It’s not the end of the world…

There is a typically Hoosier way to refer to some out of the way or distant place. “It’s not the end of the world but you can see it from there.” On at least one occasion the thought has entered my mind, as I scanned the horizon of a frosty Arctic sea. 

But I have also wondered if and how far the adage might apply to secularism itself. It seems sure to me now that if the trends of the secular age continue they will represent a definitive culmination of the age we have known and in which we were all formed, an age of faith, Western Civilization, Christendom. It’s not already, here and now the end of the world, but you can see it from here. You can see it in declining church attendance in every tradition (the Southern Baptists announced this week that in the last three years they’ve lost 1.1 million members). You can see it in the toxic politics of our time and how this tears at churches with little room left for genuine faith in the public sphere. You can see it in the sense of meaninglessness that blankets so many lives with materialism, addiction, and hopelessness as so many loose the sense that God is or can work in their lives. Maybe we’re not at the end of the world yet, but it feels like we can see and feel it from our current location.

Our last place of residence during the sabbatical time was in a pleasantly shabby farmhouse on the island of Tjeldøya, still north of the Arctic Circle.

Christianity came to this island almost 1,000 years ago. In that era King  decreed Christianity the faith of the realm. The old gods were to be put away forever. The farmers were to build the churches. The king would send the priests. In spite of massive upheaval in society in the centuries to come including the Black Death, famines, the Protestant Reformation, and World War II the settlement continued, mainly without interruption.

 

A globalizing world would emerge in the wake of the Second World War. Simultaneously, Christian expressions steeped in the individualistic values of the West flourished. Methodists, Baptists and a multitude of others multiplied. Yet, the bursts of material prosperity and individual emphasis which boosted them would eventually come to undermine not only the established state churches but also these more independent groups. The narrative played out in variations in Norway and continues to play out there and the United States alike. Churches and people of faith are not done away with. They have and will continue, even if it be in a smaller, humbler form than decades past. A fine example of this trend is the beautiful church we could see from our cottage’s porch. 

 The congregation was more or less founded almost 1,000 years ago. There is archaeological and historical evidence which indicates a church building on this site in particular at least as early as the 1300’s. By 1500 the archaeological record is incontrovertible. New church buildings were built on or very near the same site about every hundred years after that, slowly and steadily expanding until the current building was built about 100 years ago. It was built to seat 400 but chances are good that it will not hold so many on just any given Sunday soon. The average worshipping attendance is dramatically smaller than it was 100 years ago. The congregation now works with our local UMC’s and Rev. Helen Byholt-Lovelace in a shared youth ministry. It will survive, but in a leaner form and required by the times to a habit of constant adaptation, with less room for catastrophic errors.

Pastor Helen is not introduced to this sweeping history of church and land by accident. She stands as an important witness to God’s work at this moment in its history and in her role keeping careful watch over the final chapter of our sabbatical time. Let me tell you about her, and about her husband Rev. Bill Lovelace.

Helen is an ordained deacon in the UMC who is originally from Norway. For the last 2 years she has served a three point charge mostly about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Before that she served with Bill in other contexts.

Bill is an American by birth. In 1991 he answered an invitation out of seminary to plant a congregation in Saint Petersburg, Russia- literally in the months after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. He would go on to found an additional congregation in a Russian speaking region of Crimea in Ukraine. Eventually as more churches were added and affiliated he would be named the Conference Superintendent of Ukraine. In time this responsibility would be handed off to Ukrainians and Bill became a Superintendent for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. (One interesting story about the refounding of Methodist congregations after the Soviet era included 2 sisters in Lithuania writing the German Methodists in the early 1990’s. The sisters had been a part of the last confirmation class before the church closed as Soviets took over. Decades later they wrote to indicate interest in restarting the Methodist movement in that country). 

Bill and Helen had our crew for breakfast on the 17th of May, Norway’s national holiday celebrating its constitution (imagine 4th of July, Memorial Day, and the Lapel World Fair rolled into one). It’s a day Norwegians relish from special breakfasts to parades, speeches, and special clothing such as the “bunad” for women. Joining us for breakfast was an intern of Helen’s, Lisa, from Germany. As we headed to the parade we were joined as well by a couple from Ukraine that are refugees from Bucha. Bill and Helen have been helping them feel welcome in a land that is not home, even as they suddenly have no home to which they can return.

(Helen in her bunad and Bill 2nd and 3rd from left with the crew on 17 Mai).

I was struck profoundly on the mainly happy occasion that “the end of the world” probably had a very different look to our new Ukrainian acquaintances. We had come, seeking a sort of an adventure and exploring the contours of the collapse of Christendom. They had come only after reaching the end of their own world as they knew it. Their world has ended definitively as they heard Russian soldiers in pretense  of the defense of Christendom and Russia, ransack their store as they hid in the basement. Their world was shattered with breaking glass and gunshots as friends and neighbors who were non-combatants were murdered in cold blood. 

With dramatically different agendas and experiences we had come to the end of the respective world as we knew it to this small town in Arctic Norway.

There, standing at- if not the end of the world, then the place I could see it from- stood Helen and Bill. They are clear eyed about challenges and pain around them, but holding to a unique and wonderful kind of hope and joy. As the children’s parade marched by us, Helen didn’t ask, but instructed our whole crew: we would join parade. And we did! 

Bill and Helen are joyful prophetic people and they kindled the hope within me that whatever the end of the world looks like, there will probably be United Methodists there.

It has been tempting at times to despair about the pain that refugees are experiencing as we meet them on streets and in stores. It has been tempting as well to get caught in fits of despair about the project that brought us to Norway, trying to answer questions relating to how the church can meet the shifts of the Secular Age. Often it seems like the words of realism I would bring back would be something like a) churches should get used to getting smaller and more marginalized, b) many churches will close, c) even congregations that try to adapt may simply not be able to survive no matter what they do d) attempts to secure political power and slow secularity will probably only prove destructive to Christian witness and dangerous to the dwindling number of Christians who remain. Even as all this swirls in my mind so too do the news stories of Christians caught up in scandals of secrecy and abuse, jockeying for power and privilege. Even as I love and believe in Jesus Christ, can I maintain my commitment to church? The despair, the questions, the frustrations within my heart are real. The pain of others and the apathy of the culture toward God and church alike is even more real.

 Yet on May 17, Bill and Helen reminded me of something crucial. If we are indeed coming to the end of an age and the dawn of a new one, the word of hope is that my people, the people called Methodists, will still be present as witnesses of Jesus Christ. In fact, later the realization occurred to me that this is probably exactly my calling. Perhaps I am to be someone like them, a character pointing to Jesus, waiting to welcome wanderers, waiting to invite others to join a parade of joy over and against the tears, terrors, and trials of this world as one age comes to a close and another dawns.

The thing we must remember as Christians is that we are witnesses of hope no matter where we find ourselves located in space or time. In the epistle to the Romans the Apostle Paul writes, “ we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings,because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (5:2-5 NIV).

As we prepare for return to Lapel I’m convinced that the difficulties of the present time are in their own way a gift. Our witness of Christ will be informed by them, and we ourselves by God’s grace and love can be shaped by them in deep ways which form our character. What we have as we observe the end of the old age and the beginning of whatever is to come is then a genuine hope. It is a hope contained in the durable character forged by the storms of our era and the love of God. Suffering gives way to perseverance, perseverance to character, and in graced character, witnesses of hope arise.

 I will spend a career watching the trends of secularity that I have witnessed in Norway  unfold in my native land. I will spend a lifetime scanning the horizon for end of this age, the end of this world and settlement and the birth of something new. I am now convinced that these trends will unfold in probably far deeper ways than I have experienced here, even in this most secular of countries. Just the same, I hold the conviction that there will be joyful, hope-filled witnesses of Jesus in this era, of which it is my happy destiny to be one. Therefore, come, let us go on together into the parade of history to the end of the age, through the ordeals ahead, confident that trial will give way to perseverance, perseverance to character, and character to hope in Jesus Christ. This I know, no matter what lies ahead, Jesus and his people will meet us there.