Popular Christianity

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. ROMANS 12:2

In 1887 Catherine Booth gave a series of addresses in the West End of London that were published as Popular Christianity. The title was not a compliment. By popular Christianity she meant the religion that respectable Victorian society found comfortable: a Christianity that fitted neatly around dinner parties, careers, fashionable dress and social ambition, that asked very little and offended no one. She had preached for years to exactly the people who practised it, in drawing rooms and West End halls, and she did not spare them. The same concern runs through all her earlier books, and it is from those, in the Ochorus library, that this chapter mostly draws.

The world has not changed

Her central argument was simple and uncomfortable. In Aggressive Christianity she observed that the church of her day provoked almost no opposition, and drew a sobering conclusion. “It is a bad sign for the Christianity of this day that it provokes so little opposition,” she said. “When the Church and the world can jog along comfortably together, you may be sure there is something wrong.” The world, she reasoned, is exactly what it was when it crucified Christ and stoned Stephen. If Christians lived as those early believers lived, the world would hate them as it hated them. “It is the Church that has altered, not the world.”

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. JOHN 15:19

Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. LUKE 6:26

This was not a plea for Christians to go looking for trouble. It was a diagnosis. A Christianity that costs nothing and offends no one has probably stopped saying what Christ said.

Selfishness moved indoors

Her deepest charge against popular Christianity was that it was simply selfishness in religious clothing. In The World’s Need she asked her hearers what they had done for Christ in the past week. They had read their Bibles more, they said, and prayed more, and asked God for great things — and all of it, she pointed out, was for themselves. “I am afraid a great deal of the religion is a mere transition of the selfishness of the human heart from the world to religion,” she said. The same person who once sought pleasure, comfort and advancement in the world now sought spiritual pleasure, comfort and advancement in the church, and had never actually stopped living for himself.

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 1 JOHN 2:16

Conformity

In the second of her Exeter Hall addresses she took up Paul’s words about not being conformed to this world, and applied them without softening. She had spent hours after meetings counselling people who wept and prayed for a closer walk with God, and then found, at the dinner table afterwards, that they had no intention of changing anything. They would not give up their conformity, she said, even to the extent of a dinner party. They would not have their domestic arrangements disturbed, even if the salvation of their children and servants depended on it. They wanted Christ, but only if He would come into their houses and take things as He found them.

And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. MARK 4:19

She noticed, too, how respectable the things were that did the choking. The parable does not speak of shameful things, but of cares, riches and the desire for other things. Most people who lose their spiritual life, she thought, do not lose it to vice. They lose it to comfort.

Hot or cold

Her remedy was a call to wholeheartedness. In How to Work for God with Success she reserved her strongest language for the lukewarm professor, whom she called a laughing-stock to hell. She told her hearers to be hot. They would burn the fingers of the Pharisees, and be called fools and fanatics, as Paul was. “God likes hot saints,” she said. Hot people are never a trouble to hot people; it is the cold who are troubled by them.

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. REVELATION 3:15

Weighing it

Her diagnosis has worn well; her particular rules have worn less well. She was a woman of the Victorian holiness movement, and she drew the lines where that movement drew them: against fashionable dress, card-playing, the theatre, dancing, wine and a good deal of polite society. Some of those lines were wise, and some had more to do with her culture than with Scripture. A reader in another century and another country should not take her list as God’s list. The principle is binding; the particular fences are not.

There is also the danger that a call to separation from the world becomes a separation from people, and holiness turns inward and proud. That was not her own practice. She did not withdraw from worldly people; she went into their drawing rooms to preach to them. Her nonconformity was a freedom to be different among them, not a wall to keep them out.

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. 2 CORINTHIANS 6:17

What remains is the question she put to her own generation, and it has not lost its edge. Does your Christianity cost you anything? Does it offend anyone? If Christ were to come into your house this week and take charge of your timetable, your money, your friendships and your ambitions for your children, what would have to change? If the honest answer is nothing much, she would say, it is not because you have arrived. It is because you have not yet begun.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List the three things in your life most likely to choke the word — not sins, but cares, riches and other desires. Which has grown fastest in the past year?

2. Ask whether your prayers and Bible reading are for yourself alone. Give some of that time this week to the needs of others.

3. Name one domestic arrangement you would not let God disturb. Offer it to Him.

4. Examine one of your own rules for Christian living. Is it Scripture, or only the fence your circle builds around Scripture?

5. Do one thing this week for Christ that might cost you some reputation among respectable people.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have made You comfortable, and I have made myself comfortable with You. I have followed You as far as it suited me.

Forgive me for moving my selfishness indoors and calling it devotion. Forgive me for loving the world while I sing about heaven.

Take charge of my house, my timetable, my money and my ambitions. Disturb whatever You need to disturb.

Make me hot, and not lukewarm. Let my life be a reproach to nobody but the devil. Amen.