The Church Promoting Secularism

The Church as Immunization against God

In order to remain an instrument in God’s mission to the world, the church continuously has to be a church under reformation. This was the concern of Luther. If the church did not proclaim the gospel, that is making clear in all spheres of life that God saves us out of grace and that our own works add nothing to us being saved, it would not just be irrelevant, but would be an agent against God.

This is why Luther was so drastic in his criticism against his own Roman Catholic Church: if it was not an instrument of God it would be an organism against God. In a secular society the church is tempted to work the other way round: it is about how to become relevant to a secular society, yes even the aim might be how to adapt to such a secular society. Luther’s point would be: the only way the church could be relevant to humans is to come with that which they need the most, the gospel and the forgiveness of sins.

There are other ways of expressing the same thing, but the point is very clear. Once the calling and the mission of the church are made manifest it is indeed a task of this church to be relevant to ordinary human beings, also in that culture where they happen to be.

When we lose track of the defining aim of the church then a number of unforeseen and undesired things are bound to happen. The church will easily become that which it was sent to alleviate. The church could be the perfect place for immunization against God.

Before winter we may take a vaccine against flu. What we do is to inject an antigenic substance (vaccine) in order to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against the disease. Antigen is a substance which the body recognizes as alien and which induces an immune response. Christian faith in small enough dozes and without being anchored in a believing community may have this effect. If this state of affairs is long-lasting such a church may be an excellent means of promoting not a secular world view (which could be quite acceptable) but secularism (a secularist worldview), [from Latin saeculum, generation, age; ‘secular’ meaning this age, this world as it is, ‘secularist’ also of this age, this world, but over against anything beyond (God)].

Let me take two examples, as it is very easy to be confused about the whole idea of immunization in matters of faith. In a church like the Church of Sweden, for centuries a state church, a church to which a whole people and country belonged for many generations, we must come to realize that part of the work that has been done to make God a reality in Sweden has had the opposite effect. Let us take confirmation as an example. Great work is being done, in order to get young people aware of Christian faith as a defining element in life; at the same time this is a place where we have failed in many ways. One litmus test is to see how many of the young people who keep coming to church also after confirmation. Not very encouraging figures… in fact we have many times been busy with inoculations. The confirmation time, the whole course, the church attendance etc., have become a vaccine rather than a new life in Christ. They have in effect become immunized against not only church but also God, and to our horror they are now quite prepared to join a secularist world view and life style.

There may be no easy answers to these problems, but there are some indicators that should be taken seriously. For example, these young people were never incorporated into the fellowship of the congregation (“they are sitting there at the front, the only young people around”). The actual congregation was not able to reach out, and their own families were perhaps never part of the congregational fellowship in the first place. There is indeed a need of an ecclesiola (small church fellowship) in ecclesia, something which NFS Grundtvig made a reality in Denmark something which still has some relevance.

The second example is from ELCSA, my South African church. A few years back I preached a sermon on the theme “mission to the whites”. ELCSA is a church with only black members, except for a few expatriates, and in this case it was a congregation of coloured people (of mixed racial background, I loathe using these race terms, but realities still have to be explained that way). But it was a non-starter. It was like talking to a brick wall. Why? Because there was no interest what so ever; I talked about a different world, with which they wanted to have nothing to do. They may well have a case in saying that after all these years of oppression we should by now be able to do our own thing regardless of them.

In a way they are right. But on a deeper level I think I was also right. On a long term they are also inoculated against God, at least against a God who is for all and with all. The sheer lack of a Christian community that is transcending the ethnic/racial border lines made the whole idea of mission to the whites, ridiculous, laughable. A church that continues to allow itself to be imprisoned in one ethnic group (and here we also touch a Church of Sweden problem in relation to more recent immigrants and refugees) is in fact also making people immune against the real God, who makes no distinctions, a God who saves out of grace completely.