Looking Back: We are living in a tremendous time 

From February 1964

George MacLeod in 1975

“We are living in a tremendous time”

- Said Dr George F MacLeod in a broadcast in December

This is a terrifying and yet tremendous time in which to live. Folk are falling away from the Church. It isn’t the rogues or the lecherous who are falling away. It is the innumerable nice people.

Terrifying – if this is indeed God’s world: and His Word and Work alone can cleanse us.

But it also begins to emerge that we live in a tremendous time. We begin to know why folk stay away – that there is something to be said for them.

Why? Because it has become too prosey, the ordinary church. Too occupied with the edges – not enough concerned with the central challenge. It is vociferous about gambling – but skirts away from genocide, or murder by Bomb Tests.

It is vociferous about five hundred babies dead through an unintended tragedy in thalidomide. But somehow or another it skirts around the hundreds of thousands of babies we have already allowed to be done to death, in this and succeeding generations by nuclear tests – at least that is the figure of the Atomic Energy Commission in USA.

It is loud about comparative trifles …… indecisive about gigantic horror.

So folk, go and clean the car rather than listen to heroics about Herod and the murder of the Holy Innocents…. When Herod was such an amateur at the game, compared with us.

But it is tremendous (isn’t it?) that we begin to realise it is so, that we begin to realise we are living in a climax into which ‘Churchianity’ will never fit again.

We are no longer living in liberal days when we can afford to deliberate.

We are living in radical days when we must get down to roots; and quickly.

Everything moves into the present tense.

We have been catapulted out of the stratosphere of high ideals on to the hard surface of our immediate now. And the exciting thing is that this is the mood in which the Bible is written.

The Bible is not, and never was, a book about principles and ideals. It is about persons and immediacies.

The central sickness of our time is that Christians have succeeded in making the Cross of Christ reasonable and sane and right way up – though God all along has assured us it is foolish and weak and upside down.

The exciting thing is that we begin to know as plain fact that the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men…..and that Love is the only Power.

The exciting thing is that we can begin to preach Christ crucified again as the only sanity.

October 1938: The Iona Community - What it is, and What it is not by George MacLeod

Iona 1949

June 1975: Macleod at 80

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