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• Time magazine declares in a cover story that the sexual revolution is over, killed off by loneliness, the pain of broken relationships, and the fear of sexually transmitted diseases.

• A dental surgeon with a six-figure income and a luxurious home quits his practice to enter Princeton Theological Seminary at the age of 46. The Wall Street Journal reports this as an example of a new trend: there are now so many second-career seminarians, many of them business and professional people who are searching for meaning in life, that the average age of Protestant seminary students has risen from 25 to 32.

People who realize they are in darkness will grope toward' the light. It is the task of the church to lead people to the light, and to explain why there is darkness. The task is vital. The secular world is producing a flood of evidence to prove that much un-Christlike conduct is foolishness.

During the bleak, early days of World War II, when the British people grew prematurely excited over Eisenhower's successful invasion of Algeria and Morocco, Winston Churchill sought to pull them back to reality. He declared of the invasion that "this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

That is roughly the status of the church when its cause has gained an advantage through legislation or legal mandate. The true victory comes only when one's heart is changed. All else is merely the end of the beginning.

This editorial originally appeared in the August 9, 1985, issue of Christianity Today. At the time, Minnery was senior writer for CT. He is now senior vice president of government and public policy for Focus on the Family.

Editorial, Christianity Today, Aug. 9, 1985, Vol. 29, No. 11, pp. 14-15

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