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Show The Churches of Tomorrow Will Be Able to Rally the New Generation By REV. JAMES GORDON GILKEY, in Christian Century. HERE is the religious message of the new churches. They wili say to the youth of the future : "You are not here to lie prostrate in the dust, accepting weakly what misfortune thrusts upon you, and calling it stupidly the inexplicable decree of Providence. You are here to work with God and let God work through you until at last these disasters as much of a tragedy for God as for men are forever for-ever wiped away. You are here not to accept disease and death, but to join God's crusade against them. You are here not to watch men endure pain, but to help them find a way to escape it. You are here not to see a hideously cruel social order perpetuate itself, while men say slyly that there will always be poverty, always be unemployment, always be strife and war. "You are here to fight these things fight them with God who has always been fighting them, and who has forever been dreaming of a world redeemed at last from the horror of poverty and the agony of battle. Here is the meaning of your life, here is the task of the church, here is the purpose of the ultimately triumphant God." With a challenge like that the churches of tomorrow will be able to rally the new generation for the greatest onslaught history has known against sin and suffering, disease and misery, war and hatred. The Church of Christ decadent ? Protestantism about to disappear ? Oh, no 1 Once more we see an old order dying, and a new order coming to birth. Once more we see the Living God calling the church forward, after its four centuries of settled life. Once more Christianity gathers strength for a new adventure. |