But what chance did the Gospel have when it was believed only by the old? What chance did it have when it was associated at every turn with yesterday’s empires? I was glad my guide had stayed outside. I had been trying to convince him that Christianity was a great adventure. But this? As I joined him outdoors after the service, I found myself thinking that if this were a fair example of Chinese Christianity, then the government would have an easy job of snuffing it out. All it needed was one little poof.
This seems at odds with some of Andrew's previous comments
(such as "But Petroff and I had learned one thing right at the beginning. It is never safe to call a church a puppet—no matter how dead, no matter how subservient and temporizing it may appear on the surface. It is called by God’s name, it has God’s eye upon it, at any moment He may sweep the surface away with the purifying wind of His Spirit.")
But I think the difference is that Churches can bow to a sort of cultural-conservationism where we evade the fresh, the exciting and the new in favour if the beige, the safe and the monotone. This links to Andrew's comments about his attitude towards finance:
"I saw that this was part of a whole pattern of poverty into which we had fallen, a dark, brooding, pinched attitude that hardly went with the Christ of the open heart that we were preaching to others."
This attitude, essentially, is lack of excitement, joy and instead indifference and passivity, which is terrible for the Church, especially when read in the context of Andrew's comments about persecution:
"Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe."
If we are not prepared to spend our time, money and energy in modernising the material and cultural fabric of our Churches to welcome in different generations or cultures then we cannot expect those who are alienated by these things to take the Gospel seriously.
