NEW NEEDS—NEW METHODS
‘Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.’
This is a lesson of surpassing moment to the Church in these trying times. We need courage, we need boldness, we need living faith. Above all else, we need faith in the spiritual vitality of the Church.
I. If the Church is a living thing with the Spirit of God for her vital principle, then He must be manifesting in her the gifts necessary for her work and her sustentation.—What do we mean by ‘gifts’? Whatever is needed for her ‘to profit withal.’ Whatever is necessary for her to do her work by, whether towards her own children or towards the hostile world. And therefore it is a sign of a woeful want of faith when Christian men look coldly or timidly on agencies issuing from the Church’s bosom to meet the wants of the age, merely because they are not exactly what were in use a generation ago, or when they themselves were young. Let us take the case of the present age. Its characteristics here in England are pre-eminently special. Its problems are peculiarly social. We have aggregations of human beings such as the Christian world has never known, and which outside of England can nowhere be found. If you grant the Church is a living organism, you must expect that she will throw out some agencies adapted to the need. If you grant that her life is a Divine and spiritual one, you must expect that some Divine and spiritual ‘gift’ will be vouchsafed to cope with the unparalleled emergency.
II. The lesson is one for parishes as well as for churches in their larger aggregates.—New needs are but the occasion of new gifts of the Spirit. And new methods, when they spring up harmoniously with the Church’s principles, are to be treated as fresh indications of the fount of spiritual life which is ever fresh within her. Slight them, suspect them, look on them coldly, if you will; but beware that you be not turning away from the very marks and tokens that God is still with you. The mission-chapel in the dark corners of our towns, the parish confraternity of young men whose hearts God has touched with zeal for Him and love for man, the sisterhood, the mission, all these things within our parochial boundaries may be as truly the ‘spiritual gifts’ of our day and hour as ever were the manifold gifts of highly gifted Corinth. And if our Church is not to be untrue to her Lord and her vital principle, she will not be slow to utilise the ‘lay agencies’ which are springing up around us and asking her for work. Why is not the order of Readers recognised as a ‘gift’ for which she is responsible? And the Brotherhoods—why are they not incorporated into her system and utilised? Alas! We have not faith in our own vitality. We judge by human expediency, by worldly wisdom and chilly human precedent, and we forget the Divine precedent and the Divine rule of the Apostolic Church and the doctrine of ‘spiritual gifts.’
III. We can all do something, it may be but little, but still it is something. In our conversation and in ordinary society we may at least speak reverently of every work of faith, putting down the sneers of worldly men and timid Christians, and we can all make it our prayer that we at least may not be like the Jews, whose condemnation was, that they ‘knew not the day of their visitation.’
Illustration
‘Life in action takes many forms. If it did not it would not be life. Mechanism can do much; but a machine can only do the one thing it was made to do. Life involves the idea of self-adaptation, and with adaptability comes the idea of variety in outward seeming. So the variety of outward seeming is but a testimony to the inward unity of life. A tree springs from one root and is all fed by the same sap. And yet the same sap is the vital force which is seen under the various results of bark and woody fibre, of leaf and flower and fruit. Each of these is but another form in which the one energy is manifested, and each of these contributes its share to the well-being of the whole. So in the Church. There is one self-determining vital force, and that is the Holy Spirit of God.’