How to wreck a church

The-Wreckers 1874 by William Holbrook Beard

IT HAS BEEN TRIED ACROSS THE CENTURIES – in public arenas, through mob violence and by official banning. In the first three centuries of the New Testament church, ten massive persecutions took place, and the Roman emperor Diocletian even had a medal struck – inscribed with the boast, ‘The Christian religion is destroyed, and the worship of the gods is restored.’ But – as Bishop William Greer of Manchester once told his critic during a TV interview – “The church will stand at the grave of the BBC, the ITV and all other institutions knocking around the world today.” Those might sound like brave words only, were it not for the assurance of Jesus Christ that the gates of hell itself will not prevail against the Church.

We Christians today are astonished, not so much at the ever-continuing advance in the 2.3 billion-strong family of Jesus Christ worldwide, but rather at the amazing failure of our critics to learn from history. Naturally we weep when a Janani Luwum, or a Mehdi Dibaj is martyred. Such martyrs are numbered by the thousand today, as they were twenty centuries ago. But the sweep of civilization indicates that the greater the pressure on the church from its outside persecutors, the stronger tends to be its growth.

The atheist Philip Pulman has declared, ‘Without a doubt Christianity will cease to exist in a few years.’ He might have done better to heed the historian, T.R. Glover, ‘The final disappearance of Christianity has been prophesied so often as to be no longer interesting.’

And yet a church CAN be wrecked. To read the letters of the New Testament is to understand that although persecution from outside was bitter and powerful, the real dangers arose from men within the church’s boundaries, who – like others of ‘broad’ outlook who were to follow them – ‘creep into the ministry, but they are generally cunning enough to conceal the breadth of their minds beneath Christian phraseology’ (C.H. Spurgeon, college address, 1874). Read more