The Challenge From Our Lord

Thirty or forty years ago it was easy to be a Christian.  The very air we breathed was Christian.  Bicycles could be left on front lawns; doors could be left unlocked. Suddenly all this has changed; now we have to affirm our faith.  We live in a world that challenges us.  And many fall away.  Dead bodies float downstream; it takes live bodies to resist the current.  And this is our summons. We will have to begin to be a different church.  We are for a moment on the trapeze. We are in between the death of an old civilization and culture and the swing to the beginning of the new.  These are the times in which we live. They are therefore wonderful days, marvelous, we should thank God that we live in times like this.