Apollolaan Hilton
In March 1969 John Lennon & Yoko Ono embarked on their honeymoon, stopping in Paris and then arriving in Amsterdam. From the Presidential Suite of the Hilton Hotel on Apollolaan, they began a ‘bed-in’ and they invited the world’s press to come and say hello.
Their ‘bed-in for peace’ was reported widely and later remembered in the Beatles song ‘The Ballad of John & Yoko’.
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton, talking in our beds for a week. The newspapers said, say what’re you doing in bed, I said we’re only trying to get us some peace.
Less than two years later John released his first solo album ‘Imagine’. The title track imagines a future utopia – his and Yoko’s manifesto for world peace dreamed up in a bed in Amsterdam.
Imagine all the people, living life in peace
John’s utopia includes; no war, no religion, no heaven or hell, no greed or hunger. In many ways, he is imagining a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of God – yet minus God.
In progressive cities across the planet, especially in Amsterdam, the dream lives on. If individuals can be released into equality and freedom, if we can educate & inform people enough; we can create a new world. Human brokenness can be solved by humanity.
And in this new age, the idea of God is no longer needed for morality & order. God serves no purpose anymore, surely the empty church buildings that are now nightclubs, museums, offices, and homes tell the story of the death of God.
Yet, if we’re to assess the state of the world since John Lennon wrote Imagine, if we’re to look around today, have things got any better? Or does humanity look more broken than ever?
- In 1960 the average age of diagnosed depression was 45. Today it is age 14. (article here).
- 12% of millennials have diagnosed anxiety disorder.
- 61% of university students regularly suffer from anxiety.
- In Amsterdam, a recent survey suggested that 48% of the city are lonely and 80,000 people in the city describe themselves as ‘ernstig eenzaam’ (seriously lonely).
Although there is much to enjoy and celebrate about our city and western culture, the statistics about the breakdown of society go on and on. The hardware is more impressive than ever, perhaps the bug is in the software.
How should the church respond?
Against this backdrop, the church has to decide it’s posture. How should we react?
Do we retreat? Build a safe Christian community away from the city. We can immerse ourselves in our own sub-cultures, enjoy a private faith protected from the temptations of the world. Wary of being infected by the world, we go deep into God and can ride out the storm.
Or should we pursue relevance? Eager to enjoy all the good things in our city and to love and serve our world, we smooth out the rough edges of our faith. In a brazen PR effort, we rebrand the church for the new world. Here we go wide into the world and ride the waves of culture.
Both routes have their obvious strengths and weakness (for a more detailed perspective see Richard Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture).
Or is there another way?
(Faith-filled) Gospel Resilience
Mark Sayers in his book Disappearing Church, identifies a third way – Gospel Resilience.
We hold onto an absolute determination to follow the ways and teachings of Jesus Christ. We cling to the gospel BUT not in seclusion or isolation. We believe and engage. We stand firm and advance.
To live fully with the Holy Spirit’s guidance in a world of anxiety fragility, and emotionalism run wild. Such Christian resilience is growing stranger by the day, yet as it becomes rarer it becomes more valuable. Its strangeness will shine, pointing the way to a different future. (Mark Sayers)
We believe that the church is God’s plan-A. His answer for a broken world. The church can display an Amsterdam 2.0 – what real love and real community can be.
The church, rather than worry about catching an infection, aims instead to infect the world, or rather be the antidote.
Steven Johnson in his book The Ghost Map (about the spread of the cholera epidemic in London in 1854) wrote:
Epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.
By faithfully following Jesus, living out the gospel day by day, often in mundane and routine ways, we can create a history from below.
This blog is an adaption from the Sunday message ‘Go Deep to Go Wide – How should the church engage with culture?’ Listen here.