The Church at Large

One of the few surviving medieval tortures in England is the three-hour bus ride between Cambridge and Oxford. (Nationalized British rail has discontinued direct service between these intelligent connections.) Yet, for $1.50, the eighty-mile bus bounce is a real bargain in existential exhaustion, and is less exasperating than trying to get one’s new but malfunctioning Ford Cortina to live up to the glossy advertisements.

At any rate, at a time when the flag of institutional Christianity in England seems to flutter at half-mast, the junket gave me opportunity to ponder some of that country’s loosely connected evangelical forces. While many of these energies are channeled into and through the regular established churches, their unswerving objective is the maintenance of an evangelical witness. Many other groups thrive independently.

Through an ingenious variety of approaches, though sometimes there is only a token effort, the Gospel penetrates almost every frontier of English life. One can only be impressed by the many ways concerned believers use to show Christ alive even in this time of spiritual decline. Continually breaking out of the routines of organized Christianity, they seem to remind the late twentieth century that not mere ecumenism but evangelism is the real lifeline of the Church.

My year in Cambridge has criss-crossed many novel features of British life, and I have encountered presentations of the Gospel in city markets, rural auctions, student bread-and-cheese lunches, house meetings, hotel suppers, and formal lectures for intellectuals.

Adjoining Cambridgeshire is Huntingdonshire, where Oliver Cromwell was born. By fifteen years ago biblical Christianity had ebbed to such a low point here that evangelical witness was practically non-existent. A number of concerned believers accordingly banded together for prayer and witness. Today almost every village in Huntingdonshire has an evangelical service on Sunday and a week-night Bible study; in some communities believers meet in churches or chapels, in others, in private homes. There are Christian book shops, special missions, and open-air meetings.

The witness to young intellectuals in England is an evangelical bright spot, although much remains to be done. My ride to Oxford was, in fact, taking me to a series of weekend addresses to OICU. This effort, together with the Cambridge CICU, is among Christian Union’s most rewarding intercollegiate ventures, at a time, moreover, when ecumenical student work is in retreat. The Saturday-night lecture at Oxford, on “The Christian View of Revelation,” was attended by 320 students; the related Sunday-night sermon, by 280. So far this academic year forty-three Oxford students have become Christians through person-to-person follow-up of such Intervarsity effort.

On Easter Monday, St. Ives, where Cromwell’s monument dominates the city square, holds a city-wide market, one of the largest in England. Here, jostling through the crowds, we suddenly heard singing. Following the sound of the music we found a group of young people who called themselves the London Team. In contrast to the local Anglican church that was sealed tight against the throngs, these young people had hired a market site to reach out to the multitudes with the Gospel. From a distance the amplified procedures must have sounded for all the world like auctioneering. But these young people who had experienced the reality of Christ would not be silenced in telling about him. When I thanked them for their witness, they promptly urged me to mount the soap box and speak my word for Christ.

This meeting jogged my memory to Long Island at a time when many churches were preaching only book reviews, newspaper-reporter days when I sometimes joined other Christians in a Saturday-night street-corner gospel witness. I recalled, too, how later during college years, in one of my last street-meeting experiences, a disgruntled listener kept shouting, “Where did Cain get his wife?” Finally, when I could no longer ignore him, I replied, “When I get to heaven I’ll ask him!” He shouted back: “Suppose he isn’t in heaven?” “Then,” I retorted, “you can ask him.”

Perhaps I’ve learned a bit more about interpersonal relationships since then. But for all that, I’ve never felt called to street-meeting evangelism. That Easter Monday at St. Ives I remembered, too, a stroll in London’s Hyde Park. Here among all the soap-box agitators I had noticed a father and son who took turns mounting a stepladder to preach the Gospel to an audience of hecklers. My word of commendation to them evoked the question: “Do you have a word for your Lord?” Some questions won’t take a negative answer, and I was soon introduced as a Christian from America and was given the stand. Hecklers spouted adjectives and adverbs by the bushel. Finally when I offered the challenge: “Right now, God will make you a new man, if you’ll kneel in repentance, and say, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner, and save me for Christ’s sake,’ ” one obvious buffoon ran to the foot of the ladder, knelt, and shouted in mimicry, “God be merciful.…” That just about wound up my meeting. Soon thereafter, while sauntering through the crowd, I overheard another heckler remark to a buddy, “That blooming American didn’t have very much to say, did he?”

Perhaps I didn’t have much to say at St. Ives, either, but at least I said it. And evangelicals in England, at a time when words have largely gone the way of the world, are learning to speak their word for Jesus Christ.

In Foxton a young married couple have several meetings in their home every week—for prayer, Bible study, testimony and discussion, Christian fellowship and fun. Recently through the conversion of a long-standing church member the Gospel has become a scandal in their village; conversion, say other churchgoers, is, after all, something that can’t happen to a church member.

Only two miles outside Cambridge, in Teversham, Spurgeon addressed his very first cottage meeting, and the spiritual rewards of such effort are not lost upon the scattered evangelical forces. In Cambridge I know a busy medical doctor who invites his patients to a monthly Bible study at his home, and a leading ophthalmologist who regularly has fifteen or twenty guests to Sunday dinner where Christians and non-Christians meet to talk. And in Oxford I know a lecturer whose home is open regularly on Sunday afternoons for student discussion of Christianity.

At a time when many great cathedrals in England attract but small audiences, evangelical Christians perceive both that their homes are one of the best avenues to the Church, and that unless it offers men and women a personal relationship with the Living Christ, the Church has had it.

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