Disregard of Bible and Theological Neglect have led to Church Crisis

At an evangelical fellowship meeting, a senior bishop in the UK has expressed his concerns for an increasing impassiveness towards the Bible, and has said that it has now left the Church impotent to cope with the rising challenge of secularisation in today’s society.

The Bishop of Chester, the Rt Rev Peter Forster has claimed that clergy are not receiving the correct levels of theological training, which has led to Christians no longer reading the Bible, and this in turn has led to a negligence towards the seriousness of worship.

The increase in secularised culture has been a great concern to the Church as pews continue to empty in many areas of the country. During the Chester Diocese Evangelical Fellowship, Forster criticised the way in which the Church has lost "theological seriousness".

He went on to speak of the sadness that comes to him as he sees the "inattention" that congregations give to the bible during services. In his despair he said, "Only rarely, I am tempted to say, do I gain the impression that the person reading the Scriptures actually believes that what is being read means something."

A great concern with the way in which the Bible is considered has now risen according to Forster, and he worried that many now treat it "more or less like any other book."

In his speech, Bishop Forster rallied the Church to recover the Bible’s true position as the book that is the true word of God, and asked for it to be given its "true place of honour in the life of the Church."

Theology was one of the major concerns for Forster – he believes that a real lack of "theological seriousness" has engulfed the Church in the modern world, and he called in Anglicans to capture back the holiness that it once had.

Forster said, "The central message from the African Church to the Western Churches at the present time is that we are accommodating too much to an increasingly secular culture. But how will we resist this, without a clear and widely held appreciation of the distinct teaching of the Gospel?"

In particular, the Bishop was alarmed at the lack of detail given to fundamental theological doctrines by Church ministers today. In a rush to help the Church be accepted into today’s secular environment, ministers have forgotten and neglected the Prayer Book. He said, "(The Bible) has been practically ignored to the point that many Christians no longer read it."

The same disregard of the Bible has "gone hand in hand with a certain neglect of the seriousness and dignity of our worship."

The Bishop also spoke about the current divide that has arisen within the worldwide Anglican Communion over the past year. He expressed that the current predicament had come about very much because of the secularisation of modern Christianity.

Forster was one of the bishops within the group that set a letter conveying the grave concerns over the previous appointment of the openly gay Canon, Jeffrey John to be Bishop of Reading.

In conclusion, Bishop Forster called for the Church to stop being drawn into the secular state that it has been falling into, and to return to more holy ways, where the Bible, as the provident word of God, can be used to guide and bring back brighter days for the Church.

"In our Anglican future I believe we need to rediscover in renewed ways what it means to live a Christian life, perhaps I should say the Christian life. We have become deeply secularised in modern European Christianity: that, I believe, is one lesson which we should draw from the current debates over human sexuality. It is certainly the lesson which the African Church has drawn."