WHY ARE CHURCHES EMPTY?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 5

WHY ARE CHURCHES EMPTY?

Sir,-One always wants to applaud a poor show when the participants have done their best, but I am afraid one could scarcely accord such charity to the participants in the recent discussion broadcast from Christchurch, "Why are the Churches Empty?" However sincere the members of the panel may have been they were not competent to handle the subject. They dealt with incidentals, and failed entirely to get down to fundamentals. We have all felt the discomfort of hard pews, but hard seats don’t deter thousands of spectators from going to football matches. We all realise that. a generation reared on magazines and newspaper articles as a literary diet must find the King James Version of the Bible difficult to grasp, but surely that is not an insuperable difficulty for the people of "a country that has the highest standards of education in the world." A world survey shows that apathy is the root cause of irreligion, a want of interest in anything worthwhile. Religion, culture, and art are all similarly afflicted. In how many of our suburbs or provincial towns are to be found flourishing dramatic, music and. art societies, and where they are to be found, the few always carry the burden. And again at trade union or political meetings do° we find men and women crowding in? Perhaps they do on a special occasion, but so also do they crowd into Church on important occa"sions. Apathy is the deadliest of diseases in our religious and social structure. The motto of the apathetic is "we couldn't care less," they like being apathetic, to be otherwise would mean having to do something and pre-eminently that is what Christianity demands — doing something without expecting self-profit, and that has no appeal for moderns.

P.

RYND

(Auckland).