Aggressive secularism

Aggressive Secular 'Religion'

Today's post is out of the order I had in mind. This comes about because of two insightful but disturbing opinion articles in yesterday's “Australian” newspaper, which I read.

Both are by self-declared Roman Catholic writers. So they are approaching the problem from that particular perspective. They also then tend to conflate Christian faith with the institution of the church. Given that I differ from them in these respects, they have expressed very well the ideas that have been shaping up in my own mind.

The first is by Greg Sheridan, the paper's foreign editor. For those who would like to read the full article. It is online at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/greg-sheridan/christian-churches-drifting-too-far-from-the-marketplace-of-ideas/news-story/e641fab1f62b1a63b08cc1ec75634af5

His premise is that a new religion has swept what I have been calling “the West”. Extremely aggressive, intolerant of other viewpoints; it is modern secularism.

In his own words:

“In Western Europe, on the east and west coasts of the US, and in Australia, the new religion of aggressive secularism is on the rise, more self-confident and fundamentalist than ever.

Widespread, prolonged affluence has been more effective than oppression ever was in killing religious belief and practice. To take one figure almost at random, in 1954, 74 per cent of Australian Cath­olics attended mass each Sunday. Today the figure is substantially less than 10 per cent.
The churches cannot recognise and come to grips with their strategic circumstances. They behave as though they still represent a living social consensus.
They remind me of South Vietnam’s government in 1974. It over-estimated its strength and tried to hang on to all of its territory, including the long narrow neck of its north. It did not retreat to its formidable heartland in the south, which would have been vastly more defensible. Had it done so, it might have survived. Instead, the next year, the armoured divisions of North Vietnam invaded and Saigon lost everything.
Across the past 120 years, the Christian churches in Europe and Australia have lost every significant, long-term battle about social norms and legal measures to underpin them.
Consider just a few: birth control, no-fault divorce, abortion, Sunday trading, blasphemy, film and television standards, same-sex adoption and soon same-sex marriage, and no doubt euthanasia and much else. On some of these issues it was right that the churches lost. In these 120 years no victory was ever more than a temporary slowdown in secularism. While there seemed to be many tactical wins, the war was lost. In each case, the church misunderstood the extent and nature of its support and the long-term threat it faced.”

And pointing out that the secular religion was not going to tolerate competition from Christianity :

“The real danger now is the increasingly frequent direct attacks on religious freedoms. The Greens have called for an end to the exemption for religious bodies from the operation of anti-discrimination laws. This is a direct assault on religious freedom and indeed freedom of association. Christian schools would not be able to insist on hiring Christian teachers.
Yet no one imposes such restrictions on other bodies, such as political parties. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews [a semi-socialist] is not required to offer equality of employment opportunities to Liberal Party [conservative] members when he hires a press secretary.
The aggressive secularism of public culture has become increasingly a state religion in itself and will use the coercive powers of the state to enforce its new orthodoxy. Thus Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner was willing to hear a complaint against the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart for circulating a pamphlet of the Australian bishops entitled Don’t Mess with Marriage.
People should read this document. You could not imagine a more temperate, mild and respectful stating of the traditional Catholic view of marriage as being between a man and a woman. It stresses the inalienable dignity and respect with which every human being should be treated and opposes any discrimination against gay people. But in its view marriage is between a man and a woman.
The complaint was eventually withdrawn. But the fact it was entertained at all is a sure sign of the future. The process itself is the punishment. The process is designed to intimidate. Soon, apparently, it will be positively illegal for Christian churches to publish their traditional teachings.
The intolerance of Australia’s secular religion, which adds to legal harassment the effective tactic of ridicule and endless public abuse, is evident.”

On the same page appeared an article by Angela Shanahan, who in her regular contributions describes and shows herself a devout Catholic.

Her article concerns the innocently named “Safe Schools” program, which is about to be made compulsory in all schools by the State government. And that the concern is not that Roz Ward who led its development is a Marxist, but the damage it will do. It pretends to be be anti bullying but is transparently aimed at sexualising children from a young age and at that biasing them against heterosexuality. Objections by parents and churches have been summarily dismissed as “bigoted”. The point of crossover with Sheridan's article is where she details the targeting for destruction of the social institution of the family by what is in Sheridan's words the new secular religion.

“The issue was the damage that could be done by an extreme philosophy of gender fluidity and sexual libertarianism now embedded in the school curriculum. However, that Ward is a self-confessed Marxist is no great surprise. After all, where did all those Trotskyist activists at university in the 1970s go? They went into the environmental movement, the extreme feminist movement, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex lobby groups. They undermined the old Labor movement with its roots in the working-class family and formed a new set of green-left alliances to push their barrows. Within that ­alliance they can keep on deconstructing, breaking down social pillars.
And the strongest social pillar is, ironically, the family, the same conservative family from which the Labor movement originally sprang. The natural family is the No 1 enemy of every extreme ideology. Even today in Marxist societies the family plays second fiddle to the state. The state instructs and controls the family, not the other way around.”
“The queer gender theory that much of the Safe Schools program is based on is about breaking down the heteronormative view of the world and the natural binary view of sex. It is destructive of the natural family.”
find the article on: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/angela-shanahan/roz-wards-safe-schools-role-should-have-raised-red-flags/news-story/49eb3bf06d7810b40f77821e6e88d395
Linking back to the ideas I have taken from Hayek that morals are evolutionary in the sense that societies with ones that allow the necessary cooperation and coexistence of humans to function better eventually dominate; I would add social institutions to the list. For a start, the Family. Also though maybe down the list a bit, churches. Once you start knocking down the pillars that support our modern extended and complex society what do you think will happen?

My Adventures with God Ch 37: More Miracles

Ch 37: More Miracles

To re-cap: From our “back to the drawing board” experience we were re-building the church. Sociology had given us valuable insights, but the actual details came as answered prayer to our little prayer group. Spiritually and numerically the parish was growing. But what the diocese needed to see was growth measured in dollars – lots and lots of dollars.

I had stood firm against fund-raising when people wanted to do that instead of evangelism. But this was different, we had previously done the evangelism very successfully: now we needed some miracle money to convince the diocese we were on the right track. But you know what God is like: he does so much better than we can imagine or dare to ask!

In our family we have a saying “For God two-birds-with-one-stone is still wasting stones”. In this instance God raised money and built up the morale and numbers of the congregation at the same time.

Here is how:

Inez and Sue – but since they were both great prayers I should say “and God” – made a formidable team. Gala events were planned. The congregations were still small but we had huge numbers of people in the community who would gladly help out at grand events.

And grand they were! We believed that these events had to be fun for the workers and give them a great sense of achievement and being part of a winning team. This meant grand scale, good planning, effective team and morale building and really obvious success. People had to have fun and be proud to have been part of the team pulling off such a big successful event.

We might spend sleepless nights, but the team had to know they were supported, valued and they had to believe it would work!

Our first grand event was a Gala Fashion Show (with dinner of course). Now we had a fashion show each year at the flower festival with local women modelling clothes from Sparrows Emporium – a great thing but we were thinking bigger, much bigger! One of Inez’s friends in the district, Dulcie had been a top model in her youth: she still had contacts. We were getting real models, actual high fashion clothes, the correct trappings of catwalk and music. The real thing!

Next came the dinner part: we had lots of volunteers, and all those women who had gone into other churches, and some of the others from those churches who thought we were, as one lady said “A breath of fresh air” cooked and baked (yes including a Uniting Church lady who was the undisputed best sponge baker in the district – Vera of our church was undisputed second best)

For wait staff we put out the call and the town young people rallied, they brushed up exceedingly well in the natty black and white uniforms we got hold of somehow. I think about 30 of them rolled up!

It was stunning! Financially it was hugely successful. In team building it was amazing. In satisfaction level for the gang … you only had to look at their faces! They were exhausted but they had been part of something big!

We only did these really big things annually – the next year the theme was picnic races – still in the Lang Lang civic hall. But people got gourmet picnic hampers, a course of hurdles (and a water hazard) was set up round the hall. For safety riders ran behind their (human) horses with reins connecting them. I am told the town’s real life SP (illegal off-course) bookie was running the betting shop and everyone was given Monopoly money to bet with. Another howling success! I even won the “Lang Lang Cup” cup (I was the horse) elegantly made by one of the parishioners from a jam tin and fencing wire.

In between we catered for weddings with much smaller teams, and put on other social events. The men from the pub who I had talked to in the old days sitting in John’s barn – and their friends turned out to help wash up and things like that – since we often borrowed the glasses from the hotel they had a vested interest in getting them spotless! The barmaid I mentioned earlier was one of the team – the first time she helped at a “do” I remember the look on Jan’s face when she came out in her miniscule black skirt and fishnet stockings and see-through white blouse! I didn’t think people could really turn purple! I also thought some of the old men were going to have heart attacks – but for the opposite reason.

Having mentioned Jan I realise I have been remiss. I have only described the new fundraising ventures. I need to give due credit to Jan and the rest of the Ladies Guild who had for years been faithfully ploughing on, and were still hard at work doing their various fundraisings.

By the end of six months, yes we were still in debt but we were definitely gaining ground. In the analogy I used of a swing we were now on the down-stroke and gathering speed! It was a success. The diocesan bean counters were still sceptical. But we said we’d won our bet. And continuing improvement of the financial position as the months rolled by showed we were right. Also the church was growing, not the rapid expansion of the early days but good solid and above all stable growth. We had proved the sociological research findings right! More important we had been another demonstration that God is faithful. 

My Adventures with God 36 : The Wager

Chapter 36: The Wager

I had thrown down the gauntlet to the received wisdom of managed adaptive decline in country parishes. I believes it was at God's direction. But I really needed God to back it up with a miracle.

I had declared that I would personally fund half my salary for six months. I had publicly wagered that in ths time the parish finances would recover to the point where it would be able to fund me 100%. If the experiment succeeded, I would return to full pay; if it failed I would quit.

The purpose of this experiment, as I saw it, was to show three things:

1. That God could provide.

2. That for denominations like the Anglican church, accepting decline as inevitable and simply reducing ministry in the face of it was wrong-headed.

3. Lastly to vindicate my belief that the church was – to use one popular story – meant to be a life boat station not a clubhouse.

On #1 and #2 I was challenging their view of God. True they cried out to God for help. True that help was, in so many country parishes conspicuously not forthcoming. But I believed the Bible gave the reason “I gave you cleanness of tooth (famine) in city after city yet you did not return to me says the Lord” is a recurring Old Testament theme. Sure they prayed for help – help to go on being the sort of church they wanted to be. God didn't answer, so they acted as though God could not help them and adapted and kept going as they wanted to. They never said: “The God of the Bible can act. He clearly is not acting – so what are we doing wrong?” To which the obvious answer would be: you are not giving him anything more than lip service; you don't act like he really exists; you don't act like Jesus wants all people everywhere to turn to him and be saved.

On #3, early in our time at Lang Lang whilst studying Ephesians a current application had struck me so forcefully that I felt God was using it to open my eyes to something which was important to him. In the early part of Ephesians Paul was on about the dividing wall between Jew and gentile being demolished and the two being united as one body in Christ. It was brought home to me that we faced an analogous situation. There was a dividing wall between the church community and the general community.

On the side of the church community, they were every bit as introspective as the first century Jews. They were happy to have “outreach” programs to encourage the secular community to donate money (which the general community often did),  for at least the right sort of people to swell the numbers in church (which the general community mostly didn't). What they never considered was that it might be their duty to take the Gospel of salvation to the secular community without strings or ulterior motives. Definitely they did not to allow, let alone welcome, an influx of “unchurched” who might be messy, might change things or want to do things differently or threaten their personal sense of identity.

Christ was not like that! He humbled himself and sacrificed his life to woo us rebellious humans.

As recounted earlier, God had blessed the efforts prompted by this insight with a spectacular revival in Lang Lang. However diocesan officialdom had been openly contemptuous that we had sought to convert young people and those from the less prestigious social classes to Christianity. When the three-pronged attack of the devil had brought an end both to the revival and to visible material success in the parish it was to them proof that we had been wrong to take the Gospel to young people and the “unchurched”.

At the time I opposed the Dioceses decision to reduce the Lang Lang parish to a half-time ministry and proposed this experiment, our church already advancing in spiritual recovery. We had the prayer group I mentioned previously. We had already seen God at work providing as we laid the needs of people and the parish in believing prayer before him. We had seen him take a hand in directing our path as we actively submitted our personal ideas and preferences to his. For Sue and me the devastating effects of her post-natal depression and my own chronic depression were lifting. All round God's hand could be seen destroying those works of the devil which had caused the collapse of the revival.

However, what the diocese saw was just the bank balance and that was going from bad to worse. Money was where God had to demonstrate his approval of us in order for the diocese to recognise it as that. This was the substance of my challenge. Could we with God's help – or more accurately could God, even through us – turn the parish finances around in just six months. That would be a miracle!

My Adventures with God : On Eagles' Wings

Chapter 35 : On Eagles' Wings

God seemed scarcely to have begun directing and enabling us to rebuild the parish when a crisis loomed which threatened to halt everything.

A few years previously the parish had as I said, after a period of truly miraculous revival succumbed to a three-pronged attack by the devil. It seemed that everything we had laboured for and that God had achieved through us and the believers he had rallied to this work had turned to ash.

God is seriously wonderful. When this happened he had protected all his little baby believers. Many of the women converts had already gone into the churches of their husbands' nominal religion in the hope of bringing them to faith. Other believers  God seemed to protect and keep in what almost seemed a state of suspended but alive faith. We thought it was a bit like some spiritual equivalent to preserving frozen embryos to be implanted and thrive when the opportune moment comes.

However in material terms, Sue was put out of action and I was chronically depressed and barely functional, so to any outside observer the parish looked as though it had slipped back to what it was before we came. And before we came the parish couldn’t really pay their minister. They got by because ministers only stayed on average 18 months and then they had a long interregnum during which the saved up for the next one.

So at the time in question the parish was back in the old position of not having enough income to pay the minister. I was still getting paid because the diocese had centralised payments. But the parish was sinking into debt. In the eyes of the diocese this could not go on.

At that time country parishes all around were were in decline. Now the policy our diocese had adopted was to reduce ministry. Marginally financial parishes were amalgamated where possible otherwise they were reduced to part time ministry. Our friends at at a nearby town had their parish reduced to part time status, as they had children they left and found work in another diocese.

In hindsight, if you have no hope of a revival of religion this is logical enough. Particularly if you only see the Anglican Church as the comfortable rituals and social organisation of your fondly remembered youth. If you had no vision of spreading Christianity to the masses, then it made sense scale back and at least preserve the assets of the church in case your vision of Anglicanism became fashionable in the future. So there was a rationale to what they were doing. However it was a course of action which the books on sociology of religion I had studied said was a recipe for actually accelerating the decline. I have since found there is a term for this behaviour. It is called “Managed Adaptive Decline”. It is a notable feature of the terminal stages of empires and civilisations, but in their own little way churches are following this pattern.

I had a different vision. I saw Anglicanism as basically (especially in its original doctrines and ideals) a sound church which had just lost touch with God and the community it was intended to serve in His name. From our spurt of revival I believed people were searching for God, and it was our duty to spend ourselves to help them find and be found by God. From my sociological researches I was sure that the measures the diocese were adopting, would merely hasten the demise of the church. That was evident from the case studies in the US research. This research showed in practice the opposite reaction worked. Putting more, not less effort into marginal churches. Never amalgamating parishes or reducing them to part time ministry.

At Lang Lang we were starting to pull out. Although we were in debt, the rate of increase of debt was slowing. To an engineer like myself, used to thinking in terms of integral and differential calculus, what this meant was obvious. Let me try to explain with a common physical analogy:

Suppose you are pushing someone on a swing. You stand behind them, pull them back a bit and let them go with a push. Now stay there and observe: They are going away from you fast – so there is no need for you to move out of the way is there? Then you notice they are slowing up but now they are even further away from you and they are still moving – more slowly now – away from you so there's no need to move out of the way is there? You all know the answer: because of gravity they are continually accelerating in your direction. So they will keep slowing down, eventually they will stop – yes quite a long way away from you; but then they will star moving towards you, slowly at first but then faster and faster. You really do need to get out of the way!

That seemed so obvious to me that it was frustrating that I could not make the diocesan “bean counters” see that since our income was steadily increasing we would like the swing eventually stop going further into debt, turn around and eventually return to a positive bank balance. They could not see past “but you are in debt, and the debt increased last month, and will next month: Panic Stations!”

The bean counters won.

It was decreed that the parish would be reduced to part time ministry from a certain date. The bishop said I was welcome to stay on as part time minister, assuming I could find other part time work to support myself.

From their point of view they thought they were doing the best thing. I did not know what to do. I was thinking, I was doing a lot of praying. The time came when the archdeacon was to address a meeting of all parishioners which had been called to explain it all. Then right at the “eleventh hour” I had an answer from God. It was a sort of “Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? ” answer

It went a bit like this:

Did I believe the sociological research was correct? “Yes!”
Did I believe that the parish needed more effort put into it not less? “Yes!”

Did I believe the parish was even now growing and could become financially viable? “Yes!”

Sue is now working more and more so could we survive a while on half pay? “Well I guess so”.

So why not put your money where your mouth is and prove it can be done? “ Oops … I didn't see that coming! … umm … OK ... Yes”

I told my thoughts to Sue. After the expected “Are you mad” she prayed and agreed. I think we talked to Inez and maybe some others – there wasn’t a lot of time for more because the meeting was upon us.

So the poor archdeacon got up to explain what he thought was a done deal: the parish will only have half time ministry (with me still as minister) until or unless it can be merged with another parish.

Then I got up and said: “I have had a better idea! I believe the parish needs full time ministry to grow. I believe God will grant for it will grow. I believe this so much that I will stay on full time for a six month experiment. I will personally put in the money to cover half my pay. After six months, if the experiment fails, I will leave; If it is clearly succeeding, then I will stay on and stop subsidising myself.”

In hindsight the poor archdeacon must have felt he had been ambushed, but I did not deliberately do so, it just happened that way. Anyway my idea carried the day at the meeting and it was agreed to by the diocese. I don’t know how they felt about it, but at least outwardly they were supportive and the experiment went ahead.

Working for God is really exciting! There is a bit in the Bible God's servants being carried “on eagles' wings”. Well it certainly is exciting, but sometimes you look down and really hope he doesn't let go!

My Adventures with God: Ch 31

Chapter 31: Back to the Drawing Board

Why had it all blown up? Why had we not been able to increase the size of the church and still have it stable? Why could we convert people to Christianity yet not have them in church? These and similar questions needed answers.

When I was studying engineering I quickly learned that studying failures led to advances. For instance one of the most repeated film clips in documentaries is that of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Seattle. It is a dramatic example of forced (by wind in this case) vibration. It is great footage. The suspension bridge writhes snake-like until it finally shakes itself to pieces. Actually a young engineer had warned soon after it was built that given a certain wind strength and direction this would happen. He was dismissed as a nut case. After the failure of the bridge, his work was re-visited! Wind bracing then became standard on large bridges. The engineering world had learned something important from this failure.

This phenomenon of learning important lessons from studying failures is seen in all branches of engineering – and probably most spectacularly in air crash investigations advancing aircraft safety.

In our church we had run a dynamic revival, something rarely seen in those days in Anglican country parishes. People with no church connection had come to faith in Christ. ... But ... Firstly we had not been able to bring the new converts into the existing church structures. Secondly the parish had all spectacularly blown up.

We realised that if, like many career minded ministers we had moved on to a more prestigious parish while things were going well, we would have looked successful and the inevitable blow-up would have happened later and been blamed on the next minister. We could have (and perhaps many clergy have) gone through many parishes making the same mistakes and sowing the same seeds for disaster each time. In his mercy God had kept us there to see the outworking of the mistakes. So we believed it was our duty to find out why.

So, once we started to recover I set out to do some research.

Since we had no difficulty converting people, I decided the problem lay in the area of human rather than spiritual factors. (Apart from the triple whammy attack by the devil described earlier. The books and seminars on church growth had not prepared us for that attack, but we had since then worked out the lessons). So I set myself to study sociology and especially the sociology of churches.

I need to do a flash back here to show why I thought I was the sort of person who could find out anything valuable, or find any solutions. The answer lay in my past experiences working as an engineer.

Theologians and other theorists can indulge themselves in fantastical theories in their ivory towers – they can hardly ever be proved wrong. They don’t have to stare reality in the face. Engineers do not survive long if they believe post-modern rubbish like “truth is relative” or “language has no objective meaning". ... Reality always wins!

Kids playing at “Superman” and jumping off the garage roof have universally found that gravity puts a painful end to their pretence. Engineers likewise deal with the real world where if you are wrong the laws of physics will tell you so, sometimes very painfully. I had been trained to think under this discipline. I also knew I had a track record for getting it right. It was not pride, it just was. Let me illustrate.

I first worked in a government department that designed buildings that were more in the “special projects” line. I was in mechanical building services – air conditioning, noise control, any anything else “mechanical”. It soon became apparent that while I still had a vast amount to learn from the older engineers (and even the draughtsmen!) about the art of air conditioning, I had this quirky ability to solve baffling problems and to be able to invent new things where needed. So if there was something outside the square, I got called in. If I then left the office (we were right in the city) and spent a few hours wandering round the botanic gardens sniffing the roses, no one minded. They I knew I would come back with a problem solved.

Just one anecdote.

We were designing a new printing works for the Reserve Bank. Yes, printing money! This needed a vault which would hold about three months worth of Australia’s currency – at that stage paper money had a short life in circulation before it was so tatty that banks sent then back to be exchanged for new notes. The bank was understandably concerned about security. A successful theft of that magnitude could cripple the country.

One day our chief engineer showed me a proposal for this vault by a world famous safe company. “Look at this” he said “but don’t worry about the details of the vault door. Bank-vault doors are just a trap for young players; any smart thief goes for the wall.”

I read their glowing accounts of the performance of their patent system of vault wall reinforcement. My attention was grabbed by the assertion: “One third of an ounce of pure Nitro-glycerin exploded on the surface had no ill effect” This made me suspicious. So I studied up on explosives and called up a relative who was in army intelligence and quizzed him (he was most enlightening). My suspicions were confirmed.

For fun I drew a cartoon of how I would crack this vault if I were a thief (terrorists were not an issue then). I had it lying on my drawing board when one of the Reserve Bank chiefs walking past chanced to see it. He was not amused! But I was given funding to have a model of a safe manufacturer’s device for ventilating the vault and a model of a device I had invented and have them tested as part of tests being done by army engineers. After the sappers had done their work they picked up pieces of the safe manufacturer's device 200 metres away. Attacking my device they cut into it and exploded five kilograms of plastic explosive (so much for a third of an ounce of Nitro-glycerin!) as I intended, it “failed to safety” leaving only a hairline crack in the vault wall.

My point is that from that and many other escapades I knew I had proven ability to research new disciplines and come up with solutions that worked!

So I set out to study and apply Sociology.

I read the renowned “fathers” of sociology, Weber and Durkheim. I took my self off to the nearest university library pouring over books. I took a course at the university taught by noted sociologist who was also an Anglican priest. I talked to him and he set me a reading list, even lending me some of his own books.

It was absolutely fascinating! The top sociologists were remarkable people. I remember avidly reading one sociological study of a small town 70 km outside Washington DC made some 30 years earlier. The team had visited the town over many months, looked at all the institutions and groups and just looked and listened until they understood. Then they wrote it up.

As I read a verbatim of a church council meeting I found I could do more than identify with it, I could put names of people in my parish council to the ones whose words were recorded in the book. They were just the same! It was just what they would say! (and often had said!)

When I read about the town groups and how it all worked it was just like Koo-wee-rup (which was a town the same size the same distance from the big city, likewise a farming area - just in Australia and 30 years later!) It was a revelation.

One thing I will mention – and it is why I commented that the men in our church “rebellion” had all been Masons. The study observed that the Masonic Lodge had men in key positions in every church in town “whose apparent function was to control the minister” – the sociologists were not making a religious or value judgement – just a scientific observation. An observation which was particularly relevant to me!

I went on to read sociology of churches – works like David Moberg’s classic and some Australian studies of rural church life. From the latter I found out why I had met opposition from the stakeholders in the church as it had been. The sense of “Identity” for people like Jan (and others) was strongly bound up in their church leadership role. Any change to the church let alone their role was a threat to their sense of “identity”. They might not be able to see let alone verbalise this as the reason. But they would fight to the death to protect their vital sense of identity. It was, the books informed me, no surprise I had encountered hostility and opposition. One book I recall was titled “Conflict and Decline - Rural Churches in Australia”. According to their findings, the real surprise was that I had survived! In their studies, ministers who had tried what I had tried had uniformly perished in the attempt (generally suffering a breakdown in their health and/or marriage and leaving the ministry). So now I knew!

From Moberg I found even more fascinating things. The problems country churches were facing in my part of Australia were not new. They had happened (probably many times) before. Here were studies of exactly the problems we were facing. Here were studies of the various solutions which had been tried, analysis built up from many case studies that pointed to which solutions worked and which made things worse. It was a gold mine!

In country Victoria rural churches were in decline. The situation was universally acknowledged as most serious. Bishops were lamenting the decline of country parishes and wringing their hands and running around saying “What will we do in this new frightening situation”

I don’t know why but the bishops and church leaders, faced with a new perplexing problem never stopped to think that someone might have faced this problem before. They held endless conferences but never wondered if better minds than theirs might have actually found a solution. They never considered that someone somewhere might already have invented the wheel!

I tried to tell the head ministers in our diocese that I had done some research and found that our problem was neither new nor unique. I told them that up to 50 years ago these same problems had occurred, had been researched, and that solutions had been found, tried and proven in the US. I tried to tell them that the solutions they were putting into practice were precisely the ones which had been found make the situation worse. As with the young engineer who tried to tell the experts that the Tacoma Narrows bridge would fail, I was dismissed as a nut case.

How could I prove that I was right?