Address by David Millikan to SCM Friends at the University of Canberra

My first encounter with the SCM takes me back to my days at Monash University in the years prior to 1976. I was in the Evangelical Union and we had a very active dialogue with the SCM. It was in those encounters with SCMers that I really began to cut my teeth on theological discussion. I found myself somewhat drawn to the SCM, for reasons which had less to do with theology and more to do with the fact they engaged in their theological discussion at The Vicarage, which was the Pub down the road. In those days the SCMers smoked and drank and this, I must confess, was extremely appealing to me at the time.  It set them apart from my more austere brethren in the Evangelical Union.

It was my experience that the SCMers were interested in the broader philosophical dimensions of Christian thought and theology. I was attracted to these interfaith dialogues, in particular I was extremely interested in the questions surrounding the struggle to understand the nature of evil. In fact I find myself in the situation where some of my Evangelical brethren (at least some of the more fundamentalist factions) now regard me as something of a renegade. Although as far as I can see, I have remained relentlessly conservative in my theology.

In the spirit of the SCM capacity for spirited and wide-ranging discussion I thought that I would venture a few generalisations. Now these may sound excessive but they are my views about the way I see the situation in Australia at the moment in relation to the Christian Church. We are surely at a very interesting stage in the development of Christianity in this country. Sometimes I think I understand what is going on, and then things will happen, and I’ll think to myself, “No, I don’t”. I’ve been in a fairly good position to be able to take a broad look at what has been going on in Australia.  This was especially true during my time at the ABC, where I was in the great position of being able to be on speaking terms with a number of prominent leaders of the major Christian denominations. It was also during this time that the charismatic movement came to prominence, not just in its capacity to generate large organizations, but also by beginning to put forward spokespeople who had the capacity to speak and argue positions. I also found myself in the wonderful position of being required as part of my task, to relate to the leaders of the Buddhist and Islamic communities and encourage them to find ways of developing a voice and presence in  the media. It was a position that some of my Christian brethren found a little to understand.  I found it necessary to point out that I was not appointed to the position of Head of Christian Broadcasting but “Religious” Broadcasting which meant I had a responsibility to encourage the presence of all significant religious bodies in Australia.

The Siege Mentality of the Major Denominations

I think there is a very paradoxical situation a foot at the moment in Australian Christianity. I was at the Charles Sturt University’s St Mark’s graduation ceremony the other night for an impressive body of graduates from mainly post-graduate degrees and I said then that this presented a sort of paradox: Because on the one hand, the major denominations in Australia are showing certain signs of death. In fact, the major denominations are dying. That is the reality of the situation. I wouldn’t have said that two or three years ago and I had to first pluck up my courage enough to say it publicly about eighteen months ago. The reality is that for thirty years the numbers of people attending church have been declining. The best we can say, and I have fairly spirited arguments with the likes of Gary Bouwmer and other sociologists, is that the decline is not as bad as what it used to be. And I think that is probably true.  But all of the major denominations are struggling.  Although the Charismatic movement presents an exception and I will talk about that later.

Generally, what you see as you move around bureaucracies of the mainline denominations are organisations under extraordinary stress. There is a fairly consistent pattern of the realisation of real estate, shrinking of the bureaucracies, various re-structuring schemes. If ever there is a word that sounds death, and you know this better in Canberra better than any one else, it is “re-structure”. If you bring that word into a department, people cringe because they know that all hell is about to break loose around their ears and their working environment will never be the same. That same sort of pressure is present in many of the Churches that I encounter. In many places I see a sort of siege mentality developing and a shrinking back from some of the more active engagements with the world outside. When you are under threat, and you see the base slowly contracting around you, it’s a brave person who responds to that be leading the charge out. In many cases, people continue to consolidate and look to secure the base. That’s what I see happening in the Catholic and Uniting churches and many of the Anglican Dioceses; a shrinking back from their commitment from some of the more radical causes like social justice. Also, in a way, I see a gap developing between the bureaucracies and the parishes out there. I think quite a few church leaders are struggling to maintain a sense of cohesion.

Division, Ecumenism and Unity

What is also remarkable about the Australian Christian scene, in my experience since the late 1970’s, is that it is more divided now than it’s perhaps ever been. The ecumenical movement is dead in Australia. It is a sad rump of what it used to be. It represents a shrinking number of Australian Christians.  The National Council of Churches, for example, in a number of the state branches has been reduced to one or two people in an office with their only funding coming from the Christmas Bowl appeal and it is difficult for them to see a future beyond this. In a sense, the ecumenical movement has done its work at that upper level, the structural level. It initiated a series of interchanges between the denominations that broke down that very sad division between Catholics and Protestants and so forth. That argument has been won. It was won twenty years ago.

When I say that Christians are more divided now than I have experienced for many years, I refer to divisions which are of a different kind. They’re more elusive but in many ways just as profound. They’re not vertical divisions that separate one huge organization from another but they are horizontal divisions which exist within denominations themselves. For example, the difference between the Sydney Diocese and other Anglican Dioceses in Australia is not diminishing. It is getting greater. These divisions are not structural but tend to be differences that have to do with politics, theological, cultural, social and even stylistic differences.  The divisions this creates can be profound to the point that they simply don’t talk to each other.  If you approach these situations from the old ecumenical model it is difficult to work out what the differences actually are.  But nevertheless they have created these quite profound gaps. The Charismatic movement, for example, cuts across a number of the denominations and has created great differences. The difference between the Catholic Diocese in Melbourne under Archbishop Pell and more liberal diocese elsewhere creates a entire cultural difference in things such as the schools, the capacity for tolerating diversity of opinion within its own ranks and so on. I am hoping that some smart commentator will write a magic article or book which explains more of this situation and the new divisions being experienced in Australian Christianity.

 That task has some similarity in my mind to what happened on the streets of Seattle when the World Bank was meeting there and that strange conglomeration of people got together in protest. I watched that with great interest.  I found it fascinating that people like Pat Buchannan, the right-wing U.S. presidential candidate found themselves in the same company with radical feminist separatists, radical greenies, anti-abortionists, anti-capital punishment advocates. This strange amalgam of people on the streets: all of them fiercely attacking the underlying philosophies of the evil of globalism. What is it that is bringing these things together? Just as you think that you’ve got the common factors that cause these people to coalesce, it begins to break apart again.  I find the situation in Australian Christianity somewhat similar.

The Charismatic Movement

So how are Christians relating to the situation in Australia? Well, lets have a look at the Charismatic movement. That is a very interesting phenomenon, the fastest growing section of Christianity. In fact, you might say the only rapidly growing part of Christianity in Australia. It is beginning to break up into huge conglomerations, churches that have got budgets in the millions, which have got congregations in the thousands. Three, four, five thousand people arriving on Sunday morning. These are massive businesses with their own bus lines, publishing houses, schools and their own access to television and radio programs. I know of one charismatic church in Sydney that is presently negotiating to buy a television network in the U.S. An Australian group moving into the U.S.! This same group claim to be the largest publisher of “Christian” music in the world.  The Christian City Churches which began with Phil Pringle in Dee Why is now opening churches in the US, Europe, Asia and London.  This is a different initiative to the missionary endeavours of the past.  It is a process of church planting and denominational growth outside of Australia.

So, what is the charismatic movement actually saying? What style, what theology is there behind them? First, let me say one thing, I’m going to say some critical things so I want to cover myself here. It has been my habit during my life to go to the nearest Church to my front door. It saves me a lot of problems and it also puts me in some very interesting situations. [audience laughter]  I am a  Uniting Church person so it has always been to a Uniting Church that I have ended up going. [more laughter] My grandfather was a Methodist minister, so I’ve got to. And I am a Uniting Church minister, after all. During my last sojourn here in Canberra it meant that I was going to O’Connor Uniting for about seven years. I was there during the last years of Harry Wescott’s era and it was a period when Harry was really pushing it, right at the edge. He was running big services at the Lakeside Hotel and people were being healed and there were all sorts of things afoot. I liked being there, I liked the energy, I liked the sense of activity and the sheer sense of exuberance of it all. But as a personality, I am not suited to the Charismatic world. I cannot put my hands above my head; even now I can’t do it! I can’t even clap when someone tells me to. It’s just my style and my nature. There were also parts of the whole theological environment of the charismatic movement that I found tremendously superficial and unsatisfying. In the end, it really was not addressing the fundamental issues. What I see in the charismatic movement is a type of response to the sense of decline that is present in Australia and in Western cultures generally.  At this stage, and I may well be in the process of changing my mind, I do not see the Charismatic movement as essentially evangelistic because it is not changing the statistics. I think it is bringing in the disenchanted Christians who can no longer endure the dullness of suburban Christianity as it operates at present in many of the small churches which make up the majority of the mainline denominational congregations.

Answering the Big Questions of Life

The question which I believe the Charismatic movement, and indeed all Christians, are dealing with in the West is a deep cultural sense of unease about the progress of humanity. As we move out of the twentieth century, I think the first question Christians need to ask is: “Where is God?” What is happening when so much that is evil has occurred in the last 100 years? When we have proceeded through a century that on one side presents a picture of the most extraordinary human advances and astonishing achievement and on the other side has been the most barbaric period in human history? And out of the very centre of Christendom and Germany and Europe has emerged these great acts of horror. In the declining years of the twentieth century it just seemed to get worse and worse...the proliferation of these horrors in East Timor, in Myanmar, Rwanda, Cambodia, The Sudan, the Western Sahara and so on and on. This is the extraordinary dilemma that we human beings face as we move together into the twenty-first century with no real sense that we had dealt with the issue at all. The desultory nature of the debates that have occurred in the last couple of years have to a large extent avoided the ultimate question, and yet we can’t as individuals.  We Christians are caught up in this. Because I think that many people believe that God has somehow left us to work out our own salvation in this world, and the picture is not at all pretty.  In fact we should have been leading the way in addressing it and giving some perspective on the nature of evil and its role in human history.  If you put this deep philosophical uncertainty about the goodness of human beings together with the decline of the middle class in Western Societies, then I believe we have the beginnings of an explanation of the Charismatic movement.  Of all the Christian expressions in Australia, it is the one which provides a form of assurance in this matter.

It works something like this. If you have a gnawing sense that God has left us to fend for ourselves? That God is still alive? If you have any doubts - and we all do as Christians - about what has happened to God? Why isn’t God protecting us? Why isn’t God more active?  Why don’t we feel God? Why don’t we have that sense of God in our activity and human history? How do you demonstrate that? Now for many people, the church has lost the capacity to do that intellectually, and within its own worship much of it is  dull and emotionally unmoving. Our intellectual life has declined; I reckon that the standard of sermons in our churches are just awful. How do you demonstrate that sense of God? Well, the charismatic movement has an answer, because you can go and you can feel it, you can see people being healed, you can see miraculous events occurring. I think that it is an illusory sort of joy because it demands persistent re-affirmation one Sunday after the next. And it doesn’t feed or provide you with that intellectual framework that allows you to address the big questions of life.  But it is an answer and for many people it is the only thing that the Church is offering.

Pluralism

One of the things I think that the Christian Church is struggling with generally is the issue of Pluralism. I think that this has been profoundly disturbing to a lot of Christians. By this, I mean that the increasingly pluralist nature of Australian society has produced what Robert Bellah has so superbly spelt out in his Habits of the Heart. There has been an acceleration of individualism and isolation for many people and it has broken up the shared patterns of understanding in our society. It is increasingly difficult to find a common ethical or philosophical language that can be used to converse with people outside our own framework. The capacity and the manner to which we can speak in society as Christians has changed. I’ll give you two examples:

i. Reincarnation

I think reincarnation is one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. According to my research, in the 1920’s around about 3 to 5% of Australians believed in reincarnation. It was seen as an exotic and somewhat bizarre Eastern idea. Now, the number of people who say they believe in “some form” of reincarnation is up around 30%.  It is one of the fundamental beliefs of the whole New Age movement. Now the implications of that shift in thought are quite profound. Take this for example, some years ago I made some films in Africa, during the Famines in The Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia.  I found myself filming people dying and in desperate circumstance with and view to bringing these films back to raise money for aid projects. This used to trouble me enormously, the ethical complexities of it used to weigh on me. The film crew and I would drink champagne on the eleven-hour Qantas plane flight from Perth to Harare. Within 24 hrs of leaving Perth, it occurred on several occasions that we would be in the dust filming people dying. Now you can do that for a while: there is a sort of momentum to the thought: “Yes, I am helping these people. I’m raising money for them.” But after a while it just eats into you and you’ll seek urgent discussions with anyone who will talk to you about it. I can remember a night with some New Age friends, who were firm believers in reincarnation, who tried to pacify me by saying “Look, don’t worry. This is their Karma. The fact that this is happening to them now is evidence that they are living out in this world the consequences of their former lives.”  It struck me clear as a bell that here we had this basic philosophical divide, because that belief robbed my friends of any moral outrage in the face of injustice in this world. This is a profound difference in worldview. It says in Hebrews “It is appointed onto man once to die and then the judgement”. There is no point of contact between Christianity and reincarnation. You cannot believe the two: they are philosophically opposed. They present profoundly different understandings about the nature of people and holding one or other of those views will influence our attitudes to welfare, war, education, justice and all manner of things. So how do we as Christians converse in this changing environment? For some Christians they find it quite threatening. I have got to say that I find it quite exhilarating.

ii. Evangelism

Every church has a Department of Evangelism. Now I would argue that that is no longer appropriate. In a pluralist environment the thing that threatens pluralism most is the fear that in a pluralist environment, someone will begin to assert themselves as having the answer for everyone. And this many people believe, has been the cause of the problems of the twentieth century.  It is the arrogant assertion of dominant meta-stories like Marxism and national socialism and those theories that claim a triumphalist attitude to all the people around them. This is the horror of fundamentalism.  It becomes so preoccupied by the virtue of its truth that it will destroy people in the cause of spreading it.  Pluralism understands this.  And Pluralism is here to stay, and is seen as a virtue within our society.  We Christians have now got to accommodate ourselves to this environment. It is for this reason that I say that it is no longer appropriate for us to simply step into a society with a view to plundering souls, even though theologically we may have an understanding of the truth of our position.

Humility and Cultural Exchange

The Christian response to pluralism requires a form of humility. Let me tell you of a suggestion I made within my own denomination.  It was not perhaps put in the right way, and it will come as no surprise that it fell on deaf ears.  I suggested that we should disband its Department of Evangelism on two grounds. Firstly, that the department had over two generations pursued fifteen or twenty schemes for evangelism and none of them had stopped the decline in church numbers.  So on this ground alone it could be said that the organized schemes of evangelism promoted by the department had not worked.  Secondly, in the light of what I have been saying about pluralism, that evangelism as a pointed exercise in winning others to Christ was no longer appropriate. I have got to be careful here, because I am not suggesting that we Christians should turn our backs on the idea that we have a responsibility to our fellow Australians outside the Church to tell them about the good news in Christ.  I was talking about the appropriateness of having a department set up in the way of most departments of Evangelism.  So what I thought would be better was for us to use the resources of the Evangelism Department to establish a Department of Cultural Exchange. The new department could set up a series of events where people who were significant thinkers, operators or players from outside the church could be brought into dialogue with the best minds that the church could produce. We would put the mettle on our theologians. Now, this would be a serious challenge to many of our theologians who tend to be trained in specialist theological tasks and have never really been exposed to that sort of active dialogue to the world outside.

We could begin to set up this process and in the process demonstrate a couple of things. Firstly, to demonstrate to Australia that we were back in the business of entering into discussion and recognising that we are addressing fundamental issues shoulder to shoulder with other people in Australian society. We could do this without the sense of us taking a superior position, but instead saying: “We have something to say and we want to discuss with you the implications of what we believe in these matters.” Secondly, that it would stimulate within the life of the church a sense of enthusiasm and energy again about some of the great issues that were being addressed within the life of the denomination.

David Millikan
7th June 2000 (edited transcript)