‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately, there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire . . .It appears that an amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.’
George Orwell 1940
***
I was inspired to write this article by the number of parents and grandparents who over recent times I have heard expressing concerns about the sort of society in which their children and grandchildren will be growing up. Many of these are members of churches. When I hear such concerns, I am reminded of the above comment by George Orwell.
It is unclear whether Orwell (the author of the dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, considered by many to be a prophecy) was a Christian, although he appears to have had a quite strong life-long connection with the Anglican Church. Whatever the case, he seems to have based the above quote on the analogy of the True Vine in John 15, in which Jesus pictured himself as a spiritual Vine, and makes the point that true spiritual life requires that the branches (Christians) must remain closely attached to that Vine (him), otherwise they will wither and die.
Orwell’s parable pictures a society, the West, that has for a long time been intentionally sawing off the branch that for centuries connected it with the Biblical World view that both birthed and shaped it, as well as being the source of its many blessings. He implies that the expectation was that by ‘sawing’ itself off, western society would release itself into a new age of freedom from the ‘shackles’ of the Bible, indeed into a ‘bed of roses’.
However, now that ‘down we have come’ we find ourselves in a ‘cesspool full of barbed wire‘. In fact, what has happened to western society because of its deliberate rejection of its Judeo-Christian ‘Built-in operating system’ (BIOS), the Bible, is that it has lost its Soul’.’
It is the loss of Christianity and the spiritual Vacuum created by that loss, the loss of the very Soul of western civilization, which sees the West plunging into a spiritual abyss. Orwell’s ‘cesspool full of barbed wire’, a Satan-controlled Kaleidoscope of neo-pagan tribes which is destroying the very foundations of all that the Bible-shaped society, for all its acknowledged faults, had built up.
This is a situation not faced by the Church in the West for 1500 years.
Consequences
This loss of its Soul has led to the degrading of society resulting in the decline of the social compact; that is the previously common, even if often subconscious, understanding of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour, and the concern to act for the benefit of others and society generally. All such beneficial traits are the fruit of Jesus teaching and the Biblical world view that permeated citizens’ minds in the West and, of course often imperfectly, shaped behaviour until beginning to fade over the latter half of the 20th century.
Now in the ‘Degradation’ there are growing traits of selfishness, rudeness, crudity, uncouth behaviour, lack of respect for others and their property (private and public), largely unchallenged loutish behaviour, an explosion of youth crime, the sexualization of even young children, and ‘Rages’ of all types. Indeed, the epidemic of ‘Rage’ could be considered to be one of the defining characteristics of the ‘Degradation’. Whether it is parents raging at referees or other parents at junior sport or against teachers and school principals, whether it is those needing help raging against nurses and paramedics, whether it is the rising tide of often violent road rage, ‘checkout’ rage at supermarkets, car park rage etc. The list of ‘it’s all about me (or my child)’ bad behaviours goes on.
In parallel to all this, we see the loss of ‘quaint’ notions such as common decency, politeness, courtesy, self-control, self-denial, concern for others (and their property). Indeed, what on earth are those you might say? In addition to this we see rising rates of child and youth anxiety, mental illness and tragically suicide.
The diagnosis of all of this through a biblical lens is that it is the inevitable consequence of a creeping myopic trend by the nation as a whole, either with intent or through an ignorant apathy, to reject the faith that shaped Western society for centuries (even if subconsciously for many) and provided the basic Australian (Western) moral value system. It is the faith that has been the basis of our world view, our laws and freedoms.
The Thin and ‘Unsalty’ Salt
As the Church declines, so does the ‘Salt’ (Matthew 5:13) of Gospel influence in society. In this regard, I came across one small, but I think very significant, indicator of this when I visited the local public library recently. I made a point of looking to see what Christian books were available. However, I couldn’t find any so I asked the librarian if they had a ‘religious’ section. Eventually I was shown a small (one metre long) shelf. Of that, only half had anything to do with Christianity.
I did a quick count of the number of similar size shelves in the library and calculated that the Christian content amounted to approximately only 0.5 percent of the whole non-fiction section. Further there was NOT ONE Bible!
It is evident that the ’Salt’ has all but disappeared.
Solutions
So what could turn the tide. It is sheer naivety to expect any moral reformation from our parliaments, for most members of parliament now come from the same God-rejecting neo-pagan culture and its values that society has become.
Further, it is surely wishful thinking to expect any turning of the tide to be initiated by our education system. For all levels from primary school to tertiary education institutions including those responsible for teacher training as well as education departments, are now led by those who themselves have been brought up in, educated by, and shaped by our neo-pagan tribalized society.
Perhaps we can look to a turning of the tide by the Church’s efforts? Sadly, while that should be the case, the western Church has been a dismal failure in its mission to local society for at least a quarter of a century and longer, and there is little currently happening that will change that melancholy state. As the Director of the National Church life Survey in Australia has recently said,
The churches “response to major social change is to double down on what hasn’t been working for decades”.
So in the words of the Psalm ‘Where shall my help come from’?
Christians have two options –
1. Church members can continue to hold onto the, tragically mistaken, belief that the Christian life is just about being SCAWBS (Sunday Church and Weekly Bible Study). That is, keep things just as they are; keep on sleepwalking into the ‘Iceberg’, and hunker down into a diminishing ghetto community, trying to survive as long as possible by ongoing repetition of futile Square Wheel (i.e., previously failed) ‘outreach’ strategies, and watching the now decades long inexorable slow decline just continue, OR-
2. Seek to instigate the development of completely new missional entities specifically designed for energetic, and passionate pagan-mission (in which the western church has not engaged in to its own culture for 1500 years) the type of which there is currently precious little evidence.
To do this requires the facing of some extremely ‘Inconvenient and painful truths’, namely-
a) The need to grasp the highly unpalatable fact of the ongoing and accelerating socio-spiritual cultural turmoil that has all but exterminated the Christianised society our standard local church model was developed in and designed for.
b) There will be no significantly improved missional fruit until Christians are prepared to relinquish their, for the most part comfortable, ‘Christianity-lite’ lifestyles and devote far more of their discretionary time and resources to missional activity.
c) Acknowledge the reality that, in terms of local mission, like it or not, our traditional local, parish based, church structure is no longer fit for purpose.
d) Understand that our missional challenge requires a journey into a cultural jungle with similarities to that undertaken by David Livingstone in Africa and his 19th century contemporaries.
e) Understand that the traditional, and failing, ‘four-walls-and-a-minister’ platform is not affordable.
f) Accept the urgent need to develop new missional entities and strategies that will require a switching of resources (both human and financial) away from the Sunday-centric gatherings.
g) Address the primary issue that must be confronted before there is any hope of missional improvement, the issue that I call ‘The Biggest Elephant’ in the mission operations room. i.e., that of Leadership.
While there are many factors contributing to church decline (as I have addressed in detail in my book Quantum Mission– see below), the only way change can be achieved is by missionary leaders who will lead that very uncomfortable and costly change.
I have called the issue of leadership the biggest elephant because it’s the reason why many other systemic missional roadblocks continue to exist and largely remain unaddressed.
Missionary Leaders’ Characteristics
The missionary leaders required for ‘Jungle Mission ’must understand the needs of the hour; must be proactive and work to establish Christian fellowships away from being ‘Sunday-Centric’; will be highly Flexible and Adaptable thinkers; must avoid wasting resources on square-wheel mission strategies; and will divert resources away from maintenance of Sunday congregations to new and potentially much more missionally fruitful strategies.
They must also be prepared to challenge those who claim to be Christians with a vision of costly mission (even when that will almost certainly involve the loss of membership and income) and switch their energies to leading cohorts of truly committed Christians into a wide range of new and radically different paradigms required for 21st century neo-pagan ‘Jungle Mission’.
For there to be any turn around of the magnitude required, training institutions must be re-engineered from training pastor/teacher/preachers to training missionary leaders. It should be noted that the gift mix required for these two types of church leadership are significantly different.
Tragically, current selection and training processes rarely produce leaders that are willing to take on that challenge. This is a major reason why the fatal assumption that the current ‘Sunday-centric, In-drag, Christendom-form’ church platform can reverse the trends of decline in missional fruitfulness flies in the face of any critical analysis of the data, and is little more than a futile ‘she’ll be right’ wishful thinking.
____________________
The reality is that our (allegedly progressing) Western society is being sucked into a ‘back to the future’ pre-Constantinian spiritual and moral universe of the Roman Empire in the first three centuries AD. This was, and once again is becoming, a society where to be Christian in the West is to be the enemy, to be mocked, persecuted, harassed, used for entertainment and demonized by the twittering ‘thought police’, and hauled before the star chambers of ‘political correctness’.
***
So back to the parents and grandparents concerns we started with. What sort of society awaits our children and grandchildren? It is one with an amputated Soul; one fallen into Orwell’s prophetic morally bankrupt ‘cesspool’; one increasingly torn by the briars of the new paganism, the wounds from which are year by year becoming more septic.
What is the balm for the briar-scratched wounds of western society? It can only be ‘Salt’. The ‘Salt’ of the Gospel, proclaimed by Christians who actually will ‘deny themselves’; ‘take up their cross’; take seriously the ‘Inconvenient and painful truths’ described above and engage in whole-of-life-mission to those around them stumbling on their way to an eternal darkness.
I wonder, is that us? Or will we just continue ‘going to Church’ on Sundays.
***
Available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats, through most major book outlets on-line- e.g. Amazon Australia here , UK, USA , Booktopia etc.
unbounded church 
One thought on “The Amputated Soul”