Wednesday, 9 January 2013

December 16 2012

Of Sense and Censuses

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” (Luke 2:1)

A census drove Joseph and Mary away from Nazareth, and down to Bethlehem where Jesus was born. More recently the results of the 2011 census have started to emerge. Whilst the number of foreign born residents has raised the ire of the traditional xenophobes others have focused on the changes in the area of religion, with close to 4 million less Britons identifying themselves as Christian when compared to the previous census. What does this all mean?

1. A census measures identification, not belief. What has happened is that 4 million people, who do not attend church and have no active faith, have preferred to identify themselves as “without religion”, rather than as “Christian”. From a Christian perspective, this decrease in merely nominal Christianity is to be seen as something positive.

2. Those who define themselves as “without religion” are still interested in spiritual matters, and many are open to finding out more about Jesus. The number of people who explicitly identify themselves as atheists remains low, considerably less than those who identify themselves as Jedi Knights!

Overall, the challenge of living in a diverse and pluralist society remain, and we will increasingly find ourselves surrounded by people from different religious backgrounds and those who choose not to follow a specific religion. God is shaking up the world and our country so that the mission field is not something we here about in exotic stories told by “missionaries” but what we meet when we open our door and walk out into the streets as people convinced that Jesus still is the only Lord and Saviour.

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