April 2006: Death denying society

Rosalie Sayers said, “We live in a death-denying society which doesn’t want to talk about death.” Yet there are many wonderful stories about death, none more amazing than the birth, life, death and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Maybe it is because we are fair weather travellers who cannot face the thought of our own inevitable death or that of a friend or relative who has just received news of terminal illness.

Maybe it is fear. There is disturbing evidence that fear is increasingly dominating society, whether it be a political tool used to win elections or to hold on to power or is caused by the impact of terrorism, which pervades our lives and needs little to trigger the ugly side of human nature — racism, hatred and retribution. Perhaps the proverbial fear of the unknown is harder to handle in a world so full of anxiety about change, perceived societal degradation, or unacceptable value systems.

As I’ve said before, I certainly do not want to be a leader of dying church. With God’s help, I am playing my part to restore the hope and commitment of our members. I believe we can transform our lives and, in our actions, disprove the death of the church. I have been greatly encouraged by feedback to the Synod’s “Moving with God, transforming communities” vision statement as a path to a highly relational, networking, emerging 21st century movement of the Spirit.

We are certainly a Uniting Church which is still in the process of uniting. Some observers would argue that there has been little change over the almost 30 years since the union of the three traditions in 1977 and that death is inevitable.

However, I am convinced that there has been significant change in key areas such as the growth of our serving ministries (healing), and our prominence in political issues (social advocacy) and multiculturalism (inclusion rather than exclusion). These are hardly signs of a dying church in a death-denying society.

Nevertheless, we as a church need a greater contextual understanding and application of the gospel in what we do and say. Our context is a busy world, troubled by the muddiness of life and relationships; particularly, there is confusion about direction, hope, security and personal safety, each of which affects unity within the family as well as in our local and global communities.

A prominent outcome of these threatening issues is the growth of spirituality — the search for meanings in life; especially in unambiguous definitions. Yet the world is anything but a clearly defined model. We must constantly seek God’s wisdom to present the answers to all life’s problems.

Another outcome is fundamentalism. According to Professor Donna Ortusa, fundamentalism is a manifestation of fear. The challenges of the postmodern world frighten people, so they want to cling to the security of the past.

This is not the time to abandon ship, look backward or seek simplistic solutions. We must positively face the issues.

We must remember what the God of Easter continues to model for us. The church needs to remember the most powerful event in the Bible, the death and resurrection of Christ. If the church is to have unending life it must experience its own resurrection, its own transformation.

Easter is an opportune time to reflect on the theology of the cross, which Douglass John Hall says in his book, The Cross in Our Context, is “first of all a statement about God, and what it says about God is not that God thinks humankind so wretched that it deserves death and hell, but that God thinks humankind and the whole creation is good, so beautiful in its intention and its potentiality, that its actualisation, its fulfilment, its redemption is worth dying for.”