THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

12 February 1997

Address by

The Most Reverend Dr Keith Rayner, AO

Archbishop of Melbourne

Primate of the Anglican Church of

Australia

Plenty of people willing to write off the church. “Yesterday’s people”
was the term used of the church by one Australian politician recently.
And reports about the church in the media seem to give some substance
to this view – whether it is small numbers, fierce theological
controversies, loss of political clout, the moral failures of some clergy, or
the appearance of sheer irrelevance. So, has the church a future? I’m
grateful to the National Press Club for giving me the opportunity to
discuss that with you today.

Over the years relations between the Church and the media have often
involved frustrations on both sides. Perhaps I can illustrate with the story
I heard about the bishop who went out for a day’s fishing on the lake with
one of his clergy. The bishop’s hat blew into the water, and despite the
priest’s attempts to drag it back with an oar, it simply drifted further
away. Finally the bishop got fed up, stepped out of the boat, walked
across the water and retrieved his hat. It happened that a reporter from
the local paper observed this remarkable event. So he wrote up the story
and handed it in to the sub-editor. Next day it came out with the
headline, “BISHOP UNABLE TO SWIM”.

The way the Church is reported in the media sometimes feels like that.
I don’t know how many times in the past ten years the Anglican Church
has been about to split! Stories that start “Church attacks ….” or
“Archbishop deplores …” often make me cringe, because frankly I do
very little attacking or deploring – we have much more positive things to
say than that.

I recognise the Church is not free from blame if we are badly reported.
We often don’t handle our media relations all that well. But I ask: how
many of our major papers employ specialist religious reporters who
actually understand the issues? And despite the fact that more people
attend church, synagogue or mosque each week than attend football or
cricket, how does the space given to religious issues compare with space
devoted to sport? My point is that underlying many of the political,
economic and social questions of our day there are profound spiritual and
moral issues. They call for perceptive exploration, not trivialisation.

We’ve just concluded here in Canberra a National Anglican Conference.
It has been a new kind of gathering for us – not hierarchical and
legislative like a synod, but informal, evocative (and provocative), and
with opportunity for bubbling up from ground level. About a thousand
people came from every part of Australia – young and old, men and
women, ordained and lay, indigenous and non-indigenous. It has been a
stimulating, encouraging, dynamic experience. It certainly didn’t have the
feel of a church with no future! The Conference was built around the
basic things of faith and worship, but from beginning to end it was
positive, critical and forward-looking.

We didn’t agree on every detail. A church that is alive will be wrestling
with big questions – issues of faith, of social concern, of how to deal
creatively with the change that is going on all around us. It takes time to
come to one mind on major new issues that face us; but I’m glad to be
part of a church that is ready to wrestle with the big questions.

To be honest, we face some worrying things. One is the loss of young
people. There are a lot of marvellous young people in the church – some
of them played a big part in our Conference this week. And there are
parishes where there are lots of active, committed, enthusiastic young
people. In general, though, we have to confess that the church does not
have the credibility with youth that it should. The church – and I include
myself – can’t exonerate itself from blame in this. There is a culture gap
which we have not effectively bridged; and a lot of the younger
generation have grown up in a spiritual and moral vacuum bequeathed to
them by their elders. We have to work hard at finding the right way
through this major concern.

Incidentally, it’s important to observe that this vacuum is a phenomenon
of the western world rather than the world as a whole. Take the Anglican
Communion, for example. Australians often think of the Anglican
Communion as being essentially made up of white people of English
descent. The fact is that at next year’s Lambeth Conference of Anglican
Bishops, the white faces will be very much in the minority. There are
many parts of the world where the church is growing rapidly.

Two elements in our present environment undergird my optimism about
the future of the church. One is the massive contemporary interest in
spirituality. It takes a variety of forms. Some of it is specifically
Christian, like the house church movement or the charismatic or
pentecostal renewal. In a country like Russia, after seventy years of the
militant propagation of atheistic materialism, it finds
expression in the revival of Orthodoxy. In western society there is the
attraction to meditation, eastern religions and New Age spirituality. For
many people there is a strong spiritual dimension in the concern for the
environment – something that the church has not always appreciated. Let
me make it clear that I do not give equal weight to all these forms of
spirituality. Some of them are problematical and some positively
dangerous. But they have this in common: they all represent a strong
reaction against the sufficiency of materialist values on which both
western capitalism and eastern communism placed their faith.

It is interesting to see a similar trend in the world of advanced science.
As scientists probe more deeply into the nature of the physical universe
and of matter itself, the questions they ask sound more and more like the
religious questions. When Paul Davies writes of “The Mind of God”, he
starts not from religious revelation but from scientific insight. It cannot
be said that his understanding of God is the traditional Christian one; but
his thinking, and that of other significant scientists like him, represents
a shift from a mechanistic, materialist view of science to one that sees
ultimate reality in spiritual terms.

As a Christian I see this interest in spirituality not as a passing trend but
as a basic expression of our human nature. For me the words of St
Augustine of Hippo are profound: “You, Lord, have made us for yourself
and our heart is restless until it rests in you”. There is a restless longing
in the human being for communion with the eternal. It is often covered
over, and it often finds expression in quite unspiritual looking ways – like
the use of mind expanding drugs, or the quest for fulfilment in successive
sexual encounters. At heart these unconsciously cloak a longing which
is essentially spiritual.

There is then an interest in God and the things of the spirit. For a lot of
people this is not matched by allegiance to the church. In part, this
reflects the mood of anti-institutionalism which has characterised the past
generation. Whether we think of the state, the monarchy, the parliament,
the school or the family, institutions have been out of favour. And the
cynicism – especially of the young – has not always been without
foundation.

A root of this is the excessive individualism of modern western society.
“Doing my own thing” is its catchcry. That is one aspect of the
contemporary push for euthanasia. We all feel deep compassion at hard
cases of suffering; but the exclusive concentration on individual cases as
against the wider, long-term, compassionate ramifications for the
community as a whole, misses a critical dimension of the euthanasia
debate. In the same way religion has been seen as a private and
individualistic matter. The spiritual journey is my journey done in my
private way. That goes right against the fundamental human and religious
understanding which sees the individual finding completeness in
community. One of the persistent themes that bubbled up in this week’s
conference was the need to recover a genuine sense of community in
Australia.

Simply disparaging institutions won’t do. The fact is that whenever
people do anything together there must be an institutional element. It
was very realistic of Jesus Christ to leave a church to embody his new
spiritual movement. Of course, I must immediately add that there is a
great temptation for the church to be no more than an institution – for
faith, and love, and worship, and care for justice to become subservient
to and hindered by the institution. That is why the church has constantly
had to be reformed and why reformation must always be part of its life.

Let me say for my part that I love the church; but I am constantly
frustrated and disappointed by it. That is because we weak and fallible
humans keep on falling short of what God asks of us. The miracle is that
despite the human sins of members of the church, God still works
through his church as a primary instrument of his purpose. We shall
learn to shake off excessive individualism and the disparagement of the
institution. Then the role of the church as the embodiment of Christ’s
Spirit will be appreciated afresh.

Let me turn to the alleged irrelevance of the church. Historically two
things are true about Christianity. One is that it is rooted in what we call
the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. We believe that the Son of God came
among us as a man, with human flesh and blood, mind and spirit, at a
particular time and place in history. He immersed himself in the life and
culture of his day. In the same way the church has to be incarnated in
every time and place and culture. It has to express and live its gospel
within the forms of every culture – and no culture is so divorced from
God that it is impenetrable to the gospel.

That is one side of the story.

The other side is that the Christian message, and therefore the church
itself, has called into question certain elements in every human culture.
It might in fact be described as counter-cultural. Read the Sermon on the
Mount or the teachings of the great prophets of the Old Testament, and
you discover that they are really quite revolutionary documents. Oh yes,
we have tamed them; we have made them respectable; we have
interpreted them so that they lose their cutting edge. In fact that is the
way we have made them relevant! But relevant to what? I happen to
believe that the Bible is most significant not when it comfortably
reinforces our cosy assumptions but when it calls them into question. In
short, there will be times when the very irrelevance of the church to the
commonly accepted assumptions of the day will make it most relevant to
the long-term well being of the human race.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

One of the most common elements in contemporary thought is the idea
that there is no absolute truth, no final right or wrong. What’s true for me
is true; what’s right for me is right; what I feel good about is good. Truth
is relative … everything is relative. Of course there is a fundamental flaw
in this relativism – relativism itself must be relative, so you can’t say that
it is true. You don’t need to think hard to recognise the practical
consequences of this way of thinking: there can be no agreed basis for
rational discussion, and talk of morality is meaningless.

In the face of this the church says: there is ultimate, absolute truth. In
fact, we hold that final truth, that final reality, to be none other than God;
and the character of that final reality, the character of God, is love. That
is the conviction that changes life from an empty, meaningless riddle into
a purposeful journey with a definite goal. Try to understand a
phenomenon like youth suicide without reckoning with the contemporary
sense of meaninglessness, and you are doomed to failure. Irrelevant?
The church’s message here is relevant at a most profound level.

Here let me admit that a serious mistake is often made by religious
people. They move from the conviction that there is absolute truth and
absolute right to the idea that they already have a complete grasp on it.
The fact is that we cannot contain the infinite God in our finite
understanding. I believe God reveals himself to us; he has done so as
fully as possible in Jesus Christ. But our grasp on what God has revealed
falls short of the reality … sometimes desperately short of it.
Pronouncements of the church often fall short too. But even when they
fall short of adequately expressing the truth, they bear important
testimony to the principle that there is truth, and we are responsible to it
and for it.

Another example of where apparent irrelevance can be deeply relevant:
the political and economic orthodoxy of today – and I mean across the
political spectrum – is that the criteria for successful public policy lie in
the areas of productivity and efficiency, which will be created by
competition, the free market, downsizing of the work force, etc. It is
assumed that these elements will yield a prosperous and contented
society. The church for its part has an uneasy sense that all this is far
removed from the criteria of the good life expressed in the Bible. The
ideals set out there postulate community, not rampant individualism and
competition; bearing one another’s burdens, not knocking your neighbour
down; having special concern for the weak, not allowing the strong to
ride roughshod over them; recognising the dignity of every human being
as the child of God, not regarding people as productive units or
dispensable cogs in the machine. The church’s message is deeply
relevant here. It witnessing to the ideal of a humane society where people
matter.

One last example: one of the common Australian criticisms of the church
is that we are a lot of wowsers. Christianity is a kill-joy religion. Well,
I have to admit that some forms of Christianity can be like that. So when
the churches came out strongly against government encouragement of
large-scale gambling it was easy to dismiss this as another example of
out-of-touch wowserism. In Victoria it was the Labor Government that
first legislated for a casino. The church warned of consequences, but no
one took too much notice. Then the coalition government really
developed the idea, and a casino-led recovery became a major plank of
policy. It has been an incredible success. The new casino dominates its
end of Melbourne; gaming machines have proliferated, particularly in
economically disadvantaged areas, profits are immense and are growing
rapidly, and the government’s coffers increasingly depend on gambling
revenue. Marvellous! How could anyone in their right mind oppose this
kind of progress?

But wait! The escalating profits of one party represent equal escalating
losses of the other. The other day the Melbourne press carried two
stories. One was of a survey which showed that over 50% of those using
gaming machines were unemployed. The other was the story of a woman
before the court who had embezzled three-quarters of a million dollars
from her employer to pay casino debts. A few days later the papers had
another story, about the disillusionment in the United States with the
casino boom of a few years ago. It is another example of how Australia
takes up overseas trends just when the weaknesses of the trend are being
recognised there. What the church has been on about is not some
wowserish objection to the gambling flutter, but a critique of the
insidious effect of promoting large-scale greed, promising dazzling
rewards, turning gambling into an instrument of government policy, and
creating a fiercely regressive form of taxation of those who can least
afford it. Irrelevant, or constructively counter-cultural?

What then is the role of the church in Australia as we come towards a
new century? The first and central task of the church is to draw people
into relationship with God, to deepen faith, to help people discover
meaning in life and to live a life that is full and rich, both now and
eternally. But the Christian faith is not a privatised faith. It is not just
a matter of God and me. We were made for community. The Christian
vision of heaven is a vision of a perfected community, and our goal here
and now is to do what we can to shape that kind of loving, caring
community, where the dignity of each person is acknowledged and
enlarged. The gospel is not a political and economic program; but it has
very real political and economic implications.

It is not a matter of a minority church imposing its views on the
community. The church has certain beliefs, and those beliefs shape
values. We firmly believe those values make for the fullest and richest
way of ordering human life. But we have the obligation to argue them
openly, to demonstrate them in our own lives, and to enable them to win
their way by their sheer merit. We don’t do that nearly as well as we
should. That is cause for repentance. In fact the church continually
needs repentance and reformation. Today, Ash Wednesday in the
Christian calendar, reminds us that the church continually needs
repentance and reformation.

The church has a future – I have no doubt about that. The nation needs
the church. Already the church is different in many ways from the one in
which I was ordained more than forty years ago. This week’s conference
convinces me that it will be different again in the future. But beneath the
differences will be those eternal truths which abide, which make sense of
life, and which provide a spiritual and moral foundation for the human
community.