Christ the Divine Shepherd  

Penn Hills/Monroeville 

Everywhere in church circles today, you hear a lament: Our churches are emptying. We've lost our youth. This generation no longer knows the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how?  The church is becoming ever more marginalized.

That's the situation pretty much everywhere within the secularized world today. Why is this happening? Is the problem mainly with the churches themselves? Sexual abuse? Cover-up? Poor liturgies? Poor preaching? Are churches too liberal? Are churches too conservative? I suspect it's some combination of all of these, but single out one issue here to highlight,  Jesus told us that it's difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.   No doubt, that's a massive part of our present struggle.

So, I'm suggesting that what we need today is a new kind of saint, an individual who can model for us practically what it means to live out the Gospel in a context of affluence and secularity. Why this? One of the lessons of history is that often genuine religious renewal does not come from think-tanks, conferences, and church synods, but from graced individuals – saints, like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Clare, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius, or other such religious figures can reshape our religious imagination.

The new lies elsewhere, that what needs fixing in the church will not be mended simply by patching the old. What's needed is a new religious and ecclesial imagination.   Today is not so much a crisis of faith as a crisis of imagination. No Christians before us have ever lived within this kind of world. What will this new kind of saint, this new St. Francis, look like? I honestly don't know. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. We have no answer yet, at least not one that's held much fruit in the mainstream culture.

That's not surprising.  The type of imagination that reshapes history isn't easily found. Here's our quandary: We're better at knowing what to do once we get people into a church than we are at knowing how to get them there. Why? Our weakness lies not in our theological imagination.  What we lack are saints on the ground, women, and men who, in a passion and fidelity that's at once radically faithful to God even as we walk in an affluent and highly secularized world.

And such new persons will appear. Every time the world believes it has buried Christ, the stone rolls back from the tomb; every time the cultural ethos declares that the churches are on an irrevocable downward slide,  the Spirit intervenes, and there's soon an about-face; every time we despair, thinking that our age can now longer produce saints and prophets, some Augustine or Francis comes along and shows that our generation, like times of old, can too have its saints; and  Every time our imaginations run dry, as they have now, we find that our scriptures are still full of fresh insight.                                                                                      

We may lack imagination, but we don't lack hope. Christ promised we would not be orphaned, and that promise is sure.  God is still with us, and our age will produce its prophets and saints. What's asked of us at the moment is biblical patience, to wait on God.  Christianity may look tired and spent to a culture within which affluence and sophistication are its current gods, but hope is already beginning to show its face: As secularization marches unswervingly forward with its affluence and sophistication, we're already starting to see many men and women who have found ways to become post-affluent and post-sophisticated. These will be the new religious leaders who will teach us, and our children, how to live as Christians in this unique situation.