Cultural Pain And God’s Megaphone

God’s Pain Megaphone

What we are seeing across the West in the so-called “Quiet Revival”,  the “Surprising Rebirth”, or Tide of Faith” – call it what you will –  is a corporate expression of a previously personal phenomenon: The problem of pain.

And in this instance – not simply personal pain, but cultural pain. The pain of a society in deep distress. All of the levers of success, or ease, or hope have been pulled, and they have broken off in our hands. Pain is everywhere.

Many of us have quoted  CS Lewis, and his comment about how personal pain is used by God to wake the spiritual slumberer. Here it is in a fuller rendition:

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world….No doubt pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.

And we have indeed seen this megaphone phenomenon in individual lives. Here and there we know of the stories. But please note that Lewis himself did not limit that pain to a private affair. He said that pain is God’s megaphone for a deaf “world”.

Perhaps in the relatively dry spell for gospel ministry in the past couple of decades, we’d shrunk our vision down to individual pain. Or perhaps we just assumed – as many of our secular peers seemed to – that the good times in the West would keep rolling. Sure life as a Christian was a bit tough, but look at all those white goods and cheap overseas holidays?

But remember this important fact, or learn it for the first time: Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940.  The whole world knew a lot about pain in that time. The megaphone was turned up all the way to 11.

Yet since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, there has been a confident (albeit myopic) view that somehow things were getting better and better for the average Westerner. The megaphone was being dialled down as the West experienced once of the biggest wealth and personal freedom movements in history. Not one of the biggest, the biggest.

And by many indices these were the good times. We were headed on the increasingly smooth cable car ride to the top of Mount Progress.  And now? The times are not good. Someone had to pay for the party. And the cultural nausea we experience is because this cable car has turned out to be a roller coaster. Who knows where the next twist or turn might take us.

Suppressed Cultural Pain

And the result? Well let’s put it this way: Suppress a running fire hydrant long enough, and the building pressure is going to take matters into its own hands. And that’s what we are seeing. The pressure of the modern world is starting to crack people.  And crack them big time. And when you crack enough of them at the same time, a subterranean fault line, leading to a tsunami, will occur.

So there is deep cultural pain, ingrained over the past three decades. And it’s reaching our shores. There is fear. Some of it real. Some of it manufactured.  And not simply manufactured in a way that you can see the moving parts and the joins. Manufactured seamlessly, brilliantly and technologically. It appears that we are headed towards some form of seismic shift culturally because of AI. The scientists tell us there will be winners. The poets warn us there will be losers.

So there is upheaval and insecurity and technological craziness. There is porn addiction and sexual dysfunction. There is a whole agenda – funded by government and corporates – to rewrite, and attempt to rewire, what it means to be human, and to suppress voices that reject this rewiring.

We’ve seen so little community-wide acknowledge of God that we now have generations of people who have zero interaction with the church, or with people of faith. A generation or two rising up, who not only don’t know Joseph – so to speak -, but don’t know that they don’t know Joseph.

And these are generations who, with no stable platform of reality, or True North, other than the one they are confidently told lives within them, have deconstructed themselves in search of that True North, and come up with nothing.

Hence we’re not simply seeing a person here or a person there asking the hard questions. We’re seeing whole cohorts. We’re watching viral videos about it.  We’re finding a whole generation who realise that they have most likely been lied to.  And for whom the truth has been suppressed.

Sure we are also seeing hard Left and hard Right draw adherents, especially through on-line messaging. Online life is a cess-pool. But on-line gospel messaging is getting through too, especially to the timid inquirer who will follow a YouTube rabbit hole long before they turn up at a church.

Heeding The Megaphone

And now we’re seeing something that began five or so years ago. Five or so years into the rabbit-holing that began during COVID the cheques are starting to come in.  We’re seeing people – often young – on their own volition, turn up at churches, or start reading the Bible. It’s a fact!

The pain megaphone has been dialled up again. People are being roused from their slumber, not merely individually but corporately. They’re not just hearing the megaphone, they’re heeding it!

Just last week I spoke to a school teacher who said that his son attends the most progressive school in his city – the city itself being one of the most progressive in the West.

The school, he told me, is completely antithetical towards Christianity and takes every opportunity to promote and celebrate diverse sexual and gender identity markers in its students. Students who are Christian keep their heads down.

Meanwhile the government of the state in which the school resides,  has made it harder for churches to be explicit in their pastoral care about such matters. Legislation is more intrusive. Corporates are more hostile. Workplaces are complex to navigate. None of the conditions are in the gospel’s favour.  The tomb seems well sealed and well-guarded.

Yet over the Christmas holidays, as this teacher recounted, two of his son’s friends turned up at school for the new year, having become Christian seemingly out of no context and with no real church touch-point (though don’t under-estimate that young Christian man’s quiet life and witness to them).

One of those students had to tell his two mums that he’d become a Christian. That would have been a complex, and perhaps challenging conversation. The other had been devouring the Bible and turned up with questions about the seeming divide of “works/grace” in the book of James.

Praise God and wow!

Are We Ready?

Yet why are we surprised by this? Our problem is that we are so used to thinking that if the conditions do not line up – we haven’t got our ducks – or our “Five “M’s” – all lined up in a row, then the fruit won’t come, the seed won’t sprout, the dead won’t rise.

This should humble us. There is absolutely no way that the Western church is in the type of shape to accommodate hoards of new Christians.

In fact all too often on the more progressive side the church has slipped into complete accommodation with the culture. Such churches – having betrayed the mission of the church – will be bypassed for people looking for something completely different to what the world is offering, especially in matters of sexuality.

But a warning to my own conservative evangelical tribe too: If you say you are biblical, and you’re preaching humble servant leadership, holiness of life, deep community, costly forgiveness, heart-changing grace, generous hospitality, spiritual renewal and power, then your product better match what it says on the tin.

I completely understand why progressives that have rejected biblical authority have nothing to offer the “quiet revivalists”.My concern is that many of my own cohort will be caught out by a generation that is sick to the back teeth of being promised something that isn’t being delivered. They’ve seen every marketing strategy under the sun and they no longer believe. They don’t want a Temu version of a good product. It’s time to sort our house out.

Yet, ironically, the very arrival on our doors of a new generation might be the very thing that sorts that house out. There is nothing like new converts to revivify old converts. There is nothing like excitement and zeal and wonder to either shake up or shake out cold Christians.

Personal Tributaries/Cultural Rivers

So somehow, at a time when the gospel had appeared to be in low ebb – and many churches are struggling -, the dots across the West are joining up and something is happening. The personal tributaries of pain are wending their way towards a collective cultural river of pain. This pain is seeking an outlet.

Or to use another image, it’s as if for no apparent reason people are pouring out into the streets from their houses and walking somewhere.  Like those ads celebrating some product or other in which the crowd comes together seemingly spontaneously. No whistle blew. No announcement was made. No government phone message came through.

Why now? Why at this particular time?  I believe that what we are now seeing is the tipping point of the corporate cultural pain that has been building up over the past three decades. The corporate cultural pain is now at such a level that deep questions are being asked.

To expound on CS Lewis’ quote, the flag of truth has been planted within the fortress of the rebel culture. All of the guns and guards were pointed in particular directions to keep God’s gospel out, and He simply undermined the fortress and popped up in the middle – right there among the next generation supposedly tasked with taking the godless agenda to its next stage.

Now we have seen conversions before. But this? This trickle that, when I have conversations with pastors and evangelists and ministry workers on campuses, seems to be gathering strength and growing into a stream?  The tipping point of cultural pain might just have arrived. The flag is fluttering in the breeze. The fort has been breached.

God’s megaphone, although seemingly silent, has a pitch to it that those in pain can hear.  And it turns out that there are lot of people attuned to hearing that pitch.  In a final echo of Lewis, here in the painful West, Aslan is on the move.