The churches' lamentable role

Britain's national decline

By the Rev. Peter Simpson

(Minister of The Free Methodist Church in Penn, Buckinghamshire)

It was Zerubbabel who led the first return of Israelite captives from Babylon in 538 BC. The former exiles immediately began the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, but they soon lost their enthusiasm, and the reconstruction work never progressed past its initial stages. So for some 16 years the Temple remained unfinished and untended. This was indicative of a deep spiritual malaise amongst the people. God then called upon Zechariah to address them about their faithlessness and disobedience. However, it was not just a 16 year old problem that Zechariah had to deal with. It was much more deep-rooted than that. This latest neglect of God's work was in fact a continuation of a spiritual waywardness which had been plaguing Israel's national life for generations. After all, the reason why they had been taken off into captivity 70 years earlier was because they had turned their backs upon God. So Zechariah was having to preach to a nation in which the ignoring of God had become deep-seated and habitual. That is why he declared to Israel, "The LORD hath been sore displeased with your fathers" (Zechariah 1:2). Each generation had been passing on its sinful habits to the next, causing the nation's spiritual darkness to become deeply ingrained. Rebellion against God's authority had thus become the norm in Israelite society.

Modern-day Britain is in exactly the same situation as Israel was in Zechariah's time. God is looking down upon us and is saying that he is "sore displeased" with us, and not only this, but that "he hath been sore displeased with our fathers" also, because the rejection of the Biblical Christian faith is no longer a modern phenomenon. It now in fact spans generations. Let us therefore consider some examples of our longstanding national departure from the one true faith.

It is now forty years since the permissive society first came upon us in the 1960s. The deliberate undermining of our Christian culture which began in that decade has now become the accepted norm; it is today's establishment thinking. For example, the removal of censorship laws relating to stage, printed page and screen which occurred in the Sixties is now of such a longstanding nature that the reintroduction of wholesome, Godly restraints seems almost impossible. The changed attitude to cohabitation outside of marriage has likewise become deeply entrenched, so that it is now actually regarded as strange for a courting couple not to be living together.

In 1967 the Abortion Act legalised the wickedness of the taking away of human life in its mother's womb. Thus for some 40 years the blood of an ever increasing number of innocent slain ones has been crying out from the earth for justice to be done; and let us make no mistake, God will render vengeance.

Back in 1950 a British Sunday would have been a quiet day, with far less unnecessary commercial activity profaning this sacred institution, but with each passing year our nation has become more and more acclimatised to ignoring the fourth commandment, and even professing Christians have become lax, going out to restaurants and using other commercial services on the Lord's Day. It now seems that any hope of recapturing some of the honour of the Sabbath Day, by, for example, shutting supermarkets or curtailing professional sport, is something of a pipe dream, for a whole generation has grown up with no apprehension at all that the first day of the week should actually be different.

Another serious instance of departure from God's ways in the post-war period has been the success of the gay rights lobby in making society think that the orthodox Biblical teaching on homosexuality is no more than prejudice and bigotry. We have now reached the stage where all our political parties openly condone sodomy as normal, with our Government even legitimising homosexual marriage in all but name by means of the Civil Partnership Act.

So we thus observe that un-Biblical thinking has become deeply entrenched in Britain's national life. What we are witnessing, therefore, is the cumulative effect of many years of departure from the authority of God's word. What, however, is the reason for this departure? In answering that question we come to the main thrust of this article. The primary responsibility for our tragic national decline must surely lie with the churches themselves. With a few honourable exceptions, the churches have hopelessly let the nation down. They have failed in their task, for they have abandoned the true Biblical Gospel. Society has become increasingly wicked precisely as the churches have compromised with the spirit of the age, turning away from the oracles of God as recorded in holy Scripture.

True Bible religion has in fact been on the wane in this country since the latter half of the 19th century. It was then that theologians began to question the inerrancy of Scripture as the word of God, treating it instead like any other historical document over which they could stand in judgement. It was then that the anti-Christian theory of evolution quickly gained acceptance, as if it were scientifically proven fact, although nothing could be further from reality. It was then that the churches began to argue that being a Christian did not require a belief that everything in the Bible was true. So we need to realise that a devilish attack upon the authority of Scripture has been going on for some 150 years, and that this attack has been taking place in the churches themselves.

As far back as 1887 C.H. Spurgeon felt that he had no choice but to resign from the Baptist Union, because of its departure from Scriptural truth. He argued that it was positively sinful for Christians to maintain fellowship with those who were denying God's word, and he called those who made such denials traitors. He thus made a courageous stand, but he had few allies, nor was he able to stop the rot, as theological liberalism made a relentless advance amongst the mainstream denominations.

So when the Great War began in 1914 our country was actually in the midst of a tragic abandonment of the historic Biblical faith. The churches were giving in to the spirit of the age. The Great War was called the war to end all wars, but far from bringing the nation up with a jolt, and causing it to cry out to God for mercy, it seemed to have the opposite effect, for after 1918 church attendance began seriously to fall, as the churches' embracing of liberal, unscriptural theology continued. The decline in church attendance was not surprising, because liberalism is simply the philosophies of men dressed up in religious garb, and if the churches are going to teach exactly what the world is already thinking, then why should people bother to go to church at all?

The declining influence of the churches upon society in the inter-war period was such that in 1930 the President of the Baptist Union had no qualms about describing the situation as "desperate". In 1933 the eminent nonconformist minister E. J. Poole-Connor felt quite able to publish a book with the dramatic title, "The Apostasy of English Nonconformity". The word 'apostasy' means, quite simply, the abandonment of the faith. One tragic statistic to be found in this book is that by 1933 all seven of the English Methodist theological colleges no longer adhered to the inerrancy of Scripture (despite John Wesley's assertion that "if there be one falsehood in the Bible, it did not come from the God of truth"). Liberalism had thus triumphed within Methodism. The same thing was happening in the Church of England also.

Then came the Second World War, which constituted a further warning to the nation to come to its senses and turn in repentance to God. Britain was on the verge of being overrun by the invader. Nevertheless, the Lord of hosts graciously delivered us, when we stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany in 1940 (Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain were mighty divine interventions for us). Did our nation, therefore, post-1945, turn back to God in thankfulness for undeserved mercies? One can only answer that question with a resounding 'No'. The pre-war worldliness and indifference remained, and there continued to be, generally speaking, a dearth of sound Gospel preaching, with liberalism becoming thoroughly entrenched within the churches.

In 1963 the Bishop of Woolwich published a book called "Honest to God", which was a best-seller and very influential. This work continued the liberal attack upon orthodox Biblical doctrine. It argued against the very notion of God as a supernatural transcendent personal Being, One who reigned supreme over the world which he had created. The bishop wrote that the modern age needed new, less orthodox, definitions of God such as "the ground of one's being", rather than the Supreme Power who was outside of man, and who needed to be approached by man in fear and trembling.

Also in the post-war period the churches became preoccupied with ecumenism, and the abandonment of traditional doctrinal distinctives. Truth took second place to unity. In the 1960s and 1970s even evangelicals amongst the Anglicans repented of their former separatist attitude towards Roman Catholicism, and the Protestant Reformation came to be seen as creating a tragic division within the Church, rather than what it really was, a wonderful movement of the Spirit of God. So, even those who called themselves evangelicals were moving away from "the faith once delivered to the saints".

The triumph of liberalism was further seen in the existence of clergy who denied Christ's virgin birth, bodily resurrection and literal second coming. In the 1990s the Church of England abandoned plain Scriptural teaching by authorising the ordination of women, which was an act of total capitulation to political correctness, and a craven display of 'moving with the times'. Then in 2005 the Anglican House of Bishops declared, "Lay people who have registered civil partnerships ought not to be asked to give assurances about the nature of their relationship before being admitted to baptism, confirmation and communion". What can this statement possibly mean but that the Church of England thinks that participation in de facto homosexual marriage is compatible with a Christian profession? This once more represents an utterly shameful departure from the historic Biblical faith.

So looking at the church scene generally at the beginning of the 21st century in Britain, we see many churches having sold out to secular feminism, to New Age one-worldism, and to humanistic notions of the rights of man. The need to be 'inclusive' has displaced the need to uphold God's truth. Many today bow down at the altar of multiculturalism and political correctness in accordance with the philosophical dictates of the prevailing secularism. Many churches have also allowed their worship to become thoroughly dumbed-down, with seriousness and sober reverence giving way to entertainment-style informality, in which the emphasis is all upon the worshipper having his senses excited and being made to feel good. This leads to a low view of the holiness of God, which in turn leads to a failure to make God known as the One who must be feared by feeble, sinful man.

No sensible observer can look at Britain today, comparing it to 40 or 50 years ago, without acknowledging that it has become increasingly crime-ridden, vulgar and profane. An Englishman used to be known for his gentility, honesty and politeness. Now he is known as a lager lout and football hooligan, and the point that we are emphasising is that much of the blame for this must be placed at the door of the churches. The 18th century evangelical poet, William Cowper, who has written one or two of our finest hymns, once wrote in his poem entitled 'Expostulation',

"When nations are to perish in their sins,

'Tis in the church the leprosy begins :

The preacher, whose office is with zeal sincere,

To watch the fountain, and preserve it clear,

Carelessly nods, and sleeps upon the brink,

While other poison what the flock must drink ...

Then truth is hushed, that heresy may preach;

And all is trash that reason cannot reach".

Cowper, then, rightly perceived the seeds of national decline to lie in the abandonment of a pure Gospel by the churches. Nations perish, when churches preach error. There has been in our land, to use Cowper's words, a distinct failure to keep the fountain of the churches' teachings clear. There has been a failure to uphold the truth of God's word in Scripture. The people have been drinking instead the poison of man-made and man-pleasing philosophy, and this rejection of God's word now spans many generations. The situation is also being exacerbated by a fashionable openness to other religions, causing an even further dilution of the one true faith of Christ. Our society is no longer just apathetic with regards to Christianity; it is downright anti-Christian, and the rot has been setting in and getting worse for nigh on 150 years.

Now it was precisely that kind of situation of deep-seated, longstanding rebellion against God which Zechariah once had to deal with. How was the prophet to respond to it? We have the answer in Zechariah 1:3-4, "Say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Turn ye unto me ... and I will turn unto you ... Turn ye now from your evil ways". So the solution could not be more straightforward : the nation must be called to repentance with the utmost urgency, for God is a God of wrath, as well as a God of love, a vital truth which many have forgotten today in their desire to 'market' God. What Britain needs is to be exposed to fearless Gospel preaching in the highways and byways, preaching which refuses to 'pussyfoot' around regarding the depravity of fallen man. Before the churches can begin to call others to repentance, however, many of them will have to repent themselves of their appalling conformity to this world, and of all their endless jumping upon the world's trendy bandwagons.