|
Recently, missionaries from overseas and from the southern hemisphere have traveled to the United States, seeking to morally council the mainline protestant churches. This undertaking, called the Anglican Mission in America, is indirectly a response to actions taken by the Episcopal Church’s General Convention of August 2003, in which delegates from American diocese approved the consecration of Gene Robinson—a non-celibate, homosexual—as bishop of New Hampshire. In addition to this abrupt deviation from traditional teaching, ECUSA also approved the blessing of same-sex unions by Episcopal churches. This, the foreign Anglican churches felt, warranted missionary work inside the united states—the original source of their own birth in Christ. This missionary action has only been encouraged further after the more recent issue with druidic pagan liturgy usage by the ECUSA women’s ministry. The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) website—www.anglicanmissioninamerica.org—words their mission statement like this: For generations the United States and other nations in the ‘west’ sent missionaries, armed with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to the far reaches of the globe. But the light that was once America has dimmed, as we find ourselves in a deep state of spiritual need and hunger, searching for true meaning and significance. Particularly since 9/11, Americans are desperate for hope and direction that only the Gospel can provide. Orthodox, traditional Christianity is thriving; spreading like wildfire in South America, Africa, and Asia. Soon it will be the fastest growing religion in the world (now it is second only to Islam in growth, though not in membership), claims AMiA. In a specific reference to the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Mission expresses its disapproval of the American religious situation thus: The Anglican Mission in America was birthed at a critical time. The Episcopal Church had lost a third of its membership over the preceding thirty years, had drifted into revisionist doctrines and had wasted opportunities in leadership and mission. Valiant and sustained efforts to renew ECUSA from within had, unfortunately, not provided enough impact to slow the church’s dramatic slide deeper into false teachings and practices. Here we are encountering the counsel and spiritual aid of converted peoples, who had formerly been pagan and unacquainted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As AMiA would put it, the roles have now switched. Our churches, they say, are becoming more and more pagan. This is certainly consistent with the latest developments in ECUSA, where druidic rites were used for the sake of advancing a feminist view of allegedly ‘Christian’ women. In this rite, the deity of Sophia is worshiped—a pagan goddess who embodied wisdom. Another event that the Anglican Mission in America would no doubt highlight was the church conference back in the early 1990s called ‘Re-Imaging the Divine’, in which members of the mainline Protestant churches gathered and participated in devotionals using pagan symbolism and mythology that ultimately amounted to church-endorsed lesbianism and heretical departure from the two millennia of preceding Christian teachings. The AMiA website provides a most interesting portrayal of the American religion that the traditionalist, Apostolic Christians such as myself have been lamenting for a while now: The United States is now home to the largest population of un-churched and spiritually disconnected English speaking people in the world, yet also a country where the only religion losing members is Christianity. At the same time, Christianity is experiencing a dynamic renewal and expansion in many other parts of the world, including Africa, South America and Asia. Ultimately what this means is that in the postmodern, democratic societies of the West, Christianity is on the decline—it is now being replaced with Paganism, Neo-Paganism, Gnosticism, and a variety of animistic New Age faiths. We hear it often, best embodied in this vague concept of ‘spirituality’ that is replacing ‘piety’ or ‘religiousness’. America, as AMiA is keen to observe, is leaving its historically Christian roots behind to embrace more appealing, undemanding religion in which anyone may be satisfied and accepted. This is ultimately the result of the Renaissance Humanist movement, and the later 19th century Enlightenment Era, in which humanity began to question any authoritative structure…especially the churches. What is most interesting about this change is that close observation reveals an obvious correlation between our technological abilities and our individualist self-confidence as a culture. Many attribute the birth of the “Age of Reason” (usually thought of as the Enlightenment) to the invention of the printing press, where books became more readily available to the masses, anywhere, for a lower price. New technologies, throughout history, have been accompanied by new social movements—breakthrough medical knowledge was followed by eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia, urbanization by freethought and individual competition, advances in the press and media by activism and biased yellow journalism on an unprecedented scale. And these are changes attributed to the 20th century alone. What it points to, at any rate, is a change in social values that is directly proportional to changes in human technological capability. Not so, for the third world. As the Anglican Mission in America website points out, “Christianity is experiencing a dynamic renewal and expansion in many other parts of the world, including Africa, South America and Asia.” It is soon to become the fastest growing religion in the world, replacing Islam. Overseas it is flourishing and meeting with unprecedented acceptance. Why? Because people in the third world live very different lives from our own. It does not take a scholar or theologian to recognize that the openness to the Gospel found in the poorest, dirtiest regions of the world occurs in part because of a limited technological means. Americans, indeed all westerners, have quite simply become dulled to the fact that the world can be a dark, horrifying place where their security is never guaranteed. Westerners, with their cars and office jobs and fixed incomes and computer communication experience reality in controlled doses, whereas teenage girls in Cambodia are left to prostitution in order to fulfill their debt and be fed (hopefully a few nights a week). In a world where communication is instant, where news and current events are experienced from the comforts of a couch or computer desk, where technologies bring us almost anything at a moments notice, we grow more prone to deficiencies in our relationships with God. Surely anyone will acknowledge that the words “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” resonate much more profoundly with the impoverished than with the middle-class American family. Technology gives us power. Or, at least, what we consider to be real power. It enables us to manipulate more and more intimately the workings of God’s world, in ways that we had never before thought possible. It stands to reason that this strange, continually growing ability would manifest itself in arrogance—cultural arrogance. It is not so easy in the postmodern world to recognize one’s need for Jesus, whereas in the hot savannas of Africa where survival is not given on a silver platter it becomes a much more simple matter to understand that we are deficient and lacking, that God fills an emptiness in all our lives that nothing else can. |
