Faith in a workaday world

                                    Faith in a workaday world

One of the questions to be asked in a big city like this one is how easy it is to continue with a religious belief among the tumult of modern life.

In a country where most people profess a secular orientation and churches tend to empty more and more the issue of people of faith living as a minority comes to the fore more and more. In most churches the picture is the same. Declining attendances tell the story with empty pews in most churches. Differences can be seen in areas and in churches.

The Church of England has been the victim of a very steep decline in membership over the years with the Methodist church taking an even bigger hit.

It is as if Religion has been expunged from the national consciousness with even the Prime Minister speaking about having issues with faith. In terms of most moral issues that are affected in any cases there is a strong puritanical streak in secular Britain which damns all who do not see eye to eye on the issues of the day. Recent issues affecting Christians are usually spoken about as if the Christian position is wrong. On abortion the consensus is that it is a good thing and that only Catholics are against it. To be against abortion is to be against the rights of women over their bodies. It is a decidedly non party political issue but most politicians who raise their heads above the parapets endure strong derision from their party colleagues

A few years ago at the time of the Olympics, a faith outreach was set up linking all the main Christian churches. People were invited in for tea and coffee and a chat about faith. Various volunteers many from the US provided outreach services. I could only imagine the response that they got most of the time as people do not even want to talk about faith and in this case I ended up talking to a southern Baptist Lady from the US who almost fell off her chair with shock when I was able to produce a Bible from my rucksack. In England this would be a very unusual response.

Many churches have progressively ageing congregations with the membership dwindling. The Methodist Church was predicted to go extinct a little while ago. As far as other churches are concerned immigration has been a boom. It has halted the trend of declining catholic congregations and the catholic church seems to be holding its own in the battle of numbers. The same effect works for the orthodox churches which show a modest increase in membership. Apart from that the Pentecostal churches show some sort of increase in membership being increasing linked to arioso initiatives from the US.

Aside from this the picture is a bleak one. Increasingly the church has been all but expunged from national life. The new place of worship is the shopping mall driven by an increasingly money orientated consumer society.

The picture is similar for most of the British Isles with the exception of the Republic of Ireland ,though there the church has taken a knock due to child abuse allegations. However it remains fundamentally strong as still plays a part in national life unlike the other countries of these islands