Perhaps one of the difficulties of Christianity for our day is that it's so familiar to churchgoers. Many of us have known the Christian story from our cradle and although we may have always regarded it as supremely important, we may not necessarily have experienced the living Christ for ourselves. Those who come into the church from outside with very little knowledge of Christianity, often come from the opposite extreme. They experience the living Christ first, often in powerful ways, but they have no knowledge of the Bible, its stories, or 2000 years of Christian history and tradition.
When a new religion is introduced to people, one of the most important aspects must be to ensure that the behaviour of the new devotees matches their very real experience of God.
This was the challenge facing the founders of the Christian Church back in the days of the New Testament. It may sound like a challenge which has little to do with us in Western churches steeped for thousands of years in the Christian tradition, but it's a challenge which may be beginning to face us now and which looks as though it will face us very much more in future years.
Here in England in the rural area in which I live and work, churchgoing is still followed by between five and ten per cent of the population. This is a comparatively high percentage relative to urban areas, but it still means that over 90% of our small village populations don't attend church on a regular basis. Our local village schools are all Church of England schools and so give the children a reasonably good grounding in basic Christian stories, but with many children we now have the fourth generation who have no family history of, and no family grounding in, Christianity. We now have grandparents, parents and children - whole families - who have never attended church.
Even in the villages we are now drawing close to the position of the founders of Christianity in the days of the New Testament where they were introducing a new and unknown religion for the first time, and in towns and cities the problem is even more acute.
A few weeks ago we had a group of weight-lifters who came to our village green to speak at an open-air service about their Christianity. I was shocked to hear them say that through all the years of their childhood and youth, none of them ever met a single Christian. They came from one of the poorer suburbs of London which sounded almost like a non-Christian ghetto. They'd never met a priest, they didn't know anything about Christianity, but had always vaguely associated it with well-heeled do-gooders. They didn't think it was for the likes of them, and they weren't in the least interested. But when eventually they met somebody very like themselves who began to talk to them about Jesus, they started to listen and they soon experienced Jesus for themselves.
But then they had to learn to change their life-styles. They'd grown up in families where they'd been plied with alcohol from the age of three. They'd all spent time in prison, some of them over and over again. They'd belonged to London gangs where violence was the norm. But now they'd become Christians, the heavy drinking and the swearing and the violence and the thieving had to go, and they had to learn to allow Jesus to make those changes within them.
Many of us are more fortunate. We don't have life-styles like that and we've been brought up to know about Christianity and to attend church, so perhaps don't need to ask Jesus to make much difference at all to our life-styles. But perhaps we do need him to give us a personal and living experience of God and perhaps we need to be open enough to receive such an experience.
The letter of James is thought to have been written by James the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Jewish Christian community. He was writing to non-Palestinian Jews who had settled throughout the Greco-Roman world and he's at pains to build on their Jewish religious background in ways that will touch them. He points out something his Jewish listeners would have know very well. He says, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." This was a basic tenet of Judaism and respected by all good Jews.
James acknowledges the gifts his readers have received from God, and he talks about God's generosity to them. "Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from the Father of lights," says James.
Then James goes on to detail the ways in which these new Jewish Christians should behave. He implores his readers not just to hear the word of God, but to respond to it in practical and demonstrable ways. Things have changed from the old Jewish religion, which perhaps they followed in word but which maybe didn't touch their hearts. "If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless," says James. Perhaps he's thinking of the Pharisees, who were perfect models of religiosity, but many of whom didn't allow God to touch their hearts. James also says that they must persevere in the new religion if they want to be blessed.
In many ways life may be easier for those who come to Christianity from a background of total ignorance. They carry no religious baggage, so they're often immediately able to experience the risen Christ for themselves. This is a momentous experience that fills them with such joy that they're hooked on God. The change is so startling that it's immediately noticeable by everyone. In the early church, it was through the gentiles who came with no religious baggage that the church grew at a phenomenal rate. The Jewish branch of the early church never grew much beyond a small Jewish sect.
We're seeing something similar today in our country. The churches which are growing at a phenomenal rate are those which have lots of previously non-religious people who are experiencing God for themselves and who are worshipping him in a rather different way. The good old churches which follow traditional worship in a traditional way are mostly either diminishing in size or growing slowly.
So does this mean that we can only grow if we come in from outside, experience God first and worship completely differently? Well no, not at all. But it does mean that if a church can't enable its members to experience the risen Christ for themselves, those members may gradually drop away no matter how steeped they are in the tradition. This may be one of the reasons why we now have families of three and four generations who don't attend church - because grandparents and great-grandparents who did attend weren't actually touched by it.
If we want to experience God's good and perfect gifts and his huge generosity to us, we need to open ourselves to him. We need to use our tradition to enhance our experience of him, not to act as a barrier to his presence. And we need to persevere in our response to him, until we he's as real to us as breathing. And then we'll really discover our rewards.
