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As persecution has increased around the world, and the countries of the West are in dire threat of socialism, I’ve worried for some time about “what if?” I’ve just finished reading Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, which is very good, but I’ve also read books about life under Communism and Socialism. We are told repeatedly in the Bible, “Fear not”. Ok; I’ll try, but I’m not having a whole lot of success with that, quite honestly. They say ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone’ but I beg to differ. I know right now what I’ve got and what it will be like when it’s gone and I’m not happy.
The subtitle to Dreher’s book is A Manual for Christian Dissidents. He has a lot of great information for families but it seemed scant information for the rest of us. I am reminded of the fish symbol – half the image in the sand and a knowing person finishing the image and then scuffing away the sign. Maybe we should begin buying fish statues for the front yard. Perhaps fish flags under the American flag. Should we replace our Cross necklaces with fish tattoos? This all sounds fairly funny and light hearted but there’s nothing in the least light hearted behind it.
What will we do when we can no longer take our religious freedom for granted? We’re on the cusp and if you’re not aware of that, you’ve been blinding yourself to it. What will we do when governmental constraints become so strict as to choke off – and finally, kill – the Church? I read this article this morning and it follows a thought that’s been in my mind for some years now. https://www.smallgroupchurches.com/preparing-the-american-underground-church/
It’s one thing to see an event coming, it’s quite another to prepare for it. I see that every hurricane season here in Florida. Two things happen when a hurricane is threatening – the availability of plywood in the anticipated hit zone goes to zero and the beer coolers in the supermarkets are emptied. People make choices and not always intelligent ones. How one prepares in large part determines the outcome. So. How do we prepare for what may not be so far off in the distant future?
It’s time for us to address this issue with our church families. How will we continue to worship? How will we continue Bible study? Who can ‘say a few words’ at a funeral? We, the baptised, are able (thank God and His mercy) to baptise at need, so that’s covered. How will a house church in neighborhood A stay in contact with the house church in F neighborhood?
Even as I write these words, it sounds ludicrous even to me. But the shot heard round the world was Senator Feinstein’s remark, “The dogma lives large … ” It does, indeed, and not just in the life of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. I believe in Christ exactly the same way I believe I have blue eyes. I believe the tenents of the Church the same way I believe in the pulse in my wrist. I believe the loss of community in Christianity is as deadly as gangrene.
These questions I pose are not rhetorical. If you have had thoughts along these lines, I suggest that right now, here on this site, we should open some dialog and make some plans, hash out ideas, give voice to the concern. Cliches become cliches exactly because of their underlying truths; in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
All Along the Watchtower 
It’s interesting and appropriate, Audre that you place this article here. Mine is essentially a mainline American Christian conservative site, as am I, and you. This site is as well, but this site has also, for its Christianity itself, been driven underground for more than a year, we weathered that precursor, with some damage to our readership, but we survived intact.
What you see now will not be of a years’ duration, it will be permanent if our peoples do not stop it now. Michael Voris recently compared President Trump to Constantine. He has a valid point in that connection, one established Christendom, if the other fails, we will see its end, as our society sinks in neo-paganism made worse by the lights of perverted science.
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There are several points to be made here, but I think that would require a post rather than a comment. I will say that this matter has been on my mind for some years, which you will appreciate given my thoughts about where history is headed.
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Neo – I thought the conversation video with Michael Voris very compelling. And isn’t THIS Watchtower for just that?
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It is, and in a very real sense, yes, it is.
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Okay, I’m Miss Newbie (Know Very Little About Christianity) around here but I do think this is an overly pessimistic view. Of course I am in the UK and not the US but I do feel there are reasons to be more upbeat. In the past few days I watched a most excellent talk by the English historian Tom Holland hosted by the Christian organisation Speak Life. In it Holland talks at some length about his latest book Dominion and the way in which Christianity has come to infiltrate every aspect of our lives in the West even for those who are antagonistically anti Christian. atheist or agnostic. I was so impressed with what he had to say that I watched twice more paying particular attention to the last twenty minutes and then tottered off to my local branch of Waterstones to buy Holland’s’ book. Maybe I am not as afraid of a takeover by the extreme left in the UK as you are in the States Audre but I really do think that good will eventually triumph and the scales will hopefully fall from the eyes of those blinded by dogma to the real meaning of life and the only salvation that we have.
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Can you post the link to the program with Tom Holland, I have read his book and watched the TV program on the origins of Islam “In the Shadow of the Sword”. He researched Islam and wrote on its origins at the suggestion of Jay Smith a Christian missionary who is engaging Islam with whom I did some training.
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Rob – Alys asked me to share the Tom Holland link with you. Here it is:
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Thanks!!
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Alys – we must always have hope and we have the assurance of God. At the same time, the Church of England gets further and further away from the Gospel and churches here are struggling to maintain their tax exemptions. Our Democrat Party is quite vocal, and the Mayor of New York has some rather dire plans for the Orthodox Jews should they continue to meet in large groups in their synagogues. The red flags are rising.
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I have been involved in participation, teaching and establishing home churches since the 1960s. Not in anticipation of persecution but seeing other advantages in this form of church life.
The editor of a Magazine circulating among the growing ‘House Churches’ of the early 1960’s, published the penetrating insights of the then Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Arthur Ramsey, into what was happening at that time. I quote the extract in full, the extract begins as:
“Let me end with reference to one further theme – a brief reference. There is amongst many Christians I know, especially young Christians, a great impatience with what they call ‘institutionalism’. That is very understandable. And that impatience leads to the creation of Christian fellowships of worship and service and study, outside the church’s institutional life. This is the sort of thing that happens. There are Christians who aren’t interested in church services or in church buildings or in all the elaborate and costly paraphernalia of traditional Christian organisation. What do they do? They meet in one another’s houses. They carry with them ideas very much derived from the whole Christian tradition. They worship together, they pray together, they study together, they discuss life’s problems together and they act in concert with any group of Christians, whether within or without the traditional pattern of things. Now such developments are often called ‘non-Church’ Christianity. I believe it is a mistake to use or to acquiesce in the term ‘non-Church’ Christianity because if they are Christians possessing the tradition of faith and the Scriptures and the sacramental life as they do in the cases which I have been describing, they are the church. They are the church, and it is so important for us to be clear that the Church does not mean buildings into which people are collected but it means the people of God themselves, the Baptised community of people who use the scriptures, share the Lord’s Supper, know Jesus as divine Lord and try to serve him. And in the Apostolic age there were not church buildings but there was the people of God. What is sometimes called ‘non-Church Christianity’, in the forms of which I am thinking is not properly so-called. Call it ‘extra-mural Christianity’. I think that’s a better name for it. Perhaps the best name of all is ‘experimental Christianity’. I think that’s a good name for it!
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Rob – thanks for this. I hadn’t come across this piece before, but it hits the nail on the head.
As far as I can see, the problem with `The Church’ as an institution is that it isn’t producing the goods and I suspect that there are many Christians who have turned their back on `The Church’.
Some Christians simply attend church out of loyalty. For example, one lady I know is going deaf and now needs a hearing aid. It took us a long time to persuade her to get it and then it took even longer to get her to try it out. One advantage was supposed to be that she would be able to hear what was going on in church (which she attends regularly). One day she said, `well, I put in the hearing aid and it was working beautifully and I could hear every word of the sermon loudly and clearly! And, it was a load of rubbish.’
She hasn’t used her hearing aid since.
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Excellent comment, Rob, and I thank you so much for sharing it.
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Thank you for this, Audre. Per se, socialism is no threat. We have had periods of socialist government and they have done no harm to Christianity. There seem to me three sources of danger: one, the main one, is the aggressive secularism in much of the West which, knowing nothing about Christianity, sees, rightly, that it is a threat to a functionalist and materialist view of what life is and what it is for; the second is fundamentalist Islamists; who the third is, oddly enough, fundamentalists who call themselves Christians, but who seem to know as little about the history of their faith as the secularists. There are times, listening to the three groups, one marvels at the assurance with which the ignorant can pronounce on things about which it is clear they know very little,
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Chalcedon – Have you read Tom Holland’s book ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’? Being a historian I think you would appreciate it.
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Thank you, Chalcedon; as with so many of the folks who comment here, I always learn something when you write.
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Thank you Audre, much appreciated!
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Gee, I find it odd that you say that socialism, per se, is not threat. I suppose that the beginning of “democratic socialist regimes” are rather benign but what do they look like as they progress and adopt more Marxist and Communist goals or socialist oligarchies. It is all about whether the people have a voice in their governments and whether they are open to the majority while protecting the rights (if they have any) of the minority.
Here in the U.S. the Democratic Party is moving from socialism to a more Marxist trend rather quickly without even stoping at socialism long enough for us to examine it. People already, though the Democrats are not in charge, have taken control of the school curriculum, the language we can and cannot use, the meaning of words etc. Further they already are persecuting anyone who does not agree with them. They fire people for saying the wrong things, they control the media which refuses to make public anything they disagree with and they have threatened with dissenters of their ideals with death. It doesn’t seem that we are headed for a “no threat” future if the Democrats finally get all the branches of government.
They have threatened to increase the size of the Supreme Court, abolish the electoral college, abolish the filibuster, make new states of Puerto Rico and Washington, DC which will give them a plurality in the Senate while wanting to abolish the borders and give those who enter (even illegally) access to welfare, healthcare, free tuition to our schools and possibly the vote (since felons are now being allowed in some states to vote . . . as most are all to willing to vote democrat because it is the Democratic Party that supports this). So they are making a power grab to ensure that if they get the reigns of power they will never again lose their grip on power. It is as simple as that.
We are in a precarious position at the moment and no better off than we were when George Washington fought for freedom. We have no voice and now Democrats in a number of states and the media are pushing the idea of a Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. Sound familiar?
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa after the end of apartheid. Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings.”
I guess Trump voters might find themselves under investigation should we not stop the ascendency of these “benign” socialists.
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` ….. free tuition to our schools ….’
You know, that’s one of the things that one of my colleagues complains about. Well educated people moved to the West (particularly the U.S. of A.) when they had the opportunity and, with their expertise, they basically propped up American academia – and the Americans (and the individuals who moved there) never thought of compensating the country of origin for the cost of the education they had received.
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What you call “socialism” we would call communism, and there is a difference. The post-war Labour Government was socialist and we all survived it. Indeed, insofar as it intoduced the National Health Service, it did good work, and no one in the UK need fear that getting sick will bankrupt them.
I share your concerns about the wider extremes of the Democratic Party in the USA, but I would not see them as socialists – they are out and out Communiosts.
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Not so sure I share your loathing of communism – during the communist era, Moscow State University produced some of the best mathematicians – so the system wasn’t all bad.
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I wouldn’t have wanted to be a Christian or to have dissented from the views of the State in such a system.
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True.
On the other hand, you might have been a better Christian – because in such an environment Christians had to have balls.
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I am, for some reason, a little cautious about that. There is a difference between fanaticism and true faith I suspect.
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Chalcedon – I’m not at all sure it was nearly as bad as you think. For example – in Poland I know of someone who became the deputy head of the forestry academy, but was ineligible for the top job (head of the academy) because he wasn’t a party member and was one of the faithful who regularly went to church. This isn’t exactly persecution – this is the sort of minor inconvenience designed to make a person feel virtuous. The person I’m thinking of was a good and devout person who would have remained faithful and would have put up with much more hardship for the faith.
I can’t speak for Russia, but I suspect that you, of all people, would not have had a problem – they’re Orthodox (and you have had Orthodox sympathies in the past) and the Orthodox church survived throughout communism; I suspect on a similar basis to Polish Catholicism …..
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I am afraid it was not that simple Jock. The Church was heavily persecuted until the Great patriotic War meant Stalin needed it. Thereafter it was, rather as in China now, manipulated. Solzhenitsyn is a good guide to what happened if you fell foul of the regime.
Of course, if you kept your head down and did as you were told, it was fine – that’s how all tyrannical regimes manage to survived!
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You would probably remember which Labour MP said that British socialism owed more to the Methodist chapel than it did to Marks.
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Good points Audre, and like you, I worry. I think you may have it worse in the US.
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What I am afraid of, Jess, is if it happens here, it will happen there and around the world.
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I worry not so much about socialism or the left taking over as I do that the right and left inflame each other. I’m worried that hurt is being thrown like cannon balls from one side to the other and no one is listening long enough to get the other person’s point of view.
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For those who may be interested this is the rest of the piece we reprinted in our Magazine “From Archbishop Ramsey’s lecture on ‘Renewal of the Church in Unity.”
Now, Harvey Cox, whom I have quoted two nights already, has something to say about this, and Harvey Cox in the ‘Secular City’ * writes this: “The real cleavage in Christendom today is not between Catholic and Protestant but between traditional and experimental forms of Church life, and if the Church leaders do not wake up to this fact there will come a division in Christendom as big as that which started in the 16th Century.” I am of course, expected to tremble when I hear those words! Well, I do not tremble; there is no need for Christian people to tremble. What is needed is mutual understanding and not impatience. Those who belong to Christianity in its institutional forms must be very patient and ready to learn from the extra-mural or experimental Christians. We must understand why they dislike institutionalism so much, and there is good reason why they should. We must realise how the ‘experimentalists’ are trying to embody the Church as the people of God living near to Christ and plunged into the life of the community rather like what the first Christians were coming to do. But then the ‘experimentalists’ or ‘extra-mural’ Christians on their part must realise that the ‘church-goers’, the people in the pews, the people employed in the old set up, are sometimes Christians and not just kinds of pharisaic heathen. Some of them really are Christians from whom something about the Christian faith and life can be learnt, and of course, the ‘experimentalists’ and ‘extramural’ Christians do, if they are to have any success at all, draw very heavily on what has come down to them through the mainstream of Christian life; a mainstream that is never, in any generation, able to avoid some kind of institutional forms. Is not the real moral, that the Church as the people of God does include a good deal of variety? It includes people in great Gothic-Renaissance church buildings; it includes people in very novel, startling kinds of church buildings, and it includes a good many Christians in no sort of (i.e. special buildings) buildings at all, worshipping and praying in their own houses. What matters is that they should all know themselves to be the people of God. To belong to the people of God, does not require elaborate organisations, but it does require faithfulness to those things that Christ himself gave to his people for their unity with him and with one another; the Apostolic tradition of teaching which came to be embodied in the creeds; the sacraments of union with Christ and with the other members of the Church; and the scriptures that bear witness to Christ. These things were once for all given by Christ to his people and they will stand for all time once again because Christianity is about a historic reconciliation. It is because Christianity is about a historic word of reconciliation once wrought by Christ that there are historic sacraments and a historic ministry and they will be there to the end, though we will understand them in the coming plenitude of the Church better by far than we understand them now.”
Harvey Cox one of the preeminent theologians in the USA is author of ‘The Secular City’ 1965.
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Rob – in your view what is the visible church for? By which I mean – you are a Christian; (a) how does your association with some organised fellowship help you with your faith and (b) how does it help you to witness and play your part in bringing others to the Saviour’s family? Also, what should `the church’ (in terms of organisations) be doing?
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Briefly a few ideas:
(a) How does your association with some organised fellowship help you with your faith?
We all have gifts natural and spiritual to share from the youngest new believer to the mature teacher of the faith. We are helped by mutual encouragement, accountability and sometimes by loving correction.
(b) How does it help you to witness and play your part in bringing others to the Saviour’s family?
A functioning family of Christians should model amongst them to some degree the life of Christ and provide a family and faith environment to introduces new converts to in which they can grow in faith.
New converts find it easier to evangelise through their network of existing family and friends. These will be less threatened in meeting some of their new friends in a non-religious setting.
(c) What should `the church’ (in terms of organisations) be doing?
Primarily seeking the awareness of the presence of Christ and the day to day activity of the Holy Spirit. I think whatever church structure or size of gathering or organisation without this will be ineffective. I think it partly explains why we have so many separated groups of Christians. many form historically through some living experience of the Lord. However, it becomes too easy for us to camp on things we have learned historically and on doctrine we hold while lacking the continuing activity of the Lord’s Kingdom.
Every member should be a disciple and equipped according to the gifts God has given them to enable them to function at their full capacity. We need to totally scrap all ideas and practices related to a sacred/secular and priest-minister/laity divide. There is only one priesthood composed of every single Christian.
We need to do more and say less.
What if every single church scrapped some church meetings and the totality of the membership were engaged together in some act of service to the community each month. Men and women of goodwill would join in and perhaps be converted to Christ at some point down the line.
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Perhaps you should write a post in response to Audre’s one, Rob. It would be good to see your thoughts explained further on these topics.
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Rob, thanks for this.
I’d say that what you say is of course true, but unfortunately the `practise’ doesn’t seem to match up with the `theory’.
Firstly – examples of gifts within the context of an organised fellowship? For example – I think I’m reasonably good at teaching some things and I have basically a teaching job – so the `gift’ (if you call it that) is being put to good use, but not in the context of a Christian fellowship. This extends more generally – people have gifts (or abilities), they put these to good use and those with a social conscience will do something useful with them for the community, but the gifts (or abilities) that are applicable to the Christian fellowship seem to be a very small subset.
I very much like your idea of the `act of service to the community.
I gave up on churches back in 2002. This wasn’t primarily because of doctrinal disagreements (although that may have been behind it); it was more because church services that I attended felt worse than pulling teeth and engendered a creepy feeling in the back of my neck that this was precisely the place I wasn’t supposed to be.
Right now I have another reason for not going along to church (different from avoiding COVID). My son (approximately 5 years old) doesn’t seem to have left the garden of Eden yet – he lives in a world where bad things don’t seem to happen. Christianity basically has three components – creation, fall, redemption and a church certainly isn’t doing its job if it isn’t hammering home the message that we are saved through the blood of Christ (i.e. the crucifixion).
It is completely clear to me that this is not a concept that he is ready for – and I’ve always strongly disapproved of any church where the central gospel message (which, of course, includes the crucifixion in all its horror) is compromised.
There is a Salvation Army in town – and this is what I was tentatively thinking of when the time comes for me to start going to church again – but clearly this is not the right time.
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In a home church setting the exercise of each person gift and contribution is a real possibility and takes place where forceful individuals are not allowed to dominate.
The cross and the atonement is at the heart of Christianity but understanding it is another matter I certainly do not subscribe to the penal Substitutionary Theory of the atonement. It is possible to see the sacrifice of Isacc as the repudiation of human sacrifice and the sacrifice of Christ brought all blood sacrifice to an end. I recently listened to a debate between 2 prominent theologians in which the one objected to and rejected redemptive violence and the other [who I disagreed with] sought to maintain it. I think the cross is something you may need to ponder a fair bit more.
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Rob …. as do we all.
My own views of the cross are probably very much in line with those of Jurgen Moltmann (`The Crucified God’) and (if I have understood you properly) I don’t think he’s a big fan of `redemptive violence’ either.
Curiously, I found the book that I recently read (`Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian’ by TF Torrance) useful too.
It is something that we all have to think about.
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You understood me correctly I do not think the cross was God infliction wrath or punishment for sin on Christ in order to forgive sinners.
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Rob – well, when you put it in terms like that, of course it wasn’t.
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Rob – apologies if you feel you’re getting inundated with requests to put up posts. Something on your views on the cross and atonement would be most welcome, the roles of the first and second person of the Trinity, etc ….. (I’d do this myself, but (a) I don’t have posting rights here, (b) I don’t have time and (c) I probably wouldn’t make a very good job of it – it would be a paraphrase of Moltmann and probably wouldn’t be a very good one). On this matter your views and my own probably coincide and it would be nice to see a post.
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