Here we are in a society paralysed by the fears, anxieties and ennui of a culture that promised so much, yet has delivered so little. And here we are in churches that are in decline census after census, and which we will pull almost any lever we can find to ensure that the earthquake does not level us to the ground. Maybe, just maybe, God will rebuild something from the rubble.

There’s a religious earthquake coming. You can tell. The first rumblings were a few years ago. Despite the obvious decline in the number of people ticking a religion on the census data, something is shifting.
I’m living in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the moment, and the Anglican cathedral in the centre of town is still a tottering heap, it’s reconstruction still not underway following the dreadful earthquake here a dozen years ago.
In a sense it’s like a metaphor. The secular rumblings of society blew out to a full scale seismic collapse of Christianity in the West. So much fell down. All that was left was for the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett to kick over the final traces of religion with their invective, their wit and their intelligence.
In a century or so, modern men and women (if there are even such categories allowed in a century or so), will have forgotten what it was even like to oppose religion, never mind adhere to it. True, the occasional piece of rubble might wend its way to the surface, but merely to be gawked at and put in a museum, with a warning that it might not be safe for kids.
Yet here we are. Two of those four horsemen have, sadly, died (Dennett most recently, and Hitchens most famously), while Dawkins and Harris are dragging their now-lame charges off to the knacker’s yard. More glue anyone?
Dawkins is saying more loudly what he’s been saying since 2007 – that he’s a cultural Christian. And Harris? Well I’ll leave you to interpret the “atheist/not atheist” of his own website when plugging his new book “Waking Up” (notice how he can’t even find a title without stealing a deeply biblical metaphor):

My hope is that Waking Up will help readers see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.

To which I would say, “Wake up Sam!” You’re playing with language you don’t own. You’re a squatter on a property for which you are not paying rent. Have the decency to evict yourself or start putting some greenbacks in the hands of the landlord. Or the Lord of the land, whichever nomenclature you prefer.
Far from a collapse following an earthquake, it’s a bit more like this:
“Hey we’re back!”
But lest we get too cocky, let’s just pause to think about what we want to have back. What do we need to leave in the rubble heap and what do we need to rebuild.
That dilemma crossed my mind as I read The Times today, and James Marriott’s piece:
Millennials are Bending the Knee to Religion:
Two which I would say “Duh!” Where have you been the past five years James? Probably in the offices of The Times of London, that’s where. The kind of place that has an alternate social imaginary, a way of looking at the world myopically: containing slightly warmed over preconceptions that came with a First at Cambridge, along with a healthy dose of skepticism birthed in a lifestyle that would be too challenged if God were on the table.
But hey, it’s a start, right?
Marriott’s newfound starry-eyed acceptance that while Boomers and X-ers were throwing it away in spades, Millennials have found religion all over again.
It’s as if those ungrateful brats couldn’t just thank us for giving them a world in which they are permitted – nay, required – to indulge themselves in every experience possible with no exceptions and no guilt (consent being required of course), but with absolutely no meaning and purpose attached to it all. Why couldn’t they just take the gifts, repurpose them for their own bodily orifices, and turn their back on the Giver?
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During a special session in 2019, the UMC adopted a disaffiliation agreement allowing churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023 “for reasons of conscience regarding a change in the requirements and provisions of the Book of Discipline related to the practice of homosexuality or the ordination or marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals as resolved and adopted by the 2019 General Conference, or the actions or inactions of its annual conference related to these issues which follow.”

Seventy churches in Georgia split from the United Methodist Church (UMC) last week largely over LGBTQ issues, marking the latest in a growing divide within the third-largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
The North Georgia Conference voted last Thursday to allow the churches, most of which were in rural areas, to disaffiliate from the UMC. The process for disaffiliation was laid out by the 2019 General Conference of The United Methodist Church through 2023, according to the North Georgia United Methodist Church Conference website.
In 2021, the Board of Trustees adopted a process and, along with District Superintendents, walked alongside the churches that requested to disaffiliate. The conference established ratification by the Annual Conference as the final step in that process.
During a special session in 2019, the UMC adopted a disaffiliation agreement allowing churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023 “for reasons of conscience regarding a change in the requirements and provisions of the Book of Discipline related to the practice of homosexuality or the ordination or marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals as resolved and adopted by the 2019 General Conference, or the actions or inactions of its annual conference related to these issues which follow.”
The 70 churches that chose to disaffiliate represent 9% of the congregations in the Conference and 3% of the membership, according to the denomination. The date of disaffiliation will be effective June 30, 2022.
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The hope that is an anchor in the storm is not wishful thinking for a better place or a better day. It is the hope of the gospel, the same hope extended by Paul to the Thessalonians when he urged them not to grieve as the rest of men who had no hope. Paul explains that hope in terms of the purpose of God bound up in the suffering and deliverance of His Son.

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God (Job 19:25-26).
Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:20–21)
Job begins not in rebellion but in recognition of God and submission to Him. When his wife urges him to forsake God, Job defers to God: “But he said to her, ‘You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?’” (Job 2:10). In other words, Job ascribes to God the right to do as He wills, what he describes as a mark of wisdom and not foolishness.
Job’s acceptance of his position is not cavalier or without cost, expressed as some sort of religious platitude as we might hear as comfort from the mouths of those who attempt to console us in our grief.
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