Christianity is currently facing a crisis, a predicament which, could either end in disaster or, if radical and creative decisions are made, could lead to new and fruitful opportunities. The words “Christian Way” have been deliberately chosen, in preference to "Christianity", for reasons which will hopefully become clear and because they combine the two earliest references to what is today commonly called Christianity. In Acts 11:16 we read “And it was in Antioch that the disciples were for the first time called Christians”. In the same book we read “About that time there arose no little stir concerning the Way” (Acts 19:23). What identified these people called Christians was that they were walking a path of faith which was coming to be called quite simply “The Way”, and the word is used a number of times in Acts.

From the beginning, therefore, people called Christians saw themselves treading a path. A path implies movement, change, adventures and challenges. This simple word picture already shows a vitality and freedom of movement which are often absent from the common associations we have with the word “Christianity”. “Christianity” is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as the “doctrines of Christ and his apostles” or “the Christian religious system”. This suggests something fixed and permanent. (In what follows, wherever the word Christianity is used it is intended to refer to the doctrines and church institutions which have long become traditional and fairly fixed. The Christian Way is a wider and more fluid term).

Today's common view of Christianity as a set of unchangeable beliefs to which one is expected to give assent, turns out to be of quite recent origin and is seriously misleading. Even this use of the word “Christianity” is no more than 400 years old. All through the Middle Ages it never occurred to anyone to write a book about “Christianity”. Although the Latin word Christianitas was coined in the ancient world, it referred not to doctrines but to the total body of Christian people, the church. They were the people who had chosen to walk the Christian Way.

The path trodden by Christians through the last twenty centuries, has been a long and tortuous one. Some of the turning points we shall sketch in the next article. Here we focus on the fact that Christianity is facing a major crisis. Many Christians appear quite unaware of it and, if questioned, often strongly deny any crisis exists. They feel supremely confident about the Christian future.

Historian K.S.Latourette, in his book A History of Christianity, referred to the period 1815‑1914 as “the greatest century which Christianity had thus far known”. So Christians confidently entered the 20th century with the slogan, “the evangelization of the world in this generation”, even expecting the whole world to become Christian during the course of this century. But as we approach the end of the 20th century the prognosis for Christianity looks very different.

If we simply examine absolute figures they may still look very impressive, for Christianity still retains a considerable momentum from its long and victorious past. It has been estimated that in the mid-1980's there were 1,500,000 Christian congregations, divided into 20,000 denominations, employing 3,750,000 clergy and other full-time workers, on a corporate budget of 75 billion dollars. Together they distributed 43 million Bibles a year, read 20,000 religious periodicals and wrote more than 20,000 religious books a year. Those figures should be enough to make any organization, religious or secular, feel very confident about itself.

But those figures also have to be related to the total amount of human activity produced by more than five billion people, which became six billion in 1998. Human population is now expanding at an exponential rate and this hides the fact that the proportion which is Christian is declining very sharply. It was only when population growth began to slow down in New Zealand, as it did from the '60's onwards, that the crisis began to show itself in that country.

So many are the signs of the malaise which has been overtaking Christianity that few can fail to see them any more. Church buildings which, as recently as the 1920's, housed flourishing congregations, are now used for other purposes or have been dismantled altogether. In many of those which still function the congregations are very small compared with those which were regularly seen in earlier days and mainly consist of the middle‑aged and elderly.

In the famous cathedrals of Europe one finds a regular stream of tourists who have come to admire the marvels of medieval architecture, but not the large congregations like those for which they were built. The cost of keeping the cathedrals in repair has become an impossible burden for the tiny congregations which now use them; indeed, their mission in life seems to have changed from one of going out "to make disciples of all nations" to that of becoming a "society for the preservation of historic monuments". The plight of the cathedrals may be regarded as symbolic of the current state of Christianity relative to its glorious past.

A recent survey in England revealed that only two and a half per cent of the population participate in the services of the Church of England, the national church. Moreover, during the decade of the '80's half a million people stopped going to church. In Lutheran Sweden only three percent of the people go to church regularly. The situation in the Catholic countries of Europe is not much better than that of the predominantly Protestant ones. The European country with the highest church-going population is Catholic Poland in spite of being until recently a Communist state.

In the Catholic Church worldwide there has been a very serious drop in the number entering the monastic orders. This fact had a detrimental effect on the Catholic education system, for it had come to depend financially on the service provided so economically by nuns and teaching brothers dedicated to a life of poverty. More recently this crisis has reached the priesthood and in two ways. A rapidly increasing number of priests have chosen to leave the priesthood, while the number seeking ordination has dramatically declined. Between 1963 and 1969 alone, 8,000 priests asked to be dispensed from their vows. A study commissioned a few years ago in Rome by the Sacred Congregation of the Faith estimated that within the following five years 20,000 would leave; the estimate proved to be far too conservative. A survey in the United States of America revealed that there were 17,000 ex‑priests in that country alone and that the average age of those remaining in the priesthood was 54! To make matters worse the number of ordinands in training had dropped from 50,000 to 12,000 in only twenty years.

Christianity has been losing its public face. For centuries the ongoing life of the community was punctuated by the annual Christian festivals which served as a continual reminder of the Christian duties and aspirations which gave identity to European culture. Of the annual Christian festivals, Advent, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Whitsunday were the first to disappear from public celebration. Then Easter tended to become a purely secular holiday, leaving only Christmas to remain a community celebration yet with minimal reference to any Christian content.

Recent research in New Zealand has revealed that no more than 15% of the population attend church regularly. The percentage of people who claim some religious affiliation when filling in the Census returns is of course much higher; but most of this larger number are clearly only nominal in their church allegiance. And even there significant changes are beginning to show. The number who now openly acknowledge no religious interest at all has jumped from 10% to 25%. The group who may be called the “unchurched" constitute the sector of fastest growth on the religious spectrum. This in turn is reflected in the denominational figures. Anglicans have dropped from being 40% of the population to only 25%; Presbyterians have dropped from 24% to 18%. This decline is reflected in the internal figures of the Presbyterian Church, where the communicant membership has dropped from over 90,000, thirty years ago, to the current figure of 46,000.

For some time, even though adults had often ceased to be regular church attenders, they continued to send their children to Sunday School. This is no longer the case. Since 1960 Sunday School rolls have declined to one third of what they used to be. The situation is being reached for the first time, in which a significant proportion of the population under the age of 20 has had no direct contact with institutionalized Christianity or with specific Christian teaching. Between 1971 and 1991 the proportion of males aged between 20-29, who claimed to have no religion, more than doubled.

There are many other indications of the decline in active Christian interest. In the last two or three decades, church periodicals have often been reduced from weeklies to fortnightlies and then to monthlies before disappearing altogether. In the 1960's the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand operated five shops retailing religious books; today it has none. The broadcasting of church services and other devotional programmes on national radio and television has either been dropped or changed in character to become far less obviously Christian in the orthodox sense.

These few examples illustrate a decline of overt Christian allegiance so dramatic that, if it were universal to Christendom, it could be nothing less than catastrophic. It is true that the decline of Christianity in the West is compensated for, at least in part, by the fact that there are various areas, such as in some African nations, where Christian allegiance is growing quite rapidly. But in the West the decline is of such a magnitude that it can no longer be ignored even by those most strongly committed to the traditional church.

The decline has become unmistakably clear because in the last two or three decades it has begun to accelerate. The malaise itself actually began much earlier but while it was relatively slow it was hardly noticeable within the average life‑span of people and so could be easily ignored. There were some pointers, however, though these were rarely sufficiently appreciated at the time. For example, a religious census to measure church attendance was taken in England in 1851. It was found, on a particular Sunday, that less than half the adult population attended church. It caused such consternation that the Bishops in the House of Lords took measures to ensure that no such census should ever be repeated. This ostrich‑like act is rather symbolic of the attitude which has been adopted by so many within the institutional church towards the problem. They have shut their eyes to the facts, refusing to acknowledge that the problem exists.

But the poet and lay theologian Matthew Arnold (1822-88) observed it in the mid-nineteenth century and mused on the phenomenon as he sat on Dover Beach; he likened the decline in faith to the retreating tide -

The sea is calm tonight...
Listen! you hear the grating road
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar..

Of course there had previously been examples of an ebbing tide of interest but these had been followed by flowing tides of enthusiasm. The Protestant Reformation was itself a wave of great new vitality. By the end of the 17th century there was another period of low vitality and John Wesley breathed new life into the church through his Methodist movement. Then in the late 19th century there were the tent missions, or revival movement, of Moody and Sankey. This year we witnessed the missions conducted by Billy Graham. But when one looks back at these it is noticeable that each new wave was weaker than the previous one.

So what has caused this accumulative ebbing of the Sea of Faith?

It led T.S.Eliot to say:

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before

That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.i

During the last three centuries, slowly at first but now with accelerating pace, there has been taking place a radical shift in human consciousness. We may speak of it as a series of Copernican revolutions.

First there was the cosmological revolution of Copernicus and Galileo. It displaced the earth from being the centre of the universe and incorporated the heavens above into the same physical space-time universe in which we mortals live. The dwelling-place of God was secularized, leaving God quite literally with no sacred space of his own.

Then came the Darwinian revolution, in which humankind was displaced from being the creatures for whom this universe was especially made. We humans seem to be no more than an afterthought, products of chance, who in a universe 15 billion years old have emerged on the scene in the extremely recent past.

Darwinism was accompanied by the biblical revolution, in which the written form of the absolute Word of God lost its power and absolute authority, as it slowly turned out to be the fallible records of humans like ourselves, living in times and cultures very different from our own.

Fourthly there was the psychological revolution, initiated by Freud and Jung, in which we found we do not possess the mastery over our thoughts and decisions quite as absolutely as we had assumed, and by which we found that the voices or visions of "religious" experience had originated within us rather than from an external source.

All these, and the continuing changes which they have set in motion, mean that we are hurtling at speed into a new kind of world which seems increasingly divorced from the Christian world which seemed so self-evidently real to our forbears. The beliefs in which the Christian path of faith was long expressed have been successively subjected to criticism, erosion, and rejection, even to the point of being regarded as empty of meaning.

Sociologists of religion have for some time been studying the religious beliefs currently held across the spectrum of society. These studies reveal that diversity of personal belief is often just as great within a denomination as between the denominations. Radical Catholics feel more mutual kinship with radical Protestants than either do with the conservatives in their own denomination. Moreover, studies show that some of the beliefs traditionally regarded as basic to Christianity are no longer held by all who are still practising church‑goers. Even odder is the fact that non‑church goers sometimes continue to accept, as true, one or more of the orthodox Christian beliefs (such as the divinity of Christ, life after death or even belief in a personal God), which some church‑goers say they have abandoned. Indeed the personal beliefs held by people in the modern Western world are much more diverse and chaotic than one would normally surmise from church affiliation patterns.

This diversity of personal belief may be illustrated by drawing upon the university study of New Zealanders already referred to. It found that, in the population as a whole, little more than a third believe God to be a personal being, an equal proportion opting to conceive of God as some kind of life force, the rest choosing to be agnostic or believing God to have no objective reality. Even among those who think of themselves as having some kind of denominational affiliation the traditional view of God as a personal supernatural being is rejected by 45% of Catholics and 67% of Anglicans and Presbyterians.

Another area of belief where there are some surprising results is in the issue of life after death, popularly taken to be an essential element of Christian doctrine. This belief is held by only 61% of Catholics, 43% of Anglicans and Methodists, and 37% of Presbyterians. The last figure is even lower than that for the population as a whole, which is 43%. The section of the population where this belief is highest is among Baptists (79%).

The last mentioned fact points to another characteristic of the current decline in Christian allegiance; while the main‑line churches are diminishing in size and influence the sects are growing and establishing a higher profile. By the "main‑line churches" (only recently has this term come into common usage) are meant those ecclesiastical institutions into which Western Christendom fragmented from the Reformation onwards, viz. the Catholic (or continuing medieval) Church and the Protestant Churches (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican, and later Methodist). The term "sect" has been commonly used to refer to the much smaller fragments which seceded from these churches from time to time and also for the new groups which emerged from the early 19th century onwards (such as the Brethren, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Salvation Army, the Mormons and others).

Following the suggestion first made by Max Weber and adopted by Ernst Troeltsch, it has been common for sociologists of religion to use the terms “church” and “sect” to make a useful distinction between two different types of religious organization. The Church is the type which tries to be universal to society, to stabilize the existing social order and to become an integral part of it. It has tended to identify with the ruling classes and/or with civil government. It has sought to put the stamp of its value‑system on the whole of society, serving as the corporate voice of social conscience and to this end has sometimes been critical of civil government.

The sect, on the other hand, is a comparatively small group which fastens attention on the inward spiritual development of the individual and of the personal fellowship in which the members of the group are joined. The sect holds itself aloof from society at large, ignoring the social order or even showing hostility towards it. It is much more concerned with its own spiritual purity and eternal destiny than it is with the destiny of the society within which it temporarily lives.

Sociologists have observed that sects, as they grow in size and become more moderate and flexible in their convictions, tend to change from the strict stereotype of sect to that of the church. The primitive Christian movement itself originated as a Jewish sect but as it spread through the Graeco‑Roman world, and finally was adopted by Constantine as the official religion of the Empire, became transformed into the structure and function of the church type of organization. Similarly, in the 19th century the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons and the Salvation Army had the character of sects at the time of their origin; since then they have been moving, at somewhat differing speeds, towards the style associated with the church type. The Closed Brethren, on the other hand, has rigidly retained the characteristics of sect. In the early 20th century the Pentecostalists and the Assemblies of God were clearly to be categorized as sects, yet already in the late 20th century they have moved some distance towards the church model.

This is not the whole story. As those groups which originated as sects have moved towards the church model, the so‑called main‑line denominations, as they have been shrinking in size and social influence, have already lost some of their distinctive character as churches and have become much less distinguishable from the sects, even though in their own eyes and because of their past history they no doubt still see themselves very differently. There is today not nearly so much difference in function and status as there used to be between, say, Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians, on the one hand, and Pentecostalists, Assemblies of God and New Life Centres, on the other.

[ While Webster and Perry conclude that it is still the case in New Zealand that "Church and sect relate differently to both religion and culture", their study shows that the Protestant main‑line churches no longer constitute the main body of active church‑goers as is commonly thought. The figure of approximately 16% of New Zealanders who attend church with some modicum of regularity breaks down into 5% Catholic, 3.4% the fundamentalist churches (commonly viewed as sects), 2.9% Anglicans, 2.5% Presbyterian and 1.9% Baptists. Thus two‑thirds of today's regular worshippers in New Zealand are either Catholics or from the fundamentalist sects.]

The majority of those in the evangelical sects were previously active in the main‑line churches. The fact that they could make the change reasonably readily is itself an indication that the gulf between sect and church has been diminishing. Moreover they leave behind them in the diminishing main‑line churches cells of similarly minded people who prefer not to make the denominational switch but who, in so far as they have influence, consciously or unconsciously steer their denomination in the sectarian direction.

This phenomenon, so clearly evident in New Zealand Christianity today, fulfils a very interesting prophecy made in 1923 by Kirsopp Lake,ii a biblical scholar of international repute. Writing shortly after the rise of the fundamentalist movement in USA, he noted that in the mainline Protestant churches there were to be discerned three main groups, whom he called the fundamentalists, the traditionalists and the experimentalists (among whom he numbered himself and whom today we would call the radicals). He prophesied that the traditionalists would force out the radicals and then they themselves would gradually be absorbed by the fundamentalists. Thus, he said, the church would shrink from left to right. That prophecy is today being realised in New Zealand, Britain and USA.

An important aspect of the fundamentalist churches is not only that they are very critical of the main‑line churches (who incidentally were often hostile towards them in the days of their origin) but they are critical of them by virtue of the criteria they use to define genuine Christianity. In spite of the much longer history of the main‑line churches the fundamentalist churches often regard themselves as the true guardians of Christianity. As they see it, it is they, and not the churches, who are the true spiritual successors of the Apostles and/or the Protestant Reformers. They accuse the churches of having departed from the unchangeable tenets of Christianity, allowing themselves to be tainted by secular modernity and weakened in their convictions and practices by liberalism and humanism. In thus making these claims they are rather like the traditional Catholic hierarchy, yet because they value their Protestant heritage they are usually also militantly anti‑Catholic.

On the other hand, not involved in regular religious activities in either the sects or the churches, there is an increasingly large body of people who still think of themselves as Christians. They retain various elements of what was once the body of Christian teaching, particularly in ethics and in the virtues they aspire to. They speak of these as the Christian Values and are sometimes strongly committed to the aim of fostering them in family life, education, sport and civic life generally. In so far as such people still see themselves as Christian even though they are not church‑goers, they commonly draw a very clear distinction between Christianity and what they call Churchianity, which in their view is a defective form of Christianity or perhaps not even Christianity at all.

Thus, compared with the Christendom of earlier centuries, which was much more homogeneous with respect to religious beliefs, the situation in the Western world today is very different. It has been called the twilight of Christendom. It is said that we live in a post‑Christian age. Such a phrase implies that the demise of Christianity has already taken place. Yet such a conclusion is altogether too premature. Even though the Christian bodies (whether church or sect) which give visibility to Christianity may be far less influential in Western society than they used to be, and they do not embrace the whole of society in the way the undivided institutional church once did, they still preserve considerable momentum from the past. Moreover, the ebbing tide of Christianity, as institutionalized in the church, has left behind a very distinctive residue of values, attitudes, goals and social patterns.

Historian of religion Robert Ellwood, in a recent book, iii has proposed a model for our clearer understanding of the life cycle of the great religious traditions which originated during, or as a result of, the Axial Period some 2,500 years ago. The best examples of these Great Religions, as he calls them, are Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, for they, more than others, have become most international and transethnic. (Also regarded as Great religions are Hinduism and the Chinese blend of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, but these remained more obviously contained within ethnic boundaries.) In his model, a Great Religion passes through five consecutive stages of varying length; these he calls: (1) Apostolic, (2) Wisdom and Imperial, (3) Devotional (4) Reformation, and (5) Folk religion. By applying this model Ellwood comes to the general conclusion that during the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries Chinese religion and Buddhism are experiencing their demise, Christianity and Hinduism are reaching their Folk religion stage, and Islam is just entering the Reformation stage, comparable to what was happening to Christianity in the times of Luther, Calvin and Loyola.

As Ellwood readily concedes, the titles he has chosen for the first four stages reflect the history of Christianity rather more than the other traditions and that may be a weakness in trying to apply it universally. Nevertheless, since our immediate concern is with Christianity it is worth seeing what light it may throw on it. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Christian tradition certainly went through a radical transition. Pre‑Constantinian Christianity (Ellwood's Apostolic Stage) was fluid and formative, living a vigorous but precarious existence because of strong competitors and the continual threat of persecution. Early in its next stage (Wisdom and Imperial) Christianity assumed its classical form doctrinally, as a result of the Ecumenical Councils from Nicaea to Chalcedon, and then assumed the mantle of authority left free by the Fall of Rome. What Ellwood calls the Devotional Stage stretched roughly from 1000 to 1500 AD, is represented by St. Francis and St. Bernard, and is manifested in the friars, the monastic institutions and the growing Marian devotion.

It was this devotionalism which provided the spiritual roots of the Reformation, as illustrated by Luther's intense search for the certain conviction of his salvation. Ellwood's fourth stage (Reformation) is not confined to the sixteenth century but stretches from John Calvin to Karl Barth, with Vatican II bringing even Roman Catholicism into the Reformation. Liberal Protestantism, from Schleiermacher to Paul Tillich, Ellwood regards as “the last great intellectual effort of the faith”.

What, then, is the folk religion stage which, according to Ellwood, Christianity is now entering? It means that stage in which Christianity is no longer overtly practised and observed in the official organs of society, is no longer dominant in the intellectual leadership, nor does it provide the chief motivation of the ongoing culture. Yet Christianity continues to live at a popular level and is passed on through personal and family networks, being revived from time to time by charismatic preachers. The rise of Pentecostalism, and the spread of the charismatic movement, may be interpreted as the visible manifestation of the Folk Religion stage of Christianity.

In his history of Christianity Latourette acknowledged his own “profound conviction that the Christian Gospel is God's supreme act on man's behalf and that the history of Christianity is the history of what God has done for man through Christ and of man’s responseiv”; yet he conceded that “the losses in Europe in the present century might well appear to foreshadow the demise of Christianity”v. He attempted to reconcile these contradictory statements by affirming that, because Christianity has become more widely distributed on the globe and more influential in human affairs than any other religion "the weight of evidence appears to be on the side of those who maintain that Christianity is still only in the first flush of its history and that it is to have a growing place in the life of mankind"vi.

But what sort of future could that be and what form will it take? If Christianity is to have a future it will no longer be like that of the past nor will it be enclosed within ecclesiastical institutions. In the past Christianity was identified with the Church, even to the point where it was confidently claimed that there is no salvation for humans outside of the church. In these days, however, what may be called the Christian Way cannot be confined, either to any one church, or even to all the churches and sects taken as a whole. Moreover, there is no clear agreement among the various bodies claiming to be Christian as to what exactly is entailed in being a Christian.

The ecclesiastical institutions may be rapidly declining in size and vitality but the long Christian past has left embedded in modern western culture a much greater deposit than is usually recognized. Non‑churchgoers, including humanists and atheists, have absorbed from their cultural background more of this Christian deposit than is commonly acknowledged. The self‑professed guardians of Christianity are not the only surviving products of our Christian past. They may not even be the best judges of just what the Christian Way is, for it is they, after all, who have been most strongly divided on what it means to be Christian.

It is understandably debated whether the Western world can any longer be referred to as “the Christian West”. But even if it is now more properly termed “the post-Christian West”, it carries the clear marks of its strongly Christian past. The future of the Christian Way depends on what happens to this widespread deposit of what is commonly called "Christian values". To regard the future of the Christian Way as dependent on the survival of Christian orthodoxy, and of the institutional church, may in the long run lead to its demise. To adopt such a choice is to take the Christian path of faith into oblivion or at best into a static museum piece, of interest only to historians. The history of religion is strewn with religious museum pieces which have become anchored to particular times and places.

"Christianity" may have become a fixed and unchangeable thing, but the Christian Way is not. It is a path of faith which must take into account the kind of world through which it is passing. We have entered a world radically different from anything humans have known in the past. To anchor the Christian path of faith to beliefs, practices and institutions which served it well in the past, because they were fashioned to suit the world which people then lived in, is to abandon the open-ended path of faith which it has more properly been hitherto. It is to lead the Christian Way into a blind alley. The Christian path of faith is at the crossroads where vital choices have to be made. To these we turn in later articles.