blinkered?

It's quite easy to think in a rather blinkered fashion. Indeed, there are sometimes good reasons for ensuring we do think like that.

Blinkers keep us focussed. They prevent us from being distracted. We all need that.

But they also keep us from seeing the wider picture. And that's never so helpful.

Our blinkers make the likes of myself look only at the church. A church which is only a few steps away from real crises.

Financial crisis, as reserves run out and we near a terrible 'melt-down'. Spiritual crisis, as the anchor of sola Scriptura (Scripture as our sole authority) is thrown out. Relational crisis, as ministers, members and even perhaps some congregations move out.

But 'church' is not all that's going on in God's world. And we need to be careful to ensure that we see all these possible crises emerging along the horizon of coming months in the context of all else that's happening here in our land.

What's going on in the church - and whatever God's doing in and through all that is thus going on - is not taking place in glorious isolation.

We live in a land where a number of powerful factors are presently coming together to create what could well be a maelstrom of chaos we'll all have to face.

Our economic and political situation is releasing pent-up energies of anger and hostility today whose issue could be frightening and extreme.

We face a massive debt, the like of which this generation simply hasn't known or had to face like this before. We're treading on ground that is new, and it's far from a comfortable walk.

Similarly, we're having to live with a coalition government: and it seems, because it's largely new, the concept's one which many simply do not understand, and don't know how to work.

The end result is a feeling of hurt and betrayal, and the pain that's being increasingly experienced is growing in a culture of incessant blame.

Moreover, we live now in a desperate moral vacuum.

Those energies of anger and hostility, in other words, are coming to the surface in a nation which has long since lost the notion of there being the moral absolutes we once could take for granted in our national life.

Those clear moral parameters which once held in check the anger and the aggro that a people felt are now no longer there. The law of the jungle, where animal instincts are given full sway, where you do what you like, and where might is right - the law of the jungle is what our permissive society has effectively brought.

Factor into all of that environmental factors - snow and ice and floods and drought and earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and the quickly melting ice-caps and the slowly rising level of the seas - and all the consequential chaos which these bring: and you start to get the picture.

And when, on top of all of that, you take account of the rampant, bold aggressiveness of Islam and of secularism, you start to see how close we are to what could well be chaos in our land. We hover more and more upon the edge of real implosion.

Who knows if the whole of our landscape is going to be re-drawn? What's going on in the church can't be seen in isolation. It's part of a much bigger picture.

I smiled over Christmas when I saw the effect of the weather.

The harsh extremes of snow and cold meant many were not able to attend their usual place of worship. We had many who live in the locality here, who normally travel to all sorts of other parts of the town to share in the worship of others elsewhere - Baptist, Methodist, etc - who were forced to 'go local' and share in our worship here.

It was great! Folk who love the Lord and love his Word, all gathering together in this way, pretty much on their doorsteps.

And it felt like the Lord was telling us all, You'd better get used to this! This is the shape of the future.

God's people uniting together. Where they live. Regardless of the 'tag' they've previously worn.

It may just be that that's what's going on.

In the crises and chaos which the future may hold, it's our bonds in Christ which will bring us and hold us together.