Peter Potter will be the fifteenth chaplain here since St Ursula's was built. When he arrives with Shareene this month, he will find us a very different congregation from the people Gilbert Sissons ministered to in 1906. Not different in our love of a good argument (the city archives show that there was a bitter conflict about what the original fund-raising committee should be called!), not very different in our background (though in 1906 the British and American embassies were more strongly represented, and passing tourists would make it a matter of course to seek out the English church on a Sunday), but different in our place in society.
This is a secular age, in Europe if not so much in America. People no longer assume that Sunday is a time for going to church, or even that Christmas has anything to do with the birth of Jesus. Here in Berne we have had to set up a Charitable Association because the tax laws no longer regard the church as gemeinnützig, serving the common good. In England, the current Charities Act recognizes "the advancement of religion", but notes that "religion" includes "(i) a religion which involves belief in more than one god, and (ii) a religion which does not involve belief in a god."
The church is not dead. Indeed, there are places where it thrives. In South Africa, Ireland or the Philippines, to give three examples, well over half the population attend church weekly. Very large "megachurches" continue to spring up, often led by a charismatic preacher with a distinctive message. Alpha Courses are well attended, and places as diverse as Taizé and Lourdes attract thousands of pilgrims. And even in "secular" countries, people expect the church to "be there" at weddings, funerals, and at national events.
But in Switzerland and Britain fewer than one person in six goes to church regularly, and in Sweden, fewer than one in twenty. The decline over the past fifty years has been dramatic. A recent survey claimed that in Britain only one young person in five knew there were four Gospel writers, and that their knowledge about the people mentioned in the Bible was rudimentary.
Jesus never told his followers that they had to go to church regularly, or memorize facts from the Bible, but his followers certainly did meet regularly for worship "on the Lord's day", and they certainly took a keen interest in the Bible - as much of it as existed at the time - searching it eagerly for insights into Jesus' ministry and his place in God's plan for us all. So why the decline?
Is it because there is a general belief that "the Bible is untrue" - a belief which has been stirred up by "campaigning atheists" (Richard Dawkins springs to mind!)? Perhaps Christians themselves have been responsible for furthering this belief, by reading the text as a dry historical textbook, and not as the story of God's saving work; by concentrating too much on the what and too little on the why.
Or is it because people do not care what the Bible is about - to them it is simply unnecessary? These people recognize that the Bible is not about how fossils got into rocks or about whether Solomon had seven hundred wives and built a splendid temple. It is about good and evil, and about the power of sinfulness. But they would say that what is good is merely what is efficient - the actions which lead to the survival of the human species.
Some of these people would go even further, and claim that religion has no place in modern society - remember the row about Nadia Eweida, the airline worker whose employers instructed her not to wear a cross, or the ill-fated EU constitution, with its reference not to God but to "principles of liberty, democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and for spiritual and moral values".
Yet the "spiritual and moral values" which the secularists hold dear are in fact God's values. The first letter of John sums up these values in the words "Beloved, let us love one another" (4:7), and hammers in the reason: "God is love" (4:16) - which is why we love God in our turn. This love is something far more than the "efficiency" of natural selection, just as the life which Jesus promised to give his followers "more abundantly" is something more than the life you take away from a mosquito when you squash it.
We all feel a need for "something more". We all have a sense of beauty, a need for something "spiritual". Even if only the most leisured of us can spend all day in art galleries, the poorest of us can nevertheless enjoy music, or sport, or the pleasures of conversation. But fewer and fewer of those who are searching "for something" come to find faith and salvation through Jesus Christ. This is our challenge - to use every means within our power to show people the riches of God's goodness. We need to listen to them, to understand their needs and the reasons they do not join us. Let us seek new ways to make Christ known in a world which not only does not know him, but no longer knows about him.
HD