Ponder: a narrative of doom becoming a theology of panic

"Secularisation functions as a theology of doom.  People believe it.  The goading analysis of 'death' and 'endgame' enters the Christian psyche.  Experts with often-limited feel for the religious cultures they study are somehow allowed to set the agenda, the problem going beyond the numbing tyranny of statistics to an insidious language of disintegration and decay... As David Martin, one of the leading exponents of secularisation theory, later reflected" 'when we said the church was in trouble, we didn't expect the churches to believe us.' Martin had 'not anticipated how enthusiastically the churches would collude in their own demise'--rolling over to appease the new secular culture.  This was not a scientific process unfolding.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: a narrative of doom becoming a theology of panic."

Dominic Erdozain, "New Affections: Church Growth in Britain 1750-1950," in Towards a Theology of Church Growth (2015), 219.

Ponder: "the best things in the worst times"

"In the middle of the 17th Century the Church of England was not so much in steep decline as dead and gone. It had been officially abolished by the Government of Oliver Cromwell. Use of the Prayer Book was illegal, the bishops had been abolished, the Anglican clergy turned out of their homes. The celebration of Christmas had been suppressed. It was forbidden even to say even the Lord’s Prayer in church since it was a written prayer. Most people at the time believed that Anglicanism was over, and consigned to the dustbin of history.

But in the middle of all this, one fellow built a quintessentially Anglican Church when everyone told him that it would only be torn down, and that all his hopes and dreams for renewal and restoration would come to nothing. When he died, his neighbors put a marble plaque over the west door of the church.

It read:

“In the year 1653 when all things sacred were throughout the Nation either demolished or profaned, Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, founded this church, whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous. The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.”

So may they speak of us."

Rt. Rev'd Anthony Burton, "

Rector’s Remarks at the Dedication and Grand Opening of the New Buildings" Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, 12 Jan, 2016