Getting There

"The route they had taken was a dead end. Finding their water rations were limited to one day, and the return to the fork was a three day journey, they set out for the fork and there, fell almost lifeless on the third day. After sleep, their guide, Hans, heard the sound of water thundering behind a granite wall. He attacked the wall with a pick-axe, allowing a steam of boiling water to flow and cool in their tunnel. Not only had they found life in the water, but a flowing guide to lead them on their journey".

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Rick Wakeman's musical rendition).

"Until we all attain the unity of the faith through the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature manhood - to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, thrown hither and yon by the conditions and thereby scarred by every onslaught of erroneous teaching and their accompanying deceitful schemes, but, by speaking the truth in love, may truly grow into Christ, from whom all the genuine virtue and truth which truly sustains and nurtures the body actually comes, held together purely by this, so that we are developed and enriched by such truth and love".

The Apostle Paul - Ephesians 4:13-16.

Take a look at this telling analysis of the work of a modern film-maker.

Like Andrew Klavan, I have thoroughly enjoyed many of the movies of directors such as Speilberg and Lucas in respects to pure entertainment, but I find the analysis here to be spot on - they lack emotional maturity because they continually fail to deeply address the larger, grubbier issues of the human condition in a manner that reality actually demands, and that can leave us stifled if we do not grow past that point.

It can also leave us totally lacking in respect to our necessary understanding of the world around us.

This is so evidently true of the church.

In one piece published this week, one commentator noted: "(These Archbishops) are at one with the frequently repeated assertion that the 'church has a lot of catching up to do with secular morality' (in respect to sexual identity, etc)... once again, claiming to know better than St Paul who wrote 'be not conformed to this world'". 

The fact of the matter is that we've known for decades that all these present troubles were coming. Anyone who could read in the 70's knew that the final objective of the entire 'new sexuality' movement was to conclude with the sexualisation and wholesale abuse of childhood. Anyone who attended history classes in school that covered Mao's revolution in China would know that the goal was the destabilisation of the democratic world. Anyone who saw Sci-Fi movies like 'Colossus', 'Soylent Green' and 'Demon Seed' would have picked up the message that the forthcoming 'Brave New World' nightmare would orbit around trans-humanism.

So, here we are, with all these "seeds" having come to fruition, and yet the church wants to continue in the same movie house, watching the same "Lucasfilm" re-runs of infantile stories, because it cannot bear to look beyond the cave-like realms of its own naivety and take on the unvarnished but necessary reality that surrounds it.

I discover this continually. Christians want their lives to be 'spiritual' (distant) from the dirt and graft of the actual, because that is simply too real - too painful or distressing or direct to continually relate to - they want "community" to be 'lovely' (without trial) and harmonious because it moves around a track of shared feelings and emotional encounters derived from these, rather than something as awkward and troublesome as actual theology.

The Apostle Paul urges the church to escape such nonsense. It can only "speak" to the troubles of the hour when it is deeply rooted in all that Christ reveals and all that this conveys to our times. This is essential for growth, depth and stability, and it needs to become the stable diet of our faith today if we truly mean to be people of worth and vision amongst the church and the world.

What we need is much more of this.