CHRISTINA REES

‘Archbishop Hannah proposed a radical solution’

By the late 2020s, India and China overtook the United States as the leading economic power, while Africa, harnessing renewable energy, largely eradicated the drought and disease that had plagued that great continent for so long. After multiple crises, the West failed, to recover its economic equilibrium.

After the UK’s massive economic crisis in 2030, funding dried up for Christian churches, and for most other religious institutions as well. Divisions in the Church of England had already caused some congregations to splinter – mainstream Anglicans struggled to maintain the traditional national and parochial structures, while more extreme factions set up their own training and worship centres. The same pattern was repeated across the Christian denominations and other religions.

In 2033, the weakened systems collapsed, an event now referred to as the Great Implosion. Archbishop Hannah, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury a year earlier, called a national Synod, to which she invited leaders of the mainstream Christian churches, from the other major faiths. She proposed a radical solution, which was passed after three days of intense debate. Following that historic Synod, all parish churches were closed and the remaining resources used to maintain the great cathedrals and a few of the larger churches. Other denominations and faiths were invited to share the buildings, if they were willing to contribute towards ministry and upkeep, and to assent to the new Common Creed of Good Faith, adapted from Jesus’ new commandment, the Golden Rule, and an acknowledgement of the supremacy of love: I believe in the Divine Spirit whose nature is Love and who is calling all people to unity within the Divine Being. I will treat others with the love and respect with which I wish to be treated.

While Christians still had their ancient Trinitarian creeds, the Jews their Torah, and Muslims the Qu’ran, the new alliance was characterised by love, mutual respect and tolerance, between all faiths, ethnicities and between men and women. If believers could not get to a cathedral, they met in each other’s homes, usually sharing a simple meal around the kitchen table. In time, the local, informal worship and fellowship generated a resurgence of faith among many communities, and all the people of the Common Creed flourished. For many years, this alliance has stood as a bulwark against the fundamentalists and the atheists.

Since then, the world has suffered biological warfare, an outbreak of the deadly Trans virus, and further flooding. The Christian church in England is now woven into the lives of many people in a new way, and the old denominational divisions have largely disappeared. Though in fellowship with all those who assent to the Common Creed, the church remains faithful to Jesus Christ.

Christina Rees chairs the campaigning group, Women and the Church

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MEIC PEARSE

‘Groovy liberalism will be long dead’

In 2053, there will be only three kinds of people in church. First, there will be those present church members who will still be alive then. Minus those who’ve wandered off in the meantime. And immediately we have a problem. A glance around your own congregation will quickly show that rather more of us can expect to be dead in 2053 than alive. That’s no problem – If we are being replaced faster than we’re dying.

That brings us to the second kind of person: our children. Christians do have more of them, on average, but the drop-out rate among the rising generation is a lot higher than among those of us who are older. The pressures on them to abandon the faith of their parents are enormous. The secularist education system. Peer pressure. The value system of popular entertainment. The tendency for young adults to create identities for themselves by repudiating those of their parents. The results can already be seen in most churches: a chasm between the ages of 14 and 40. Unless those youthful departees can be won back, it augurs ill for the church of 2053.

Which brings us to our third category. The church of 2053 will also contain those who have been converted in the years since 2013. Historically, the overwhelming majority of people who have become Christians have done so between the ages of 15 and 25 – and there is not the least sign that this is changing. That means that churches that fail to connect with young people are doomed. Yet the “connection” cannot be at simply any price – we must communicate the hard and distinctive content of Christian faith. Merely wrapping contemporary platitudes in pious waffle may make churches tolerated by outsiders – but it will never win them.

This was the folly of liberalism in the 20th Century, and is being repeated by liberals today. Through decades of belonging to different churches, and teaching and preaching in many countries, I have met a huge variety of Christians, with vastly differing ideas – but there is one kind of person I have never met. I have never met a “liberal Christian” who came to the faith from outside – from a previous life spent entirely as an atheist, Hindu etc. That is why 20th-Century liberals died out, and why their too-groovy counterparts in the present (themselves lapsed from more orthodox versions of the faith) will do so too. Well before 2053.

In the wider world, China will have to drop the last of its hostility to Christianity and pursue a pro-Christian foreign policy. It is visible to all that the mindset generated by Christian faith encourages the commercial ethos that is making China rich. And as China exerts itself abroad, it must first dominate south-east Asia, whose economies in every single case are dominated by their ethnic Chinese minorities – and who are already even more highly Christianised than China itself.

In sub-Saharan Africa, China has already invested huge amounts of money, effort, and people as it seeks to secure the last great untapped mineral deposits of the earth. In doing so, it binds itself to the interests of Africans. So, as sub-Saharan Christians continue to be attacked by the Muslim north – which they will – the Chinese will increasingly intervene on their side. Everything points to China as the great defender of the faith in this century. Who’d have thought it?

Meic Pearse is professor of history at Houghton College, New York