I had an interesting conversation with Nick Franks on his and his wife Mairi’s podcast – Into the Pray. We did not agree on everything as we looked into the decline of the church in the UK in general and Scotland in particular…
You can hear it here – https://www.buzzsprout.com/900157/6131554
This is Nick’s intro:
This week on Into the Pray we are very grateful to talk with David Robertson (aka The Wee Flea), former senior minister of St. Peter’s Church in Dundee and now Director of Third Space in Australia.
David and Nick produced some videos a couple of years back about some critically important issues relating to both the Church and the socio-cultural disintegration that we are all witnessing today. (You can find those via Nick’s YouTube channel).
In today’s podcast, David says, “Scotland has descended and secularised quicker than any nation in history.”
If this is true – and it may well be – the British Church need to recognise that a proportional response of humility, repentance and prayer is the gracious, God-given order of the day, not harking back to previous times in our history where a genuine call to repentance may or may not have been issued or nationally observed.
During the reign of King George 73 years ago, marriage still meant in British law what God says it means, millions of people hadn’t been torn limb from limb via the horrors of abortion and our children weren’t being told that they could select their gender or experiment safely with pornography – we have to get real!
David and Nick may not quite see eye to eye on the place and responsibility of the Church in this particular conversation but they do both agree that until we corporately “come to the end of ourselves” (the exact focus of the book, Body Zero) there can be no hope for reformation, renewal or revival.
What’s Gone Wrong? The State of the Church in Scotland today
A Discussion on Christian Feminism
Sadly, so very, very true. What has happened to the God respecting Scotland which I grew up in?? 😢😭
Perhaps what happened in Scotland was that, in everyday life , the believers did not want to state what they assumed to be the obvious while the rest liked and approved of the believers to the happy extent that any contradiction might seem rude.
An interesting but confusing discussion. I think you could both have done with more time as it seemed to me there was an element of talking past each other. More time might have brought the threads closer together. I could be wrong, but I thought Nick brought the discussion back to reform because he had been talking about the wider (including RC) visible church, unconcerned with the invisible church. I don’t know Nick’s theology though, so I could be completely wrong?
Ps. If this means you are back in the UK for a while, I hope you have a nice time back.
I’m not – we did it by zoom! And Nick was not talking about the R C Church. Read his material and you will see what he is getting at. I don’t share the view that it is good to close down the church (visible) nor do I share the view that calling for Reformation is something new – it happens all the time!
Greetings,
Yes, we ran out of time on this episode and I agree there wasn’t really a meeting of minds.
However, please let me clarify:
1) The call for the “church” to stop/close (as I’m strongly arguing) is not against Hebrews 10:25 in any way – quite the opposite. In the wider context of the podcast conversation, I mentioned this was a prophetic word that landed with me in great force in January 2020 – and that then happened . Again, in the context of the conversation, this is comparable with David’s comments about his predicted anticipation of Scotland’s descent into transgenderism etc etc. (You can watch the 2 hour film about this call to the Church to stop, “The Draft – A Conscription of Conscience”, via my website (www.Firebrandnotes.com).
2) On this point, there’s no need to distinguish between the visible/invisible church. Of course there is a difference but our current situation doesn’t require anyone to call the perfected/eternal/timeless Church to action! The current visibility of the Church isn’t negated by the eternal invisibility of the Church. Obviously both are inextricably connected. Thinking along the lines of not addressing the visible church in this way – because of it’s timeless invisibility – would have been like Jesus and His men having nothing specific to say to the Church when they walked the planet. But they addressed both; this is the point.
3) The main concern here is that I stand by my point in my conversation with Andrea Williams the week before where I explain that it is a completely false assumption that it’s better for the unsaved (and, indeed, saved) population of Britain to have a church building to trundle into during their COVID-19 distress. “Yeah, let’s turn to the church during our dilemma because we can be really confident of hearing about the true Jesus Christ, can’t we? We can be guided by a legit, born-again disciple/leader…can’t we?” NO! This is the bloody chaos of the Church that it means nothing to be a Christian, nothing to follow – or love – Jesus. This is the apex of the disgrace of the current state of the Church: it is not faithful to proclaim/display Jesus Christ, the coming King, as He really is.
I think Jesus is concerned about that more than me or anyone else. What a joke to continue to argue for the perpetuation of that which is causing the problem.
As I clearly explained in the show notes of the podcast, it follows that any previous (supposed) chit chat of reform, renewal or revival in previous decades, is completely irrelevant. What has the supposed “all the time” chat of reform – dare I say true repentance – got to do with anything if it has never been genuine? Or if it was never observed?
Again, this would be like saying there was no need for Hosea because Jeremiah was “banging on about it all the time”.
David, I argue that rather than “reform” and repentance being something that’s talked about all the time, it is in fact the very heart reality of the Western Church that is utterly missing NOW, and throughout the last however many centuries, and that remains the “one thing” that would actually result in the resurrection to which you refer and like for.
For anyone who’s actually interested, I’ve written 80,000 words about this.
Perhaps we can continue the conversation to avoid any more confusion.
Pax,
Nick Franks,
Ah, okay.