What if the Tide-of-Faith doesn’t come back in?

I remember on endless hot summer evenings in Perth, watching the clouds forming out over the wheatbelt, a vast oven-dried sea of grain, spattered by forlorn towns that had been scorched over endless dry spells to a sepia brown.

And sometimes, there on the horizon a storm cloud looked like it was brewing. And sometimes that cloud appeared as if it were gathering and was going to form and head in our direction. And I watched, hoping against hope that it would show us some pity and provide some blessed relief to the outer Perth suburban fringe where we lived.

But alas, more often than not, it was not to be. The storm cloud would stay stubbornly out in the distance, rattling and grumbling with sparks of lightning, perhaps dropping the odd heavy shower over one of those husky towns in a miserable act of mercy, before throwing in the towel and heading off.

The next morning the fierce Perth sun would once again bake us, the azure sky giving no hint that anything as remotely untoward as a rain cloud, had ventured into its arena.

The contrast with the fist-sized cloud that the servant of Elijah saw after the slaughter of the prophets of Baal at Mt Carmel could not be more marked. All I could do was shake my fist at the enervated cloud on my horizon, but in the 1 Kings 18 story the clouds gather and gather and pour blessed rain on stubborn, idolatrous Israel.

Times of refreshing come. God goes on to promise the prophet that, despite appearances that all might be lost, that there are 7000 godly worshippers who have not bowed the knee to Baal. And all ends well.

Not.

For as we read on in that wretched and exposing biblical story,  that refreshment  is really the last flourish of godly worship in the north of the nation. Barrenness soon returns. A spiritual barrenness that leads to spiritual death and eventually to actual death.

The ten tribes of Israel descend into ever deepening depravity and are eventually wiped out by the Assyrians. The blessing is short lived. The rain dissipates. What seemed to teeter on the edge of revival in the land, with the people falling on their faces before YHWH, is soon forgotten.

It is all a little like the last blooming of a dying tree, in which the final flourish provides a brightness and vigour that has not been seen for some time. As Clive James writes in his stunning elegiac poem, Japanese Maple, there appears to be a final flourish of health in his last few days, and then, in a flash it will be gone.

I hope you see where this is going. We are seeing something of a return of the tide of faith in the West. We read and listen to Justin Brierley We watch the excellent apologist Wes Huff rack up millions of views on Joe Rogan’s podcast. We read the online articles by cultural elites who are suddenly claiming faith. And we bone up on the stats of the Quiet Revival in the UK.

And while I don’t want to correlate national Israel with the Western nations, the hint of a correlation is there: a spike in the number of people attending church – admittedly off a low bar -, the return to a “full-fat-faith” by a smaller, but more intense cohort as opposed to the flabby nominalism of the past.  These are good signs.

But we need to be realistic. For those who see this as the chance to get the West “back again” or some such, there is every chance that this is a new work of God that will not involve Christianity holding the centre of Western culture ever again. Those coming to the faith for the first time are a mixed bag for sure. But what most of them are not, is under the illusion (an illusion they never possessed themselves) that somehow “we can get this back”.

While I write about this returning tide, and warn of the tsunami of crazy spiritual beliefs accompanying it, it is a truly Western assumption that we are somehow owed a return to faith culturally, in a way that other parts of the world are somehow not. For example, where is the church in Turkey these days, given so much of the Bible is written to churches in that region?

The vast majority of secularists propping up and propagating the post Christian human rights framework of the West are not watching the cloud on the horizon and going, ‘You know what? Maybe these rights we have all come to assume DO come from Christianity after all? Let’s return to the faith.”

Nope, it’s a sprinkle here and a dusting there. And there is zero evidence that the ruling powers of the culture, including the legislative framework – at least in its longterm direction – is anything but hostile to the Christian ethos or ethical foundation. If you don’t believe me, then just Google the Western nations’ approach to euthanasia.

What we are more likely to see is a ruling elite of Ahabs (weak-willed liberals), and Jezebels (hostile, implacable progressives) continue in their wicked ways and continue the cultural squeeze, snipping and sniping at Christian schools, pushing radical sexual agendas, etc, all while a cursory 7000 equivalent do not bow the knee.  Both things can be true. In fact the book of Revelation would indicate that this is more likely to be true.

My concern is that the Pied Pipers of Christian cultural recovery will lead a lot of children away with very little to show for it. So it was instructive that when US pastor Mark Dever, of Capitol Hill Baptist,  was in Australia, he was asked about the popularity of Christian Nationalism in the US.

And he made the point, as was equally made in the Sons of Patriarchy podcast, that even in the epicentre of such a movement, Moscow Idaho, when it came to the popular vote for any – and I mean any – electoral position in the town across all formats of civic engagement, not one such self-identifying candidate had ever won.

But, don’t worry, this is going to take five thousand years, right?

See the problem? We can be so caught up looking at that stubborn cloud on the horizon, or casting our gaze out to sea watching for the incoming tide to move from a small trickle to a compelling wave that we pin our hopes, and our mood, on a visible shift in the cultural dial. And we are certainly at risk of pouring a huge amount of energy in trying to shift the cultural dial, against the cross purposes of forces more powerful that we are.

And see the other problem? There already is a huge tide of faith in places such as South America, sub-Saharan Africa and now across many parts of the subcontinent. The gospel of the kingdom has many waves, and they ebb and flow across the planet, being pulled and drawn by spiritual gravitational forces beyond our control. We need to lose a little of our entitlement that we in the West, as well as having all of the white goods and cheap holidays, are also owed a good chunk of the Christianity once more.

I want to see a returning tide of faith in the West that lasts, and even one that seeps deeply into our political, cultural and societal fabric. But I don’t want to read these smaller trickles as indicative of a massive return to Christianity. In a sense what we are seeing is a corrective, one in which materialist secularism has been unable to hold the centre of our collective cultural imagination.

We in the Western world, virtually alone in terms of time and space, tried out the “non-transcendent” experiment and it did not work. We are certainly going to see a return to a desire for something more. We already are. But it’s taking spiritual forms just as akin to first century paganism as to the Christianity that grew up beside it. The tide of faith towards Christianity is just as much at risk from paganism as it is from secularism.

So there’s every chance that instead of hard-secularists, we’ll find ourselves surrounded by a plausibility-inducing number of unabashed Baal worshippers. And we will have to know at that time, that God has been able to keep 7000 or so who have not bowed the knee. His promise is a faithful remnant.

And for that we are grateful. Our commitment to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and our desire to live joyfully meaningfully for his glory in this wicked generation continues unabated, surely. We have been promised strength for that task. We have been promised the hope of glory. We have been promised a resurrection day in which Jesus will be worshipped by all and sundry.

But apart from that, that storm cloud may stay stubbornly in the distance. Perhaps we should stop merely watching the clouds for signs of rain, and instead watch them for His return. That is, after all, what we are supposed to be longing for most of all (2 Tim 4:8).