Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 6

Who really is in charge of this world?

I remember singing a song “He’s got the whole world in His hand”, the He being God, of course. Well, to me the statement there sounds no longer true. There simply is too much evidence around us and also in the Bible that takes issue with this claim. If God is no longer calling the tune here, then this has tremendous implications for the church, which brings me to a preliminary thought on the church, a very tentative one, one that came to me while I was stimulating my brain by running outside.

Jesus once made a reference to wine. He himself loved wine, as was evident from his first public miracle where he turned water into Israel’s national drink, wine of the highest quality. His enemies even called him a ‘wine-bibber’, probably somewhat justified.

Jesus stated that new wine should be stored in new wineskins rather than re-use the old ones. He said in Matthew 9:17 that when we store new wine in old skins, they burst. The same is true for bringing new ideas to a church that is stuck in the old format: it just won’t work. The church is too rigid to accommodate radical ideas.

We have a striking precedent there in  what happened at and after Pentecost in Jerusalem, just after Jesus had gone to heaven. Then a radically different Christian church emerged, abolishing circumcisions, changing the date of worship from Saturday to Sunday, from the 7^th day to the first day of the week, the day of Jesus’ resurrection. It also abandoned the rigidity of the law with the flexibility of freedom.

So, when Jesus talks about new wine in new containers, he really means is that new ideas also need new structures. By suggesting this already so early in my writing, could well mean that this will have significance for my theme The Church in Flux later on.

Something also struck me when we were reciting the Lord’s Prayer in church. We often do this as a matter of routine, mindlessly almost. When we say that second line: ‘Hallowed by Thy name’, my bet is that no more that one in a hundred – I am being optimistic – realizes what these words mean for today. God’s first recorded words in Genesis 1 and 2 were His Creation Words, where He spoke and things came to be, created ‘in His name.’  This makes everything that God did holy. Yes, that means that creation is holy, something usually not reflected in our daily life.

This is confirmed by what follows in the prayer Jesus taught us: “Thy Kingdom Come.”

You know what that line is? It is a prayer for the speedy arrival of the New Creation. If we take this prayer as its face value, and if we really want to follow Jesus in this, should all our actions, our entire life-style not reflect this prayer? As a matter of fact, the bible shows on every page that the meaning of creation can be traced directly to the concept of Kingdom, to the idea that all our actions must be geared toward its coming. That’s why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 6:33 – urges all believers to “Seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Radical statements from Jesus. He unambiguously states that our first duty in life is to seek the welfare of creation, and when we do that, when we make that our life’s motto, then we will never want for anything.

I again say: that Kingdom is not the instituted church but God’s creation, God’s beautiful work of art. Jesus’ command to ‘Seek the Kingdom’ means that we must get up in the morning with the overriding desire to improve the creation God so graciously has given us. And when we go to bed at night we must confess to God that we have miserably failed to do that, probably have made matters worse, have not treated this earth as God’s precious possession and have not promoted its well-being. Yet, that is what “seeking the Kingdom” means, the pursuit of which is our foremost task in life.

So here again, if I am correct in my reasoning, we have to ask the question whether the church even can change its course so that in all its proclamation and direct action, the emphasis is on The Kingdom.

The other side of the coin is that when we fail to keep the Kingdom in mind or worse actively do harm to the Kingdom, we sin.

There are sins of commission and sins of omission. Not effectively seeking the welfare of Creation, God’s kingdom, is a sin of omission. Doing damage to creation is a sin of commission, something that is increasingly going to haunt us, as sin often carries it own punishment. Rather than giving God the honor due to his name- which literally means that we must love creation as He loved it – in claiming that we can do to the earth as we please, we have made ourselves equal to God and with that act we have effectively cut off communion with God. That is the real cause of our alienation from the divine. We have cut ourselves loose from God, and, by our actions, are refusing to acknowledge God as the creator and creation as His kingdom.

I want to go even further: in essence we have destroyed the Kingdom.  Genesis 3:17 tells the sorry story that the ground is cursed because of our actions. Paul reiterates this in Romans 8:20 when he says that creation has been subjected to human stupidity, that’s why a curse has descended upon the earth.

That our actions make no sense is certainly evident from our economic priorities, where we demand from creation the impossible task to supply us with all our wants, which are, of course, infinite while, if we would stop and think, we would realize that we must strive for such economic conditions that the needs of all people in the world can be met on a sustainable basis. That this is not happening – and the result is Global Warming, Peak Oil and loss of species – suggest all too clearly that God has let the human race do its thing, has surrendered his kingdom – temporarily at least – to the powers of evil, allowing humanity to pursue its own course, away from God and away from Shalom. That too is something the church has failed to recognize.

This means that the world now is in the power of demons. The kingdom is in the clutches of Satan. He is in charge of this world.

The protestant theologian and author of many books, Jacques Ellul, former professor of law in Bordeaux France, laments in his Hope in Time of Abandonment: “It is my belief that we have entered upon an age of abandonment, that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate. I am sure, of course, that he has not turned away from all, that is he is perhaps in the life of an individual. But it is from history, our societies, our cultures, our science, and our politics that God is absent. He is keeping quiet, and has shut himself up in his silence and his night.”

He continues to list all the arguments against this view – the usual quotes from the Bible, true in David’s time, but now no longer valid as Ellul continues: “God has indeed turned away, and that his word as such is no longer spoken…. It is not the unbelievers who are keeping God away. It is, on the one hand, a matter of structures. On the other hand is it the responsibility of Christians and of the Church, who do not know how to be what God expects of them.” Ellul goes as far as saying that the church no longer understands the true situation in the world, and the message it brings carries no longer any power.

And here we come to a crucial point. What then should the church do and what should be their message? The church often provides the easy answers, because it doesn’t want controversy, doesn’t want to upset people and doesn’t really want to confront reality. Pointing to Psalm 24, the preachers proclaim: “Of course God is in charge. Doesn’t it say there that ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it”? The Gospel ministers don’t want it any other way, because then they have to change their triumphant heaven-bound message to a plaintive cry of ‘How long O Lord, when will you return?’ Then they have to surrender their claim of certainty to a more hesitant approach, realizing that what they proclaim from the pulpit is open to question, especially because of the church’s failure to see the significance of the Kingdom.

I don’t dispute that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, as other Psalms also readily admit. However – and here is something I have never heard in a sermon – “If the cosmos is really in God’s hand, why does it say in John 3:16 that God sacrificed his Son, his one and only Son, to buy it back?” The word ‘redeem’ means ‘to buy back’! We can only buy something back, if we first have sold it.

And that’s exactly what we did. The original sin in Paradise is that God gave the earth to Adam and Eve, who then became not stewards, not  caretakers but owners. That’s why Psalm 115:16 quite plainly says that “The heavens belong to the Lord, and the earth he has given to the human race.” They, in turn, transferred title to Satan.

 More about this in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 5

When will Christ return? Finally an approximate date. 

So far I have painted a very bleak picture for the future. I haven’t gone into any gruesome details, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to visualize that an 80 percent reduction in the world’s population in one generation will not be a peaceful process. But the Lord is gracious. In Matthew 24 verse 22 He makes a promise. Here’s what he says: “If those days have not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”

And that is what this chapter is all about. And, yes, it involves Primary Productivity, rapidly speeding up because of economic development in China and India, and continued growth in the rest of the world, in spite of a recession. The vast rainforests in Cambodia, Mongolia and Indonesia are being stripped to feed the building booms there, while in Brazil and Argentina they are cut down to supply China with soy beans.
Primary Productivity now stands between 40 and 45, meaning that almost half of the world’s basic energy vested in plants, trees, animals, has been consumed for the benefit of the human race, but in such a way that once it is used, it cannot be restored. Depleted oceans, soil degradation, disappeared species, cannot be re-created by human technology. Matthew 24 very fittingly speaks about ‘the abomination that causes desolation’, and notes ‘let the reader understand’, meaning that the significance of this event can only be grasped when it actually occurs. We now can begin to detect what this abomination referred to here means: it concerns Global Warming, a world-wide event that will cause tremendous upheaval everywhere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) foresees “global mean temperature changes greater than 4°C above 1990-2000 levels”. At this point there’s nothing we can do to prevent the loss of ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of major ice sheets. The most recent report also mentions that global food production is very likely to decrease when temperatures rise more than 3°C. And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above three degrees of warming, the world’s vegetation will become “a net source of carbon”. This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high level of warming. Four degrees might take us rapidly to five or six: the end – for humans – of just about everything. These are official U.N. reports, which we should take seriously, but we don’t.

Revelation, that last bible book, also offers an explanation of this process. There in Chapter 11:2 it says that “they will trample on the Holy City – God’s beloved cosmos, the world we live in – for 42 months.” “They” are we, the citizens of the Western world, the so-called Christian part of the Globe. Revelation 13:5 repeats that claim: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for 42 months.”

Just a few words now about this last text, because in the next chapter I will expand on the role of the Beast. Satan, God’s great Adversary, is the Beast whose aim has been from the beginning – starting in Eden – to destroy God’s beloved cosmos. (John 3:16). He’s been hitting God where it hurts, and we have been his willing allies, sorry to say.
There is significance in the number of 42 months, which is 3.5 years, exactly half of that perfect number ‘7’.
Allow me a brief detour by means of a riddle, illustrating the nature of exponential growth. A lily pond contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles – two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the four, and so on. “If the pond is full on the thirtieth day,” the question goes, “at what point is it half full?” Answer: “On the twenty-ninth day.”
Back to two things: that 3.5 year period and Primary Productivity.
It is my contention that we are quite close to the end of that 3.5 year mark, judging by the Primary Productivity tally, which now is somewhere between 40 and 45 percent. The 50 percent threshold will coincide with the end of the 3.5 years and the point in time where the Lord returns. This Day is rapidly approaching, due to the scramble for more oil to keep our economic system lubricated, and especially the increasing pace of Global Warming which will greatly speed up environmental destruction. We now are very close to being half- way to total chaos, just as 3.5 years is halfway to 7, the number of fullness.
Based on the foregoing – I arrived at this after a period of intense prayer for an answer – I believe that the Lord will not return on Day 30, but on Day 29, when, seemingly, the glass is still half full, and the world is still full of hope, while politicians will play down that danger. Of course nobody has the full range of accurate data to being able to perfectly calculate the exact point when this ‘half-way’ mark is reached: only God knows, who only can read the true state of his beloved cosmos.
At that moment the trumpet will sound and all will be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of the eye. The words of the apostle Peter come to mind: “Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival. The galaxies will burn up and the elements melt down that day – but we’ll hardly notice. We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” (The Message: 2 Peter 3.)
What constitutes a Holy Life? Each of us must answer that question. That it has something to do with “LIFE”, our daily doings, our activities in God’s creation, is beyond question. This makes me think of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect.” The Greek word there is ‘teleioos,’ which is best translated as ‘holistic,’ derived from ‘telos’, which suggests that we, in all we do, must keep the End – Telos- in mind, our final destination, the New Earth. Living “A Holy Life” means having a ‘holistic’ existence, indicating that we must live as much as possible so, that when the Lord returns and heralds in the New Creation, we will make this transition smoothly, without thinking twice what to do, instantly ready to adjust, because we then simply continue to live perfectly holistic, something we now try to do falteringly: recycling, reducing, reusing, living ecologically responsible, leaving few carbon foot prints.

And here I come back to ‘The Church In Flux.’ I have shown, perhaps not beyond the shadow of doubt, but with a degree of accuracy I believe, that the Day of the Lord is nigh, that we live in New Times, that the old no longer holds, that we are in the End Stretch.

What does all this mean for the church, that central question, which needs answering? Before I begin to deal with that directly, something else has to be explored: “Who is in charge of this world?”

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 4

When does Christ return? Continued.

 Jesus is taken his time in coming back. No wonder that after 2000 years of waiting for him people have become tired and, actually, influenced by the church’s teaching of a heaven-bound message, have lost their desire for a New Creation. Now rapture is all the rage. That means that the church has totally switched direction, because, when the Apostles’ Creed was formulated, it clearly stated that “We believe in the resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting.”

Now it finally looks that Jesus’ return is imminent, and, as you may have guessed by now, it has something to do with Primary Productivity and its rapid decline. So why has Primary Productivity decreased so quickly? It’s the Oil we use that is causing this.

Oil is Primary Productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many millions of years. However we have been robbing both capital and interest from that trust fund, to the point where we now can spot “The End of Oil” looming with drastic consequences for us, the human race, because lack of oil also means lack of food, and lack of food means lack of life.
Consider the following. In 1960 the expansion of the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. In spite of that, grain yields tripled. Ever since we ran out of land, food has become oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by about ten calories of oil. That figure does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory floor to the store, or the gasoline we burn by us driving to buy it. Dr. Harriet Friedman writes that one kilogram of asparagus sent from Chile to New York takes 73 kg of fuel energy and adds 4.7 kg of carbon dioxide to the air we breathe in. The same is true for out-of-season strawberries and other food items. In general the food-miles average of the supermarket items is more than 5,000 times greater than the same items bought in the farmer’s market. Compare this to 1940 when the average farm produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. 

That’s why the End of Oil means also The End of Food. Throw in a bucket of Climate Change, which, knowing the human psyche, will only get worse, and the potential for catastrophes are so big that they remind me of the seven angels in Revelation 8.
The ‘End of Oil’ will mean that civilization as we know comes to an end. This is not the wacky forecast of a religious nut, but the conclusion of people in responsible positions.
Matthew R. Simmons, is one of them. He has written: “The situation (of peak oil) is desperate. It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no Plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks, particularly while 5 of the world’s 6.5 billion people have little or no use of modern energy, it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health – greater than anyone could ever imagine.”
When asked if there is a solution, Simmons responded: “I don’t think there is one. The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered there will be no crisis for maybe two years. After that it’s a certainty.”
The harsh truth is that for the foreseeable future there are no true alternatives to oil. The sun shines only a certain numbers of hours in a year and we can’t command the wind to blow when power is needed. I know. I have both power sources and still need the ‘grid.’
Consider energy history. When wood ran out, some 400 years ago, coal came on line. When coal proved to be too polluting, oil and natural gas were available. Now, what do we do? Rely mainly on Natural gas of which the world still has plenty, but all in very remote locations, such as Siberia or Australia? It will take trillions of dollars to feed the North American market with adequate supply, assuming there is plenty of it left.
Once we pass the oil production peak, a return to a medieval style of existence looks a frightening possibility. It will mean a greatly reduced human population. Thanks to oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population has more than tripled from 2 billion to 6.5 billion. As late as 1945 my maternal grandfather had no electricity on his small farm. He managed with one horse and one help. Then people were mentally and physically equipped to cope with little. These skills we have lost. In addition much of the earth has been spoiled, unfit for intensive, organic, agriculture. The End of Oil may mean a reduction in the world’s population to perhaps 1 billion. Imagine the hardship.
Now we have a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure powered almost exclusively by fossil-fuels. Cars, trucks, roads, boats, docks, airplanes, airports, hospitals, schools, farms manufacturing plants, food processing centers, water treatment plants – all run on fossil fuels. We have heat at the touch of a switch, and cooling is just as easy. All plastics, pesticides, and fertilizers are derived from that source as well.
The End of Oil means the End of growth, on which our economy depends.

What we have in abundance is debt: corporate debt, government debt, and consumer debt, all at record levels. In order to finance debt, we need economic growth. Economic growth requires a constantly increasing consumption of consumer goods – most of which are made from plastic, which comes from petroleum (oil) and are delivered by trucks, which consume diesel fuel (oil). Even a truly successful conservation program would require us to drastically cut our consumption of consumer goods, which would also stop economic growth. Conservation would cause indebted corporations, governments, and individuals to slide towards bankruptcy. Banks would call in outstanding debts, businesses would close, government services would cease, and people would lose their jobs. This is already happening.

During the Dirty Thirties many people had relatives in the country, where food, at least, was plentiful. That option is gone. Even farmers don’t grow their own food anymore.
I don’t have to be a prophet to conclude that without an abundant supply of cheap energy, transportation systems will break down. Electrical grids will collapse. Unemployment levels will skyrocket. Consumer goods will only be available to the super-rich. Food and water will become desperately sought after commodities. Riots and urban uprisings will become common.
The words in a recent Pentagon Report come to mind: “Every time when there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans will choose to raid.” Applied to the USA as a whole, it points to a World War for Oil, with the Middle East as the centre. Expect the US Army to expand, and perhaps re-institute the draft, in order to be able to conquer Saudi Arabia, the world’s treasure chest. War leads to more destruction, and a further rapid decline in Primary Productivity. Wars are always wasteful. The U.S. army requires 400,000 barrels of oil a day to maintain its troops in Iraq.
Yes, oil, the End of Oil, even a reduced supply of this vital fuel – and we all know that oil is a finite product – will cause tremendous disruption in our energy-dependent world. Even using less fuel has dangerous consequences. Dr James Lovelock makes in interesting remark in the introduction to this book The Revenge of Gaia. Here’s what he writes: “Curiously, smoke and dust pollution reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This ‘global dimming’ is transient and could disappear in a few days if there were an economic downturn or a reduction in fossil fuel burning. This would leave us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die.”

So it seems that no matter what we do, we speed up the Lord’s coming, whether we curtail energy use or keep on using it. 

What does all this lead up to?

Read about it in the next chapter, where I finally come to a tentative conclusion on “When will Christ Return”?

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 3

Can we predict when Christ returns?

Nobody knows the exact day of the Lord’s return. Jesus in Matthew 24 admits that not even he has the actual information: “No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father.”

 That to me is a significant statement. It suggests a difference in knowledge between Jesus and God. What’s going on here? Here’s what I think, lies at the bottom of this problem, and I’ll have to take a little detour to get there.

 The Great Commandment is – Mark 12:30 – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s easier said than done, because how can we love something or someone we cannot see, and will never see? So, how do we love God, who lives in inapproachable light, who nobody can see or ever has seen (1 Timothy 6:16)? How do we love Handel or Bach? We love them by perfecting their music. That’s how we love God. We love him by loving what He loves. John 3:16 says unequivocally that “God so loved the world – the cosmos – that He gave his one and only Son as an offering, a payment, to redeem his creation” Buy it back, in other words.”  More about that in a next chapter.

 This statement which Jesus quoted to Nicodemus in the book of John is the most abused piece of Scripture. Even Helmut Thielicke in his The Trouble with the Church falls into the trap of equating the word ‘cosmos’ in that verse with ‘humanity’. That error is one of the causes why the church is in so much trouble. Another one, equally serious, is to equate the church with the Kingdom of God, while the real Kingdom is God’s beloved world, His cosmos.

 Of course God loves the human race, but He does so as a part, perhaps the most important part, of his cosmos, his well-ordered creation, indeed His Kingdom. This means that the most simple and straightforward way to love God is to love his creation, something the church has sorely neglected to do.

 This earth, his beloved cosmos, is the expression of God’s existence and God’s love. This earth, all of us, is there for only one reason: God wanted us to be there. We are God’s projection on the screen of this earth: we are made in his image. That also means that God can never be separated from his creation, can never be known without the earth and those who dwell therein. How would anybody know about God if we were not there, or if the world wasn’t there? God needs the earth to make heaven, where God dwells and his angels abide, real for us. He needs the earth to show who He is and what He sees as the purpose of his creation.

Simply put: by loving creation we express our love for God in the most direct and effective way. That also implies that by studying creation we are getting to know more about God, which actually means that we, by investigating the world and they who dwell therein, we are practicing theology. However we should not fall into the trap to make creation god: that is Pantheism. What is correct is to see God in everything: Panentheism.

 After this interlude back to Jesus’ admission that he had no clue when he would return. Yet, I think I can figure something out on that score. The key to knowing when Jesus will come back can be traced to the state of God’s cosmos: the riddle of Jesus’ return lies in the earth itself and what we have done and still are doing to it, a concept which involves “Primary Productivity.”

 What is meant by “Primary Productivity?” Any changes in the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept that  indicates the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.”  Once that budget is spent, when all our cosmic credit has been exhausted, life is no longer possible.

 All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger.

When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent. After the Garden of Eden, the number of people rose quickly, starting agriculture and making cities possible of which Cain was the prime mover. As a result Primary Productivity started to decrease.

In our age of rapid population growth and an even faster increase in the use of natural resources, this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following quote from The Ingenuity Gap by Dr Thomas Homer-Dixon: “We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”

 Dr Homer-Dixon is talking about the decrease in “Primary Productivity” here.

There have been at least two efforts made to figure out how Primary Productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other by a Christian biologist Stuart L. Pimm, professor of biology at Duke University in Durham N.C. They both have concluded that we humans consume about 40 percent of Earth Primary Productivity, 40 percent of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet: we, the 6 billion plus, have simply stolen the food, we, the rich, a lot more than others.

 So, what has all this to do with Jesus’ return? I will explain that in the next chapter.

The CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 2

“THE LAST DAYS”

Before I continue with “The Church In Flux”, I have to come up with definite substantiation that “We live in the Last Days,” and for that I don’t have to go any further than the major harbors in the world, where ships are at anchor full of the stuff that people used to buy but no longer can afford.

There is a striking passage in Revelation pointing to that exact situation. I refer to chapter 18 of the last bible book, for which the heading is “The Fall of Babylon,” or “the demise of an economic system.” That could be ours.  If you have a bible, look it up, especially verses 9 -13. Here’s a quote, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her (Babylon, the modern world) because no one buys their cargoes anymore…”

How striking! Yes, today we are in The Last Days, and the sorry thing is that when I go to church – which I do – nobody seems concerned about it, nobody pays any attention to it, even though this issue is a recurring theme in the Bible. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. Since then there have been a lot of false alarms.
Of course all Bible readers know that the day and the hour are unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, new life will come, but even when labor pains start the actual time of birth cannot be accurately predicted. In the same vein we cannot say that on December 23 2012 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 that not even the angels or the Son of Man know the exact date and time. That makes eminent sense to me.
Yet the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite signs. Jesus points to the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. In the same way there will be tell-tale symptoms of the Lord’s return. So what other indications are there? Are there more signs of the ‘fig tree’ out there?
Most definitely. Ships full of stuff nobody wants or needs are not the only pointers. There’s something deeply fundamental going on: the entire growth model we have created ever since World War II is simply unsustainable both ecologically and economically. We have this song in church where the line ‘Nature sings” appears. Well, believe me, nature doesn’t sing anymore: she screams: “No more.” The edifice of economic growth is crumbling. It depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change, earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

 We can’t do this anymore. All that money was borrowed against real estate, which now is rapidly reducing in value. Ships full of that merchandize are now sitting everywhere, because, suddenly, we don’t have any money left to buy their cargo. But politicians, in order to get reelected, depend on this treadmill exercise of more and more, so they are pushing not only the economy but everything else over the cliff, even though our so-called high standard of living has been obtained by depleting all our natural stocks – water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land.

Frankly, we are at a historic moment: the collapse of wealth, both personally and globally. 

A few economists risked the scorn of their colleagues by predicting this disaster and a few scientists warned us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets, but our elected officials, by and large, have downplayed the dangers.

Here’s what a European think-tank wrote recently: “It is high time for the general population and socio-political players to get ready to face very hard times during which whole segments of our societies will be modified, temporarily disappear or even permanently vanish. For instance, the breakdown of the global monetary system we anticipated for summer 2009 will indeed entail the collapse of the US dollar (and all USD-denominated assets), but it will also induce, out of psychological contagion, a general loss of confidence in paper money altogether.” 

Does this mean that people will change their living habits? No of course not.  There are still billions out there who have observed our Western Wealth, and want a piece of that same pie. This process is going to continue till it is no longer possible: that moment is at hand.  

 James Lovelock in his The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, writes in his Preface to the U.S. Edition that “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up…billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the arctic region where the climate remains tolerable.”

 In a recent discussion on Alanna Mitchell’s latest book Sea Sick, the reviewer writes: “While Mitchell is walking on the Australian beach with Tim Flannery, the author of the influential book The Weather Makers, and an impassioned advocate for a rational approach to global warming, he tells her that she is ‘documenting the last days of a system. Humans are now interfering with the most basic elements of that system'”.
We do have a serious problem. According the Harriet Friedman, a University of Toronto professor specializing in analysis of food systems, “more than half the world’s agricultural land suffers moderate to extreme soil degradation. Climate change will certainly make yields unpredictable in the future, if not already.”

 So when will all this take place? More about that next week.

INTRODUCTION TO A WORK IN PROGRESS

The title of this multi-part series on the church reminds me of a Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the Same.”

My interest in the church goes back many decades. Whenever I buy a book, I always write the date of purchase and the city where I bought it on the inside cover. For instance, Helmut Thielicke’s “The trouble with the Church, a Call for Renewal” was bought in 1965, the year I became an elder in the Christian Reformed Church in St. Catharines, Ontario. Since then I have acquired dozens more dealing with the church.

Now, without warning, something in me has urged me to clarify my own thinking on this topic, so my first action was to pull from my library some 25 books related to church and religion.

Why do I feel compelled to write now? People of the Reformation are apt to quote a Latin phrase “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda – The Reformed Church, Always in the process of Reforming.  I believe this to be true. However, when I look around me and cast a glance back into history, then it seems to me that in reality the slogan is “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Eadem – The Reformed Church, Always the Same. In essence nothing major has occurred for more than 1500 years in the Roman Catholic Church and almost 500 years in the Protestant part. The organized church is now 2000 years old. From all indications not much has changed in those two millennia, yet we have seen enormous evolutions in living habits, business practices, education, science, medicine, statecraft, but somehow the structure of the church has seen little development. Do New Times call for a different sort of church? That’s what I want to explore in these musings about the church.

I believe that we have come to a crucial moment in history: we have entered ‘The Last Days”. Of course that is nothing new for those who know the Bible: the entire New Testament has been written with The Last Days in mind. If that is true – and I believe it is – should the church not be in the forefront to prepare people? A real call to repentance, such as John the Baptizer did when he shouted: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand?”

Yes, I sense it’s for real. I will elaborate on this more extensively in the following segment.

To be able to concentrate on this I have suspended my weekly newspaper column on World Affairs, so this range of bites, of some 1000 words, will not appear in print but be strictly for web consumption. How these whispered words will wing their way into the whole wide world, only the Lord knows. I will simply float them on my blog and pray that somehow they will reach those who wait expectantly for His return.

I know that everything still looks quite normal. That too is a sign of The Last Days: after all the Lord Himself has said that His return will be ‘Like a Thief in the Night’. Who knows we have become so immune to what’s going on around us that we may not have noticed the magic manifestations of the “number of the Beast: 666.” Climate Change, a topic of mostly verbal inaction, has not yet reached our doorsteps; Peak Oil, as sure to come as night follows day, has not yet affected us; a possible Pandemic is still gestating somewhere. But we are already vulnerable where it hurts: in our wallets. The gods of finance have already fallen on their faces.

Yet life goes on as if nothing is different out there: people marry or start living together; children are born; couples split; more men and women grow old; in other words: life rolls on in the regular rhythm of birth, life and death, and, when I observe the church, it too behaves as if nothing has changed or even will ever change.

That too makes sense, because we seldom question our most reliable and well-established entities. The church has always been there. Why submit it to a thorough analysis? But we have to because we live in New Times. Fact is that the rulers of this world are desperately trying the right the economic ship, which is heeling unhealthily and chances are more than even that it will keel over, imperiling our way of life built on fictitious money. This situation is so critical that many start to question the role of Capitalism and Globalization, the two major engines of the current economy.

Since we already are breathing in the air of doubt about the very foundations of our financial state, the time is opportune also to ponder the current make-up of the church, where it has come from, where it now is, and whether the current model still is effective in the New Times.

So why me?  Am I really qualified to do this? Of course nobody has asked me to engage in this. Here’s why I undertake this enterprise. I have always been intimately involved in the church. When we moved to Tweed in 1975, I soon became an elder again, this time in the local Presbyterian Church, served twice as moderator of the Kingston Presbytery (the first lay person to occupy that office) – the equivalent of Classis in the Christian Reformed Church – obtaining a picture of the spiritual part of the church, and later was the chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Church, observing how the church deals with money matters.

I am an active person by nature: want to be involved, so I chaired (Christian) school boards, coordinated the start of Quinte Christian High School,  the first president of the Tweed Area Community Care Incorporated, and wrote weekly columns for decades. But now I believe the time has come to look critically at the only other institution to which I have pledged my troth.

I aim to develop my theme of ‘The Church in Flux” by looking critically at the church, that human institution, among which, I know, most members of the Church with a capital C can be found, that mysterious body, the true Church, not recognized by its spires or a published membership list.