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Let us pray.
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Christianity is now almost 2,000 years old.
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It has been transformed from a small Jewish sect in the Middle East
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to the biggest and most influential religion in the history of mankind.
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But today in Western Europe, it faces the greatest challenge in its history,
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modernity and the arrival of secular society.
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The Catholic Church has opposed with all its energy everything modern.
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With traditional churches being closed, ever decreasing numbers of believers
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and a world obsessed by money and material goods, can Christianity really survive?
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Rumors of the death of the church have been greatly exaggerated.
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In the developing world in America, Christianity is thriving.
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Oh my goodness, it’s big.
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And it is still a powerful political force.
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President Bush was open about the role of faith in his life.
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In this film, as a practicing Catholic and barrister,
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I want to look at how Christianity in the West has faced up to the momentous social changes
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of the last hundred years, of why the traditional churches are perceived to be in decline
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and consider the challenges of the future for the world’s biggest religion.
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[Music]
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I was born in 1954 and brought up in Liverpool, one of the most Catholic cities in England.
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I was raised by my mum in the home of her mother-in-law, my grandmother, who was a Catholic.
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Her house is in a working class and very Catholic area of Liverpool.
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I haven’t been back for over 20 years.
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It’s very strange coming back into this house.
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This was my grandma’s best room, the front parlour.
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I don’t think her Catholicism was overt and she certainly didn’t spend her whole life talking about doctrine.
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In fact, some things about the Catholic Church she felt were very wrong.
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I always remember how annoyed and angry she’d been when my auntie Audrey got married.
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She married a non-Catholic and how they were forced to marry at the side altar
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because he wasn’t a Catholic and wouldn’t convert.
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And she thought that was all a load of nonsense really.
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Ah, this is my bedroom.
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I was really privileged because I was the one who got my own bedroom.
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This was my domain from about the age of 18.
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My grandmother was the driving force for me being a Christian.
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And it would sadden her to see how everywhere you look today, churches are being closed,
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Christians are often being marginalised and faith is something few people like to discuss openly.
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What has happened to Christianity?
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Why do so few people now go to church?
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Has the 2000-year-old faith that I learnt from my grandmother really lost its way?
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I believe the problems began for Western Christianity many years before I was born,
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with the start of a century of some of the worst acts of violence in the history of mankind.
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At times it has seemed as if that most fundamental of Christian beliefs,
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the golden rule of “love thy neighbour”, was forgotten.
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Europe is today full of the graves of those killed in conflicts caused by Christian fighting Christian.
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The last hundred years have seen human suffering on an unprecedented scale,
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war, genocide and political oppression.
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And Christianity, or at least Western Christendom, has been at the heart of it.
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In 1914, the nations of Christian Europe started the most brutal and bloody war the world had seen to date.
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With sermons, prayers and blessings, the traditional churches of Europe helped send millions to their deaths.
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Twenty years later, most of Europe’s Christian nations united to fight the evil of fascism.
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Ever since the Roman Empire was converted over 1600 years ago,
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Christianity in much of Western Europe has been closely connected with the state,
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a national religion handed down from on high.
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And nowhere was this more obvious than in mobilising the nation for war.
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One of the few major Christian ceremonies still observed publicly in Britain today is Remembrance Day,
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the British state commemorating its war dead.
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But elsewhere, a weakness in Europe’s close relationship between church and state was exposed by a heinous episode.
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The Holocaust was possibly history’s most godless act,
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the almost complete extermination of Europe’s Jews by Hitler’s Nazis.
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This place is called the Valley of Death.
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The corpses were first just dropped down here, and then the SS built a ramp with a lorry on it,
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and they put the corpses in and put them down to the crematory.
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And then they were burned. They burned about 70 to 90 corpses a day.
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Although the Holocaust was no Christian crime, many of its perpetrators were baptised Christians,
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and Germany’s churches did little to lessen the slaughter.
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But some Christians did resist, either in saving Jews from the death camps or standing up to the Nazis.
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One of the bravest was a German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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Renate Bethke is Bonhoeffer’s niece. She tries to keep the memory of her uncle alive.
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Most Christians, of course, didn’t stand up against the Nazis.
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In fact, some of them actually were involved in what happened.
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And, of course, you could say that anti-Semitism itself came from the idea
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that the Jews were the people who had persecuted Christ.
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What made Dietrich see differently?
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Our family had lots of Jewish friends, and they were quite good people,
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so we didn’t see anything wrong with the Jews.
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But it’s one thing to say, well, we didn’t see anything wrong ourselves personally.
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It’s another thing to actually disagree with the state.
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Of course, you were frightened then, but not everybody dared to utter this kind of thing and to…
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Well, to stand up.
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Yeah, no, they didn’t.
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Right from the start, Bonhoeffer saw it as his Christian duty to speak out against Hitler
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and his anti-Jewish racial laws.
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He abhorred the traditional German church’s unholy alliance with the Nazi state.
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It was a problem for the whole family, because they were all Christian,
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but they thought Hitler was like the devil, so to kill him would save other people.
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Bonhoeffer later joined a plot to assassinate Hitler.
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When it failed, he was arrested and imprisoned.
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Bonhoeffer was brought from Buchenwald in the evening of the 8th of April,
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and he was brought to the detention building over there.
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In a cell like this, Bonhoeffer spent the night before he was murdered.
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In the morning hour, they had to undress themselves and then be naked,
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taking away the last human dignity, and the group around Bonhoeffer,
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they all were hung one after each other.
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Did you in fact say goodbye to him?
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Yes, we said goodbye, but of course one didn’t know what would happen.
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For me, Bonhoeffer’s brave stand against the Nazi state,
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when the German churches were largely silent,
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illustrates the Christian duty to speak up for the oppressed
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and not simply to accept the status quo.
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In resistance against dictatorship and terror,
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gave their lives for freedom, justice and human dignity,
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Father Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his co-resisters
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murdered in the morning hours of the 9th of April, 1945.
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But despite all the horrors of the 20th century,
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Christianity worldwide didn’t suffer in terms of overall numbers.
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In fact, it grew to include over a third of the world’s population.
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It was another factor altogether that caused a crisis in Christianity
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all over Western Europe that it has never recovered from,
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the massive social and political change of the 1960s.
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It was not the horrors of two world wars that caused a crisis
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for Christianity in Western Europe,
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but the massive social and political change that happened in the 1960s.
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It was a time when everything was brought into question.
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The old order was under attack and that included Christianity
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and in particular the role of the church.
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It was also a time when I was a teenager.
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At the age of 11 I was sent to a Catholic girls’ grammar school,
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a convent run by nuns.
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The school is still in Crosby, it’s still Catholic,
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but the nuns have gone and now it admits boys.
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I want to find out how much Catholic Liverpool has changed
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since I was a schoolgirl.
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Hello Stephanie, nice to meet you too.
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You’re in the sixth form?
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Yes, I am.
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So are you going to take me around Stephanie?
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I’m going to give you the tour.
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So this is the chapel.
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So what do you use the chapel for now?
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It’s used a lot the chapel actually for assemblies,
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but then they also have a mass each week that is voluntary
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if you would like to attend that.
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And do many people attend?
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Yeah, people do attend.
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I think especially it’s nice if maybe you’ve had something happen in your life.
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I’m just having to get married.
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When I was Stephanie’s age I was a member of the Young Christian Students
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and we used to do a lot of campaigning on social issues.
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It’s what got me into Christianity in a big way.
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I’m glad to see the school still retains that ethos.
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So is the school very much into campaigning about issues?
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I don’t think it tries to force it on you,
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but it’s into making you aware of what is going on,
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of things that you could do.
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When I was here we also used to do a lot of campaigning.
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I remember we did this great thing which was a 24-hour fast
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for people who were starving in the world,
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which was a great excuse for the girls on Seafield and the boys at St Mary’s
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to get together and spend the night in Liverpool.
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This was an all-girls school.
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So what does it mean to you to be a Catholic in the 21st century?
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To me, I don’t necessarily think it means going to church all the time.
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I don’t think you need to do that.
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I think it’s just how you carry it out, you know, in caring for other people.
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And also I think you pick up your morals and things like that from religion as well.
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You know, you know what is right and wrong through religion.
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We can’t change the world, obviously. We’re not that good.
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Why not?
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Well, we’ll try.
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You’ve got to try, absolutely.
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If it’s 17, you don’t want to give it a try.
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I’m going to change the world and I’m 54. God, I am. I’m 54.
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And you’re going to give it a good go.
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I am.
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We’ll try together.
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Figures for regular church attendance in Liverpool have declined steeply since my youth.
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And if you look at the whole country, it’s a disastrous picture.
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In 1964, 74% of people said they belonged to a religion or attended church services.
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Today, the opposite is true. And it’s the same all over Western Europe.
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That leaves a huge headache for the church authorities.
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Hundreds of redundant churches, many of them historic buildings.
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How is it that we have this position in Liverpool now that all these churches have gone?
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The city has been depopulating steadily, certainly since the Second World War.
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The north end of Liverpool in particular has gone through a phenomenal rapid change,
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where there used to be 250,000 people that are now up to 2,000.
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If I refer to a picture that I’ve got here, if I look at that whole picture now of the north end of the city,
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there are about three buildings standing still now.
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Well, the social change since the ’60s is just, you know, less priestess is also the sense of the whole community going.
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In 20 years, I know nine churches that went up down.
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In my youth, St Mary of the Angels was one of the city’s Catholic landmarks.
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But today, it’s no longer a working church.
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It was closed eight years ago and is now being used by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra as a rehearsal room.
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Some people are very upset that some of these very beautiful churches have not been preserved as churches.
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I mean, how do you make decisions like that?
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Well, in that particular case, within half a mile, you’ve got five other churches that are particularly beautiful.
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The decision was never to destroy it or knock it down.
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All we knew is that we couldn’t use it anymore as a viable church.
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The bigger problem for the church authorities is that every time a church is closed, its surviving congregation may be alienated,
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exacerbating even more the drop in numbers.
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It’s a vicious cycle of decline.
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We see the buildings closing. What we’ve also seen is actually the congregations shrinking.
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Now, what do we do about that? Why is it so, in fact?
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I don’t know. I mean, I would say what’s happened in practice is that the breakdown of the family has been quite severe.
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We’ve got a massive amount of single parents.
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So I think we’ve got a big responsibility as priests making people feel wanted.
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The problem is that many people don’t feel wanted by the church.
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And in the Catholic Church, that often means women.
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The Scarrett family live in the same area of Liverpool in which I grew up and went to the same schools.
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Like me, they were brought up as Catholics.
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But today, while Angela still attends church, Noreen has largely stopped going.
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I think the church has had a bad press because they preach certain things against abortion,
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the views from which are predominantly male that are coming up saying all these things.
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I used to get very angry when the letter would come from the Archbishop saying,
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“There’s never going to be a mother who’ll give birth in his life,” you know, telling these women.
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And I think I got angry with the church at one point.
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To me, because I’m a feminist, how could I have done all the things I’ve done if, in fact, I hadn’t used contraception?
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Because actually, every time I didn’t use contraception, I seemed to have a baby.
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I just can’t believe that the church hasn’t moved on with that.
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Because, you know, you look at the failed work countries, that, you know, people have got AIDS
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and they’re still having children because the church say you can’t use contraceptives.
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And, you know, they’re passing it on to the children. It’s just not right.
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But do you think maybe that has affected the way that women look at the church
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and therefore they feel that they’re not really engaging with women’s concerns
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and therefore they feel alienated from the church?
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Especially abortion as well.
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You know, hopefully none of us would ever have to go through that or have a disabled child.
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And that is your choice.
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And for the church to turn around and say you shouldn’t be even contemplating that,
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that’s one thing I could never get my head around.
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And I don’t think that the church should have any part in that, really.
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They should be supportive.
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They’re going to lose everybody eventually and I think they’ve got to get more modern, really.
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One of the fundamental weaknesses of modern Christianity is its ambivalence to women,
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and particularly for Catholicism.
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Until the traditional churches fully resolve their relationship with the female half of the population,
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how can they expect Christianity to have a future in the modern world?
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I first met Jerry Proctor when we both joined the Young Christian Students, the YCS, in 1968.
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He later became a priest.
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When we were growing up in the 1960s and 70s, we were both full of hope that our church could change with the times.
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I don’t think since I’ve ever felt as energised and fascinated by the Catholic church as I did then.
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But it was all very much a part of that whole 60s explosion, wasn’t it?
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Yeah.
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The society was changing, and because of Vatican II, the church was changing too.
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It was.
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We thought.
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In 1962, Pope John XXIII set up the Second Vatican Council,
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with the intention to open the windows and let in the “fresh air of change”, as he put it.
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For three years, the Catholic leadership debated how best to modernise the church.
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But 40 years later, the decline of the Catholic church in Western Europe has now reached critical proportions.
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And what about the future of the church then? What’s the key to its survival?
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I think the key to its survival is the gospel.
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Simply the gospel, and the person of Jesus.
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But the model of church we have implemented for well over a thousand years is not working any longer in our present culture.
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The Catholic church has opposed, with all its energy, everything modern for the last 400 years.
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We’ve been constantly opposing every development of society since the Reformation.
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Only with the Second Vatican Council did we have a glimpse of a different stance towards the world.
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But I’m afraid now in the Catholic church, those windows that were opened by John XXIII are being firmly closed.
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The drawbridge is being pulled back up, and we’re being encouraged to go back into the castle and survive within the ghetto.
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But that’s not the Church of Jesus.
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It’s not just the Catholic church that appears to be in terminal decline.
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It’s the same for almost all of Western Europe’s traditional churches.
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It seems to me that Christians in Western Europe have a choice.
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Either we can retreat into ourselves, preserving the purity of our faith as an exclusive club,
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or we can turn this apparent crisis into an opportunity,
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and do what other Christians have done across the world,
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and take the timeless values of the gospel and reconnect them with our culture today.
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But there is one country in the West where Christianity is not in crisis,
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a place where it has helped lead the transformation of society and is now flourishing.
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America.
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America is the largest Christian country in the world.
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Today, more than three quarters of the population profess to be Christian,
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and more than 40% of Americans claim to attend church regularly.
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In fact, the majority of Americans are Christians.
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In the West, the majority of Americans are Christians.
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Today, more than three quarters of the population profess to be Christian, and more than 40% of Americans claim to attend church regularly.
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In Britain, it’s less than 7%.
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Take the up.
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All the traditional Western denominations have a major presence in the United States.
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Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans,
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the Pentecostal movement, and also a huge variety of other non-denominational churches.
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When we look across Europe today, particularly Western Europe,
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Christianity seems a pretty marginal force.
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Very few people attend church regularly, or read the Bible, or even profess a belief in God.
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Religion has little relevance in their lives.
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But here, in America, the complete opposite is true.
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Christianity is still a potent force at the center of a large majority of people’s daily lives.
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Why is that the case? Why is Christianity flourishing in America?
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And can its success here provide a template for the future of Christianity in Europe?
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The United Methodist Temple is in the center of Chicago,
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and is the city’s oldest established congregation, predating the city itself.
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It has three chapels, including one at the very pinnacle of the skyscraper.
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Although Methodist, the Chicago Temple has broken free of the restrictions of denomination,
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and serves the whole of the city.
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The church does not exist for itself. The church exists for others.
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We’re very explicit about welcoming people,
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because we think that the call of Jesus Christ is to all people.
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So who are we then to begin to distinguish between who’s in and who’s out?
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Rose Martinelli is a leading member of the Chicago Temple’s congregation, and a lesbian.
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Tell me, Rose, what does this church mean to you?
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For me here at Chicago Temple, it’s just been this place of acceptance.
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Oftentimes I go to churches where I had to really separate my life.
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I’d either be a Christian or I’d be a lesbian, but I couldn’t be both.
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I went to a number of churches when I lived in Philadelphia that wanted to cure me or heal me.
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And there was a few other churches where I could be gay, a lesbian,
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but where the commitment to Christ’s Word and to service and to being called to something greater than yourself was lacking.
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Christianity has always been at the forefront of life in America.
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But unlike in Britain, church and state are separate.
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America’s constitution specifically forbids any one established religion.
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Christianity is free of any ties to the establishment.
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This has had a dramatic impact, with Christianity remaining an independent and powerful political force.
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When the United States was founded, the very first amendment,
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the first thing in the first amendment of the constitution and the Bill of Rights is freedom of religion,
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and freedom from the government ever establishing a government religion.
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Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush faced widespread criticism abroad for his avowed religious convictions
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and the supposed influence God had on his political decisions.
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It’s a very fine tightrope, this division between religion and public life,
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and it can lead to assumptions and unfair criticisms being made about the motivation and reasons why politicians take the decisions that they do.
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And people then taking it from that, that somehow you’re saying that everything I do is justified by God.
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That’s right. You know, because President Bush, for instance, was open about the role of faith in his life
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and how important faith is to him, then people took it the step farther to think that,
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or to make up really, that he thought God told him things, which of course he doesn’t.
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I mean, he, you know…
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No, he doesn’t think he’s Moses, does he?
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No, he doesn’t. That is part of the tightrope of it.
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People used to suggest that Tony and George would actually pray together, and that never happened, of course.
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Never happened, absolutely. Of course not. I mean, that is part of the problem of anyone mentioning what their religion is
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and why I can see that Tim Downing would not want the Prime Minister to say, “God bless our country,” because there is criticism.
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[Crowd cheering]
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In the 1960s, America underwent the same massive social, political and economic changes as the rest of the West.
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And in some ways it was even more violent and cataclysmic, with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
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both bringing massive transformational changes in society.
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Yet this period had widely different long-term effects on the church and Christian belief in the two continents.
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Whilst in Europe the 1960s provoked a crisis in the church, here in America it became an opportunity,
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a liberation from the old ways and a reinvigoration of Christianity.
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[Music playing]
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The Reverend Jesse Jackson was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, working alongside Dr Martin Luther King.
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He is also an ordained Baptist minister and has his own church in Chicago.
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Tell me, do you think that the ’60s Civil Rights Movement would have achieved its goals or even come about,
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had it not been for the religious faith of yourself and others like you, in particular, of course, Dr King?
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It was our faith that changed the law. The law did not change our faith.
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The America that we see today is born of the sacrifices we made defining the Christian faith.
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One could argue that our religion makes us political, that our politics don’t make us religious.
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It is that religious force that makes us be willing to do justice and love mercy and to fight for those whose backs are against the wall.
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Here in America, the church or Christianity, it seemed not so much as disconnected from society as it is in Europe,
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but as a dynamic force within it. Churches, both black and white, were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement,
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helping to transform America from a society that was founded and dominated by whites to the multiracial one that it is today.
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The Constitution was an immoral document. It defined the African people, God, children, as three bits of a human being.
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We had to change that Constitution. That was a turning point in our country.
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And while it was a legal change, it was driven by the church defining humanity as one.
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In many ways, the inauguration of Barack Obama earlier this year was as much a victory for American Christianity as the Civil Rights Movement.
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President Barack Obama runs the last lap of a 54-year race. This was a marathon race.
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And in that race, many runners were killed and martyred, much suffering and pain.
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But at the end of that race, Barack Obama is now America’s first African American president.
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Today, there’s a new America that’s more multiracial, more multicultural, because we changed the laws.
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For me, the strength of Christianity in America is that it has retained its ability to reinvent itself very quickly, time after time, to suit each new generation’s needs.
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In the 1970s, while the traditional churches in Europe began a steady period of decline,
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churches here were breaking free from the constraints of ancient worship, creating whole new ways to do Christianity.
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Some of the most successful are the mega churches.
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The first was Willow Creek Community Church.
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Hi, Sheree. Welcome. My name is Jim Milardo. How are you?
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I’m very well. This is an amazing place.
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Well, it’s not too old. We opened it up in 2004.
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It’s big.
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Oh, well, we’ve enjoyed it. Lots of folks come here.
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Jim Milardo is the president of the Willow Creek Association, whose mission is to spread the Willow Creek success story around the world.
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Willow Creek started in 1975, when a group of young people, fed up with their traditional church, decided to set up on their own, in a rented movie theater in a suburb of Chicago.
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This is our food court, which again, to share a meal together. In fact, you know, you think of Acts 2 in the early church.
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They brought bread and they shared and went house to house.
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And so we wanted to do everything to foster that church unit, that eight to twelve people, where they can have true community, share meals together, share life together.
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So you come, go to the service, and you come get your meal and then kind of sit and do community.
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Good morning, everybody. I want to welcome you. My name is Nancy. Come on in and take your seats.
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Gracious Heavenly Father.
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From the start, women have played a major role in the church.
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Nancy Beach was one of the founding members and is now a vice president of the church and a teaching pastor.
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And see, from the very beginning, Willow Creek has believed that God did not distribute the gifts according to gender, that women can lead and teach and do all of the gifts just as men can.
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So I haven’t had a ceiling over me, which I’m very grateful for.
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At Willow Creek, there are no crosses, no Christian symbols, nothing that looks like a traditional church.
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And today, its average weekly attendance is over twenty three thousand people and it’s growing every year.
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It’s like a rock concert.
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The main auditorium seats over seven thousand two hundred people and is the largest theater in the whole of the United States.
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Let’s sing this together.
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While in Britain, we are closing churches.
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Willow Creek is now so successful that it is developing new sites every year all over Chicago.
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Well, welcome to Willow Creek, McHenry County. My name is Steve Gillen.
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And I lead our regional ministry here at Willow.
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And this is one of our four sites.
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This one at McKenna County in the town of Crystal Lake is in a warehouse.
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And every weekend about two thousand people gather for our services.
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Right over here is an extension of our cafe.
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We want to make sure everyone has…
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Compared to Europe, there are now just so many ways that you can be a Christian in America that it would be hard not to find something to suit everyone.
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I hope and pray that you would say, I’m in for this series.
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I’m in for building contentment muscles in my life.
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Willow Creek is still led by its founder and charismatic senior pastor, Bill Hybels.
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The culmination of each week’s service is his sermon.
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The entire service and his message are filmed and packaged for distribution worldwide by the church’s own audio visual team.
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Looking around this place, this is not a traditional church.
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How do you do church at Willow Creek?
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We’ve never tried to be a traditional church.
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We’ve tried to look at the model in the New Testament, which is a radical thing.
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So, you know, we started in a movie theater and most of the people who came our way had no Christian background.
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And what they liked about the movie theater was that it was neutral territory.
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If they came as husband and wife, they didn’t really have to have a big fight.
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Are you Baptist? Are you Catholic? Are you Presbyterian?
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Because they were coming to an inter-denominational church that was based right out of the scriptures as best we could understand them.
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Unlike Europe’s traditional churches, Willow Creek is not restricted by ancient traditions, historic buildings or divided denominations.
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The real secret, in addition to that big congregational assembly, is that all of these churches are honeycombed with very small groups of 10, 15, 20 people.
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In fact, in some ways, I think the real secret is the way they combine the large with the small.
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And they minimize the boundary between the church and the world.
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Willow Creek’s work is not limited to its own members.
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It also operates one of the biggest public care centers in Chicago, handing out food and advice to the needy.
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And it is run with the efficiency of a modern business.
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And David, why are you here today?
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Times are tough, the job situation. I haven’t gotten a paycheck now in over two months.
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I haven’t received any money and I’m just asking for help.
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What do you expect from someone who comes into this community to join the community?
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I did a message last year called Faith with Guts.
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That was just kind of the repeating phrase is you say you have faith, where’s your guts?
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Where’s your guts to stand up for it? Where’s your guts to overturn systemic injustice?
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Where’s your guts to stop racism in your place of employment?
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Where’s your guts?
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Christianity is supposed to be something that calls the best out of us.
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So you don’t want your people to be too comfortable?
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No.
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There are now somewhere between five and six hundred mega churches in America and they’re growing in number every year.
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So a significant portion of people who are in church on a given Sunday are going to be in mega churches.
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It’s not a peripheral development.
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Some of the mega churches’ ideas have already spread to Europe.
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But the traditional European churches would do well to study their success story in detail.
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What Willow Creek has done is radically rethink the way church can be done in the modern world
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and may provide a template for the future of Christianity.
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What they’ve done is to take the kind of mall layout, the architecture, if you will, of the mall and use that for a church.
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You hardly know when you’re inside or outside of a mega church and you can come dressed informally.
425
00:38:15,000 –> 00:38:19,000
The ministers almost never wear neckties.
426
00:38:19,000 –> 00:38:26,000
They surely never wear vestments and talks about how Christianity applies to the life that you’re living in the world today.
427
00:38:26,000 –> 00:38:32,000
There’s very little talk about eternal punishment or preparing for the next world that hardly ever comes up.
428
00:38:32,000 –> 00:38:35,000
It’s how you live today.
429
00:38:35,000 –> 00:38:41,000
So I really believe that the mega churches, they’re in some ways the wave of the future.
430
00:38:42,000 –> 00:38:46,000
When I see the current vibrant state of Christianity in America
431
00:38:46,000 –> 00:38:51,000
and the leading role that it has played throughout history in transforming this society
432
00:38:51,000 –> 00:38:55,000
and I try to compare what’s happening here with the story in Europe,
433
00:38:55,000 –> 00:39:03,000
I firmly believe that this crisis of Christianity is not a crisis of faith, but of organization.
434
00:39:03,000 –> 00:39:11,000
The traditional churches of Western Europe were built for another age and they don’t fully work in the 21st century.
435
00:39:11,000 –> 00:39:20,000
If Christianity is to regain its place in Western Europe, then it has to grapple with change or its voice will be ignored.
436
00:39:20,000 –> 00:39:32,000
Christianity in Western Europe is perceived to have lost its way
437
00:39:32,000 –> 00:39:36,000
and to have abandoned the dynamism that over the last 2,000 years
438
00:39:36,000 –> 00:39:42,000
transformed it from a small Jewish sect into the world’s largest religion.
439
00:39:42,000 –> 00:39:48,000
But for me this is not chiefly a crisis of faith itself, but of how we practice it.
440
00:39:48,000 –> 00:39:54,000
The political, social and economic upheaval since the 1960s
441
00:39:54,000 –> 00:39:59,000
have seen the church in Western Europe pushed to the margins of people’s lives,
442
00:39:59,000 –> 00:40:04,000
with church attendance in decline and increasingly aging congregations.
443
00:40:04,000 –> 00:40:11,000
Yet at the same time many people are still looking for meaning in their lives beyond mere materialism.
444
00:40:11,000 –> 00:40:22,000
And across the globe, in the US and in the developing world, the churches are booming.
445
00:40:22,000 –> 00:40:24,000
So what is to be done?
446
00:40:24,000 –> 00:40:31,000
Christianity in Western Europe is inevitably shaped by 2,000 years of history.
447
00:40:31,000 –> 00:40:37,000
So that today it is perceived to be too closely connected with the old established order
448
00:40:37,000 –> 00:40:39,000
and the old ways of thinking.
449
00:40:39,000 –> 00:40:45,000
In Britain, the Church of England and the Catholic Church are in crisis.
450
00:40:45,000 –> 00:40:49,000
Church attendance is in seemingly terminal decline.
451
00:40:49,000 –> 00:40:51,000
Is it all too late?
452
00:40:51,000 –> 00:41:00,000
It’s interesting that the last census some years ago, 71% of the people in England said they felt they were Christians.
453
00:41:00,000 –> 00:41:05,000
In other words, the residue of faith in Christianity is still there.
454
00:41:05,000 –> 00:41:08,000
You take God out of society totally.
455
00:41:08,000 –> 00:41:13,000
This is what some of the secularists and atheists want to do.
456
00:41:13,000 –> 00:41:17,000
Then it seems to me you have a society that’s, in my view, very dangerous.
457
00:41:17,000 –> 00:41:23,000
I think what is needed is a radical overhaul.
458
00:41:23,000 –> 00:41:27,000
Christianity has to look again at its organisational structure
459
00:41:27,000 –> 00:41:30,000
to rethink how it does church.
460
00:41:30,000 –> 00:41:34,000
For me, it has to break out of the old straitjacket of a religious system
461
00:41:34,000 –> 00:41:39,000
dominated by ancient static buildings built for another age.
462
00:41:39,000 –> 00:41:45,000
Christianity is not a physical building, but a body of people.
463
00:41:45,000 –> 00:41:49,000
Beautiful as these buildings are.
464
00:41:49,000 –> 00:41:52,000
My faith is not about architecture.
465
00:41:52,000 –> 00:41:54,000
It’s about community.
466
00:41:54,000 –> 00:41:58,000
Maybe the problem is largely one of the historic churches.
467
00:41:58,000 –> 00:42:02,000
Take the Church of England with its land and its power,
468
00:42:02,000 –> 00:42:05,000
or the Catholic Church, generally speaking.
469
00:42:05,000 –> 00:42:10,000
We’re rooted in our laws and our history, and in a way,
470
00:42:10,000 –> 00:42:14,000
it’s almost the industrialised world has passed us by,
471
00:42:14,000 –> 00:42:19,000
and the Church of England has got to become the Church of the People once more,
472
00:42:19,000 –> 00:42:22,000
touching the lives of ordinary people.
473
00:42:23,000 –> 00:42:27,000
Last year, I was asked to give a speech at a conference at the Vatican in Rome
474
00:42:27,000 –> 00:42:30,000
on human rights, women and the Church.
475
00:42:30,000 –> 00:42:35,000
The Church’s message can be distorted in the eyes of others
476
00:42:35,000 –> 00:42:39,000
by the cultural attitudes which linger in the Church longer sometimes
477
00:42:39,000 –> 00:42:42,000
than they linger in wider society.
478
00:42:42,000 –> 00:42:46,000
And I believe this is particularly true in our attitudes to women.
479
00:42:46,000 –> 00:42:50,000
Traditionally, it was women who passed religion on to their children
480
00:42:50,000 –> 00:42:54,000
and who kept the Church going through the good times and the bad.
481
00:42:54,000 –> 00:42:57,000
But when it comes to the public face of Christianity,
482
00:42:57,000 –> 00:42:59,000
women are virtually invisible.
483
00:42:59,000 –> 00:43:04,000
I see a genuine complementarity between the gifts of women and men
484
00:43:04,000 –> 00:43:06,000
in the terms of the mission of the Church.
485
00:43:06,000 –> 00:43:11,000
But despite that, if you actually look at the formal structures of the Catholic Church,
486
00:43:11,000 –> 00:43:16,000
you don’t see a woman’s face when you see people speaking for the Catholic Church.
487
00:43:16,000 –> 00:43:17,000
Can we change that?
488
00:43:17,000 –> 00:43:20,000
Now, I don’t think that will develop towards priesthood or episcopacy
489
00:43:20,000 –> 00:43:23,000
because of the tradition of the Church in that role.
490
00:43:23,000 –> 00:43:27,000
But I do see the roles and the gifts of women being not just appreciated,
491
00:43:27,000 –> 00:43:29,000
but used more fully.
492
00:43:29,000 –> 00:43:34,000
I firmly believe that Christianity in Western Europe can be saved.
493
00:43:34,000 –> 00:43:38,000
But there are a number of urgent steps that need to be taken.
494
00:43:38,000 –> 00:43:43,000
Down the centuries, women have formed the backbone of faith communities.
495
00:43:43,000 –> 00:43:47,000
But their public role has reflected the culture of the time.
496
00:43:47,000 –> 00:43:53,000
Today, whilst women remain marginalised, Christianity cannot flourish.
497
00:43:53,000 –> 00:43:59,000
Women and men must be equal partners in 21st century Christianity.
498
00:43:59,000 –> 00:44:05,000
And that opening up of the Church must apply to all sections of our modern society.
499
00:44:05,000 –> 00:44:10,000
There are groups of people in our society that it will be very difficult
500
00:44:10,000 –> 00:44:13,000
for me as a priest to mix with,
501
00:44:13,000 –> 00:44:20,000
without being severely criticised and considered suspect.
502
00:44:20,000 –> 00:44:25,000
I mean, working with prostitutes is extremely difficult.
503
00:44:25,000 –> 00:44:33,000
Being connected with the gay community would be immensely damaging or difficult to do.
504
00:44:33,000 –> 00:44:36,000
But for Jesus, there was nobody he wouldn’t talk to.
505
00:44:36,000 –> 00:44:38,000
I’m trying to death, I’m helping!
506
00:44:38,000 –> 00:44:43,000
Christianity in Europe has to regain its role as a transformer of society,
507
00:44:43,000 –> 00:44:46,000
as the champion of the poor and the oppressed.
508
00:44:46,000 –> 00:44:50,000
After all, one of the first human rights charters is found in the Gospel,
509
00:44:50,000 –> 00:44:53,000
the Sermon on the Mount.
510
00:44:53,000 –> 00:45:01,000
I suppose when religion becomes privatised and ceases to be a source of transforming
511
00:45:01,000 –> 00:45:06,000
and ceases to challenge the immorality or inconsistence of the state,
512
00:45:06,000 –> 00:45:08,000
it ceases to be alive.
513
00:45:08,000 –> 00:45:12,000
Those churches are dead and their memberships tend to die.
514
00:45:12,000 –> 00:45:19,000
To many in the outside world, Christianity still looks divided by ancient enmities.
515
00:45:19,000 –> 00:45:25,000
And in a world of disbelief, Christians should work together around the core faith that they all share,
516
00:45:25,000 –> 00:45:29,000
rather than worrying about the doctrinal beliefs that separate them.
517
00:45:29,000 –> 00:45:36,000
I think it’s hard for any denomination to say we only have the entire truth about God.
518
00:45:36,000 –> 00:45:40,000
The good thing about the United Kingdom generally is that the relationships are very good.
519
00:45:40,000 –> 00:45:48,000
But we’re still defeated, we haven’t reached that full unity which we know God wants us to have.
520
00:45:48,000 –> 00:45:54,000
And finally, Christianity has to reach out to other faiths, with humility and partnership,
521
00:45:54,000 –> 00:45:59,000
in a way which respects difference rather than trying to eliminate it.
522
00:45:59,000 –> 00:46:07,000
Christianity should be building bridges between cultures, not creating barriers.
523
00:46:07,000 –> 00:46:15,000
Many people in the 20th century started to write off the church and Christianity as a force.
524
00:46:15,000 –> 00:46:18,000
Here we are in the beginning of the 21st century.
525
00:46:18,000 –> 00:46:26,000
We’ve got a church that’s lasted for 2,000 years, one form or another. Is this the end for the church?
526
00:46:26,000 –> 00:46:27,000
No.
527
00:46:27,000 –> 00:46:31,000
Rumors of the death of the church have been greatly exaggerated.
528
00:46:31,000 –> 00:46:36,000
You cannot kill the spirit of the church.
529
00:46:36,000 –> 00:46:43,000
You can kill some people, but you can’t kill the activity of God in human life.
530
00:46:43,000 –> 00:46:48,000
In America, the lesson to be learnt from the success of churches like Willow Creek
531
00:46:48,000 –> 00:46:55,000
was the simple Christian belief in the Word of God and the urgent desire to put it into practice.
532
00:46:55,000 –> 00:47:03,000
The whole Willow thing has been a supernatural experience.
533
00:47:03,000 –> 00:47:09,000
We have a phrase we use all the time around Willow, just two words, it says, “Only God.”
534
00:47:09,000 –> 00:47:14,000
And it’s true.
535
00:47:14,000 –> 00:47:18,000
I firmly believe that Christianity is not on its last legs,
536
00:47:18,000 –> 00:47:23,000
that the faith I learned from my grandmother is still as strong as ever.
537
00:47:23,000 –> 00:47:28,000
If the traditional churches of the West can only resolve their problems
538
00:47:28,000 –> 00:47:32,000
and reach out to and work with people of faith across the world,
539
00:47:32,000 –> 00:47:37,000
then Christianity can not only survive, but prosper.
540
00:47:37,000 –> 00:47:42,000
Our Tofs and Crim season continues with a true story of the aristocratic jewel thief,
541
00:47:42,000 –> 00:47:45,000
the real Pink Panther, tomorrow at 8.
542
00:47:45,000 –> 00:47:50,000
Well, next on 4, back for a brand new season of flambéed tempers and spicy comments.
543
00:47:50,000 –> 00:47:55,000
It’s come dine with me.
544
00:47:55,000 –> 00:48:00,000
[Music]
545
00:48:02,000 –> 00:48:07,000
[Music]