CHURCH PROBLEMS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20232, 16 February 1934, Page 4

CHURCH PROBLEMS.

Decline of Institutional Religion. CALL TO METHODISTS. (Special to the " Star.’’) WELLINGTON, February 15. "Can the modern man now safely dispense with organised religion? That is the vital question of the day,” declared the Rev C. Eaton, the newlyinducted president of the Methodist Church of New Zealand, when delivering his inaugural address at the opening of the annual Dominion Conference of the church. The decline of institutional religion, said Mr Eaton, presented the church with a real problem. A disquieting feature of modern Christianity was the fact not merely of diminished church attendance, but of the church’s declining prestige even in the eyes of those called by the name of Christians. There were so many church members to-day who failed to see any glory in the church, who no longer sought her courts with the eagerness of lovers. This curious situation within the ranks of those who had once owned allegiance to the church, was reflected also outside the church. While the majority of people lived in detachment from the church, an unprecedented deference was paid to i its spiritual aims. Social reform, philanthrophy, all the noblest influences at work in human life, were acknowledged to have their roots, their inspiration and example, in Jesus Christ. Vet the church was treated with indifference; organised religion was given the cold shoulder, was regarded even as a perversion of the spirit of primitive and real Christianity. Quite Another Thing. “But it is one thing to reform the church and quite another thing to reject it,” the president affirmed. “Doubtless there are those who, in Bernard Shaw’s phrase, ‘Have no use for institutional religion because their churches are their own souls,’ but for the large majority a religion that is only a spirit will soon become a vapour. That spiritual Christianity can exist apart from the church proves nothing. Would it have existed had there been no church? How long can it continue to exist with no church to teach it?" Declaring that institutional religion derived from Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and that the protest against it was really a protest against Christtianity, the speaker asserted that the church’s need to-day was for more fellowship, not less, and that whatever Others might do Methodists could not afford to stand aloof from that great fellowship called the Methodist Church. “Let us,” he urged, “get it firmly rooted into our conviction that the church of Jesus Christ is indispehsible to the maintenance and propagation of the Christian faith, and that to be cold to the church is to be disloyal to Christ and amounts to a betrayal of His cause. The church is the Body of Christ, without which His spirit must find only a limited and hampered expression in human affairs.”