church must be repented of if Christianity is to survive in the West.
 
This means living out the dangerous undertaking of faith. The fight of faith is more than an internal battle with our own sin, it also means the external battle with the sin which is prevalent in the world around us. We are called to take the faith to every aspect of life. As Abraham Kuyper reminds us, ‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!’

The day is coming when we will be unable to raise our voice in the public square. We should prepare for that day. 

Preparation

The day is coming when we will be unable to raise our voice in the public square. We should prepare for that day. But although fast approaching, that day is not yet. Whilst we still have the opportunity, we have an obligation to stand for the truth, oppose what we need to, and point to a better way. 

This does not mean that we should all be involved in every battle, but we should be involved in the battles to which our generation are called.
 
There we must do as Isaiah says,  ‘Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet‘ (Isa 58:1).