Reactionary or progressive church?

Many, it seems, wish to lead the church backwards into the fundamentalist and rigid dogmatic approach that has become the scourge of the world. In many of the great faiths, there is this resurgent drive to speak in absolutes and to present as objective what is clearly subjective.

Perhaps it is a personality disposition to flee from the real and complex world into simplistic and brutal platitudes that fragment under intellectual scrutiny and inter-disciplinary analysis.

Traditional Church is collapsing. Congregations are being wiped out. Churches are closing. The sexism, racism and homophobia of the church are just some of the indicators of a church out of touch with modern life, peddling outdated ideas in an embarrassingly reactionary spirit.

However Christ is incarnate in today's new and more wholesome age, where tolerance and acceptance, pioneering research and social integration are the fruits that secularism and liberal religion has borne.

There are signs of hope in brave avant-garde initiatives like Inclusive Church, like Post the Host, like the outbreak of Flash Mob worship experiences, like the burgeoning grass root liquid church projects, like the thousands of sacramental services that the Open Episcopal Church and the Society for Independent Christian Ministry have taken all over the country in people’s homes and gardens and community centres.

Faith and spirituality are alive and well in our land. The last thing the church needs are Christians who try to conceive how to replicate the indoctrinating nature of the Islamic Madrasahs.