The Very Rev Dr James Simpson believes church history is a powerful reminder that the Kirk’s apparent death spiral could once again become a rising phoenix.

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IN A television play, two battle-weary nuns were having a bad day. “Let us face it,” said one, “Neither we nor God are up to it any more.” Some church members today are equally discouraged. What chance, they ask, does the church have against the onslaught of an aggressive secular media which consistently trivialises the Church’s message, ridicules traditional religious beliefs, and caricatures Christian standards of decency as the hang-up of obsessive prudes?

Some dispirited church members feel like the American who on hearing his case announced in court as ‘The state against John Smith’, muttered: “My God, what a majority.”

A devilish voice whispers: “Why don’t you admit the tide of secularism is too strong? Why not just accept that we are living in a self-centred, materialistic, cruel and cynical world, a world where Christianity’s days are numbered, where church membership will continue to decline, and that there is nothing we can do about it?”

The early Christians had even greater justification for being discouraged. The mailed fist of the Roman Empire was set on destroying the early church. The church’s members had become objects of public hostility and abuse. The Colosseum in Rome, that scene of brutal sport and perverted amusement, still stands as an enduring symbol of the heavy price many had to pay in the first century for being followers of Christ. Some who had embraced the new faith were beginning to wonder if it was too high a price to pay. Others wondered if in such a vast sea of paganism, the future would have a church. Some were tempted to throw in the towel before round one was over.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews was concerned to put new heart into his readers, to rally battle-weary troops. He takes them into a picture gallery and shows them portraits of the great heroes of the past, heroes like Abraham, the original frontiersman, heading into an unknown future, enduring, ‘as seeing him who is invisible’. Then he adds: “Time would fail me to tell of Joseph, Moses, Gideon, David and Samuel who through faith conquered kingdoms.”

Aware that our choice of heroes moulds our faith and character, the writer of Hebrews wanted his discouraged readers to linger in the presence of Israel’s heroes and learn the secret of their endurance. He writes: “Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”

Come now into another picture gallery containing the portraits of St Ninian and St Columba. 1600 years ago, Ninian established his church at Whithorn in the South of Scotland. 100 years later the odds against Columba making any real Christian impact on Scotland were immense, for throughout the Scottish mainland the pagan Druid religion was strong. The story of Columba’s journey from Iona to Craig Phadric near Inverness to meet the king of the Picts is a moving one. Although we are not told whether King Brude ever became a professing Christian, we know he adopted Columba as his ‘soul-friend’, and gave him permission to travel anywhere he wanted, and to build a monastic settlement on Iona. We do well to remember these courageous saints on whose shoulders our Kirk stands.

Come now into a more modern picture gallery, one containing portraits of such heroes of the faith as Bohoeffer, Barth and Neimoller. During that cruel period in German history, when the Christian faith was in danger of being absorbed into a Christian-Nazi ideology, and the cross was in danger of being twisted into a swastika, some very courageous members of the German Confessional Church met in conference in Barmen.

There, they produced the famous Barmen Declaration, a call to Christians to resist the claims of the Nazis. They were well aware that their Declaration could well be the last words they would ever write. Albert Einstein was deeply moved by their courage. He wrote: “I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration, because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”

In this modern picture gallery there would also be the portrait of Father Huddleston who, in his fight against apartheid in South Africa, endured as seeing a God who is blind to the colour of people’s skins. What a transforming influence he exerted on many, including a young black man called Desmond Tutu, who was later to play a major role in South Africa’s history.

In this gallery of modern saints there would also be the portrait of Martin Luther King, the voice of the voiceless in America. Though vilified and imprisoned, he persevered, believing that one on God’s side is a majority. I wish young people today could be introduced to the lives of some of these heroes of the faith. We all need a diet, not just high in fibre, but in ideals. I am grateful that at school an English teacher encouraged me to read the biographies of some of the most compassionate and courageous people of the 20th century – Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, Albert Schweitzer who gave up his post as a university professor to study medicine in order to go and help the people of West Africa, and Toyohiko Kagawa, the Japanese saint who did so much for the slum dwellers of Tokyo. As a late teenager I found their example and faith challenging.

Though we live in difficult days for the Church, I believe they could also be days of opportunity. Though Scotland may not be kirk greedy, many deep down sense that something is missing from the diet of our secular and at times self-destructive culture. The church has things to say that no one else can say, things essential to a proper understanding of the meaning of our existence.

We need a renewed confidence in the message of the resurrection. The resurrection has been a recurring experience in the life of the church. How often when people have thought that Christ and His church were finished, His cause done for, there was a resurrection. St Francis of Assisi, Luther, John Knox and the Wesleys helped God resurrect the ailing churches of their day, helped bring about significant changes. They renewed the faith of the decades that followed. As a result of their commitment, dying embers sprang to life.

The former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, writing concerning the recent rebirth of Christianity in China, said: “While Christianity is in decline in Britain and most of Europe, it is growing and thriving in China where the number of people in church on a Sunday is greater than the total membership of the Communist Party – and this in a land which in 1958 Chairman Mao had declared ‘religion free’. The churchgoers are not, as Karl Marx would have predicted, the poor and the oppressed searching for the opium of the people. They are young, hard-working, upwardly mobile entrepreneurs. Christianity has offered them an ethical framework, and a structured view of life in a society experiencing rapid transition. As a Jew, I find this fascinating. Europe is losing the very thing that once made it great, while China is discovering it. This is something no one could have foreseen.”

“The struggle for a more just and caring world has been going on for a long time, sometimes with victories, sometimes with setbacks. Confronted as we are today with a flood of secularism, we are called to enter into the struggle, to be a dynamic Christian minority”.

The struggle for a more just and caring world has been going on for a long time, sometimes with victories, sometimes with setbacks. Confronted as we are today with a flood of secularism, we are called to enter into the struggle, to be a dynamic Christian minority.

Like the saints in all ages, we are called to ‘keep our eyes fixed on Jesus’, to share with others the faith and values of the Master Mind of the centuries. I believe we are also called to reshape our church operations and structures, to let some of them die in the faith and hope that God will once again sow seeds of resurrection.