Christians hindering revival?

The time has come for judgment to begin, and God’s own people are the first to be judged.

1 Peter 4:17

The thing that upset many people most during COVID, and in the permacrisis since, was the total failure of a majority of people to comprehend that there was anything fundamentally wrong. That blind attitude has persisted into the most recent manifestation of the crisis (if you don’t count monkeypox and the NATO invasion of Russia at our expense), that is the protests and riots that have many US commentators wondering what has become of English justice, and even caused a friend in the impoverished and violent state of Sri Lanka to phone me to see if I was safe.

I’m not safe, of course, because I write “anti-establishment rhetoric,” and that gets people jailed over here. But it seems that a majority accepts the narrative that Far-Right groups instigated the protests for the mindless hell of it, and should all be banged up and the key thrown away. The despair of ordinary folk goes unnoticed by those more fortunate, as well as by Keir Starmer.

What has upset me most over this period, though, has been that most of the Christians I know, either in church or via various grapevines, come into the category pejoratively labelled “normies,” seeing the perpetual bad news as the temporary result of misfortune or bad actors upsetting our wonderfully free country where, unlike those others, we are able to worship without interference. They admit the news media are unreliable, but still get their opinions from the BBC and the MSM.

So to them COVID was a natural disaster for which our brave governments and scientists fortunately found solutions in lockdowns, masks and safe-and-effective vaccines, even though they keep getting infected despite the boosters. Climate change is the effect of our selfishly using plastic straws and fertilisers, and the Lord who stilled the storm has no ability to prevent it without Net Zero. Wars and political upsets are all due to Putin or Trump, and the steady succession of coups against democratically elected governments unsympathetic to US interests (most recently in Bangladesh) has nothing to do with the CIA, but is to be expected in such undemocratic countries. Increasing UK poverty is a good incentive to support food banks, but has nothing to do with criminally irresponsible economic and social policies that should be loudly condemned – though maybe Christians voted for the other main party at the recent general election because the last lot were a bit grubby. “Please give the new government wisdom, Lord,” rather obscures the fact that Marxists despise God, and perhaps don’t actually want wisdom to sort out the nation’s problems, but prefer to destroy the lot to “build back better.”

Yet in previous ages, churches going through a period of such upheaval would have recognised that the Lord of history was afflicting the nation for its sins, as he did in the Bible, and would have called publicly for repentance (beginning with themselves). That is seldom now considered. And yet it is not that there have been no voices in the West calling for repentance, over many years, but that they have not been taken seriously.

Ruth Graham famously said that if God does not judge America, he will have to apologise to Sodom and Gomorrah. Closer to home, The Festival of Light called attention to the decline in British spiritual and moral life back in 1971, and subsequently people like Clifford Hill, in the magazine Prophecy Today for which I worked for fifteen years, repeatedly trumpeted the message that there could be no revival of Christianity in Britain without national repentance, and that this must begin with the Church. By 2001, the then editorial team considered that national judgement was inevitable, and that we should henceforth focus on how to live in a land under judgement.

For the churches – and I include here the Evangelical churches as well as the traditional denominations – became increasingly reticent about calling out the nation on its abandonment of Christianity, and increasingly focused on its own pietistic Charismaticism whilst in many ways accepting the abandonment of God’s law in its own midst. We took the wholesale abandonment of our nation’s 2,000 year Christian foundation to be both acceptable and inevitable, preferring to share the often unjust criticism of past generations of believers rather than replying publicly with informed refutation.

We went along with the denigration of marriage, keeping silent at cohabitation or adultery even by members of our congregations, and preferred to weaken Christian teaching on divorce, and even homosexuality, in the face of the immorality overtaking society. Only a minority took any concrete steps to condemn the abortion industry that now kills 1/4 million souls a year (not to mention staining the consciences of 1/4 million mothers), and an even smaller minority is bothered enough about the teaching of transexuality in schools to stand with the few teachers and governors who speak out, and are sacked and disqualified – often by church authorities. We stopped complaining about the debauchery of entertainment after Mary Whitehouse died, and now don’t even notice that the Eurovision Song Contest
and the Olympic opening ceremony are Satanic, or if we do, we shrug and switch off rather than protesting. Our young people are as addicted to their i-Phones as the non-Christians, and we feed them a diet of Holy Spirit miracles and trendy music rather than the unfashionably godly disciplines of prayer and Bible-study.

My main point is this: if God is judging a nation (as he always has) that, communally, has despised the light of the gospel it has been granted – arguably more than any other nation under heaven – then how can it escape when God’s people don’t even recognise that Britain is under divine judgement? To many of us, “revival” is a nice idea based on God’s unconditional benevolence and a good smattering of miracles. But unless the Church speaks up loud and clear that what we are going through (which is going to get much worse) isn’t due to Putin, or Labour, or even the loss of Christian national identity, but rather to damnable rebellion against God, then how will there be national repentance, and restoration?

We reassure each other that there is no real persecution in Britain, meaning that we are unlikely to die for our faith. But persecution was never primarily about death – historically for every Christian execution, usually of leaders, there were dozens of imprisonments, and hundred of livelihoods lost. Those things are happening today in our country, except that whilst some of the persecution is of courageous disciples willing to stand against woke ideas, or other lies, a majority of those suffering for exposing the deceptions of the age are not Christians. I venture to suggest that the sole reason we “don’t have persecution in this country” is that because most Christians don’t even recognise the disease, they don’t speak out about it. The Church is not persecuted because the Church is not publicly calling out sin – unlike the prophets, John the Baptist, or Jesus, or the Protestant reformers.

Even dictators are happy to tolerate churches that get on with their quaint superstitions in private. What they notice, and punish, is when Christians publicly refuse to sacrifice to Caesar’s genius, or denounce the Pope as antichrist, or openly convict governments of injustice. But in order to be motivated to speak out, Christians first need to be undeceived, which requires leaders and prophets to call a spade a spade, and proclaim to all that our land lies under the increasingly heavy hand of the Judge of all the earth, who is not mocked. Then, perhaps, the tide will turn.

“The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.”

William Booth