Neil McNicholas: The Church has a voice that is vital for us all

The first is usually trotted out when someone of the Church has expressed an opinion on something and especially when it has rattled a few consciences.

It misses the point that this is precisely what the Church is supposed to do. The root meaning of the words public and political are, respectively, “to do with the people” and “to do with citizens”, and arguably there is nothing the Church is more involved with than people – they are the reason it exists and are the object of its ministry whether spiritual, pastoral or moral.

The Church is called to be a herald, a voice to speak up for God and the things of God – a point I’ll come back to in a moment.

I often return to the words of Pope St Gregory the Great, in his Pastoral Rule, who condemned the priests of his time for failing in their ministry of leadership by not speaking out when things needed to be said and not defending their flocks against the influences of the world around them – and all for fear of losing favour with the people and settling for a quiet life. In the same way that we rely on the political party in opposition to be precisely that – the voice of opposition, so the Church and its leaders have a literally vital role in being, when necessary, a voice of opposition in the world.

It may not always be a voice that people want to hear, nor a message they may welcome, but that is no reason for Church leaders not to speak up.

No one is forcing their views on anyone else.

Those of no faith or of another faith can ignore what is said if they so choose, but Church leaders are as entitled as anyone else to voice their opinions and, more than that, they have a duty of faith to speak out when necessary – that is their role as heralds.

And this brings me back to the second of the chestnuts: that the Church is out of step with the modern world.

Yes, the Church needs to present its message, and to carry out its ministry, in what we might call a 21st century way, but that doesn’t mean to say that it has to compromise that message or ministry. In other words, we may have to “sell” in a 21st century market place, but we don’t have to “sell out” to our 21st century world.

There is a point in the Old Testament history of the Jewish nation when, in place of the rule of God – who until then had been their king – they demand an earthly ruler so they can be like the other nations around them.

Such was their unique relationship with God that they could never be like the nations around them and should never have wanted to be – but now they did. In demanding an earthly king, they compromised their relationship with God and sold out to the values of the world. They became just like everyone else.

That’s what people are expecting of the Church when they say that it’s out-of-step with the world and needs to modernise. It actually doesn’t need to. Being in-step implies uniformity and conformity, but the voice of the herald can’t be heard if it is no different to every other voice. There’s the old joke: “Ee, look at all those soldiers out-of-step with our Fred!” It’s Fred that gets noticed.

The Church isn’t window dressing; it isn’t the latest fad or the latest fashion; it isn’t HD this week and 3D the next.

Rather it possesses a 2,000-year-old history and tradition that has an implicit value in and of itself, one that cannot be compromised and doesn’t need to be.

It has a gospel message to “sell” to the world but which doesn’t require that it sells out to the world. And the bottom line is that it is answerable to a much higher authority for its stewardship of that history and tradition and ministry and message.

Two thousand years after it was founded, it is still around, which is more than can be said for all those other institutions that compromised their principles and moved with the times.