British Churches Step In Before Government
The United States and Great Britain have long behaved like twins separated at birth. When one catches a cold, the other one sneezes.
Consider politics. Like President Clinton, Prime Minister John Major is troubled by dissension within his Conservative Party having to do with his leadership. Like Clinton, Major is pointing toward the improving economy as evidence that his party is better than the other one to lead the country in the new year.
Like America, Britain is wrestling with how to reform its welfare system which, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs, fosters irresponsibility, leading to fatherless children and, for many of them, a life of violent crime.
One recent poll showed 61 percent view the Conservative Party as “sleazy and disreputable.” The Gallup organization discovered that, after 15 years in power, the Conservatives are widely regarded as having lost their ethical bearings. Does this sound like the way a majority of Americans viewed the Republican Party in 1992?
Still, a Christmas-week poll found 75 percent of Britons optimistic about 1995 and Prime Minister Major is hoping to capitalize on this by announcing a tax cut in the near future. Does this sound like President Clinton?
Like America, though, something dark and foreboding lies just beneath the surface in Britain, where severe winter storms and year-end flooding are an omen for what may be worse days to come.
The recently retired vice president of the European Parliament, Sir Fred Catherwood, thinks “British society has gone badly wrong.” He says people are beginning to look back to a time when economics were less important than safe streets, strong families and fuller employment, and children were expected to finish school.
“We look back today,” he says, “because we dare not look forward. We live in a violent, greedy, rootless, cynical and hopeless society and we don’t know what is to become of it all.”
Catherwood is doubtful that government, whether led by Conservatives or Labour, can reverse the downward trend. He believes the decline in British society has two causes, both of which have resulted from a loss of spiritual moorings. Britain is ahead of the United States on this, but America is gaining rapidly.
Cause No. 1: Greed, which Catherwood says comes from the disbelief in life after death: “We grab what we can while we can, however we can and then hold on to it hard.”
Cause No. 2: Moral confusion. Catherwood explained: “The denial of universal moral absolutes is as politically correct here as in America. The powerful use their power and the weak go to the wall. Not just the poor, but the weak-willed, and especially all the children, who depend on the age-old disciplines, and loving care of the family.”
Catherwood is not content to simply analyze the problem. After a distinguished political career, he has decided to get his hands dirty and do something about it. He has agreed to head Britain’s Evangelical Alliance. In a nation where only 2 percent attend church, this will be a formidable task.
The Evangelical Alliance is forming City Action Networks in which local churches will pool human and material resources to help those who have been blown over by the heavy cultural winds in this rootless society. Each church that signs on to participate in City Action Networks will either handle the problem of an individual or family itself, or pass them along to another church with the proper expertise.
There will be a public announcement as each urban network is ready so that local politicians, civic leaders and the press are aware of what is being done.
The goal, says Catherwood, is to identify the churches “as part of the community, not an exclusive private club.”
If British churches are able to bring this off, they will do something American churches could and should have done long ago. Instead of concentrating on building palaces of brick and glass, American churches (and church-goers) should consider what is happening here - a reassessment of the reason for the churches’ existence, which is not about building edifices, political kingdoms or institutions, but about building lives.
It would be a most welcome trend - in Britain and America - if people would begin to see government aid as a last stop, not the first stop, and the moral resuscitation of people as the honorable obligation of the churches and not primarily of the government.
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