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There is a beautiful village church church one hour´s walk from my home. I make it a "stopping point" on my usual walk. It´s a beautiful landmark on a romantic rise to be seen many miles far, far away. It´s a Lutheran state church and I do not subscribe on the teachings of the state church to the effect that infants baptized (or sprinkled) at the font have been born again and saved forever. On the contrary I believe that many members of that church (abt. 80% of our population) will be lost forever if they don´t turn to Christ for salvation.
However, I don´t gleefully like to see our many state churches being bombed by terrorists. It is a fact, hard to believe though, that within the frame work of the Lutheran church Denmark has had times of awakenings, and the Lord has used many a Lutheran minister as His chosen tool for bringing hardened sinners to repentance. Today this is mostly history. And so the Lutheran churches remind me of the fact that such awakenings have occurred in the past. In my parents´ ,or even more so, in my grandparents´time.
So I would sometimes at this stop go into the empty church, take a rest on one of the pews, meditate, pray or I may even sing a hymn from a hymn book always handy. By the way, we have a real treasure of hymns in the Lutheran hymn book ranking among the best in the world. Some have been translated from English, still more from German, but we also have a huge number of good hymn writers of our own. Many from the days of the reformation.
Why do I say all this? Because even in 2011, despite the apostasy all over, I may within that "dead" frame work find a room or meeting place where I meet other Danish countrymen not to fellowship, because there is as a rule no spiritual fellowship, but to get an opportunity to point to Jesus Christ as the only Savior of our lost souls and to tell them that their saving point of reference is not the font nor the Communion, but Him and Him alone. The strange thing is that you may be bold about it, for the state church boasts of the fact that its room is big enough for that. Its room is also big enough for the most abominable heresies. So it´s a room only, not a church in the New Testament sense.
Søren Kierkegaard,
our great thinker from the 19
th century, exposed the religious self-delusion of the "christened" Denmark and warned against the complacent ministers who mocked God by playing a game called Christianity, sanctimoniously declaimed without the reality of discipleship. He was a Lutheran himself, but was the black sheep of the Lutheran family. However, the room there was big enough to let him voice his prophetic messages and his writings went over the whole world after his death in 1855 (42 years old).
I can´t get away from Billy Graham´s words, "The church has become a mission field instead of a mission force!" If he is right, and I think he is, let us be bold about our testimony, if we have a self-experienced testimony, inside and outside the church walls, no matter what kind of church we happen to talk about! But this is always a dangerous thing to do, Søren Kierkegaard warned, but do we have any other alternative? What is the option?
-jn-
April 20, 2011
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