Andrea Williams, chief executive, writes on the global reach of Christian Concern and how the rest of the world needs to learn from Britain’s mistakes.
I am writing to you from above the clouds, marvelling at God’s’ creation. I have crossed the Atlantic sea to visit a population of 30,000 residing in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). This location lives up to its reputation. Paradise. You can see and palpably feel the perfection of God’s creative landscaping.
However, the capital city of The Islands, Road Town in Tortola, is not neat. Its infrastructure is poor, the roads and sanitation need fixing; the possibilities for beautiful hotels and restaurants seem endless to me.
Backtrack to the end of January, when I visited South Africa. What hit me when I got off the plane at Cape Town again was the glory of God’s creation – until 5 minutes down the road, I spotted a makeshift township where I was struck by the poverty, dirt and the difficulty of their challenges.
I had been invited to these nations to tell the story of Great Britain. Approaching the end of my sixth decade I have something to say. Both South Africa and BVI are under pressure at governmental level to ‘get with the programme’. What programme? The ‘equality and diversity’ programme of course.
What does that involve? Nothing less than the wholesale redefining of how we structure and regulate relationships in a modern world. Biological sex is irrelevant – you are the sex you think you are – and marriage is defined in our own image to be anything we want it to be: man and woman, man and man, woman and woman. Every marriage is equal and the right to a family within those relationships is absolute. So, family becomes defined in law, as an artificially constructed human right, to include children naturally, by fostering or adoption or by fertility treatments (donor sperm, surrogacy). And in the name of progress and diversity, family is redefined in the popular culture and in law and reason.
The new religion of equality and diversity, shaped by Queer Theory, permits no dissent. It requires approval and celebration. Anything less than this is blasphemy and requires punishment by the state.
Visit a school in BVI and the idea that you can have two mummies defies their comprehension. As does the possibility of a five-year-old boy wanting to be a girl.
And yet this is what the deeply culturally Christian people of BVI are having foisted upon them. Why can’t we leave them alone? Why force a referendum on same sex relationships, framed by UK activists, on a nation that needs to fix its sanitation?
The problem is they don’t really know what is coming. The progressive propaganda is so effective. They think it is an incidental issue simply about giving everyone their rights.
There is a category error of treating behavioural identity (same-sex relationships) as if it is the same as race (immutable colour of skin).
The West is facing societal collapse.
Our culture celebrates, teaches, protects and promotes sex between men and men, and women and women and family units based on any of those constructs. Our laws recognise all of these options as if they are equivalent. By the third and fourth generations, our children have no notion of God; no sense that they are made in his image. Children think biological sex is malleable and that sexual activity is entirely recreational. Consider the shocking statistics of our children: broken identities, sexual oblivion, sexual brokenness and addiction to porn.
We have become an end stage civilisation.
These issues are the defining cultural issues of the day but to Western governments and our churches they are treated as ‘secondary’ issues. Oh no. Without living out God’s view on this, we end up destroying ourselves.
It is cultural colonialism to say to BVI and South Africa that we know best. Actually, we don’t. We jeopardise the moral health of those nations when we foist upon them our (post)modernism. South Africa, BVI: please choose God.
By way of contrast, I also visited South Korea to bring the same message. When I stepped off the plane, I knew I was in a First World Country. The airport, the cleanliness, the smooth systems. They have been successfully resisting the push from the West to legalise same-sex ‘marriage’. Why should they?
They have bigger issues. Such as their people under a closed communist regime in North Korea , where anything less than submission to state orthodoxy is punished by death or disappearance. There, people keep their heads down. Why wouldn’t they? South Koreans can see that in the West, Christians have kept their heads down.
Christians will have the courage to speak out only when they truly believe; only if they believe in a greater cause. In Korea, they see cultural Marxism for what it is. In the UK and the West we have allowed ourselves to be subdued by the prevailing state orthodoxy of the day. We have allowed the gospel to be relegated to one truth amongst many rather than The Truth that shapes culture. We’ve relegated Jesus to ‘my personal therapist’ rather than the publicly-vindicated King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Saviour of the people.
We’ve got ourselves into a rebellious mess in which our churches do the bidding of the new state religion by normalising and blessing same sex relationships and families.
So this is the message that I bring: I chart the history of our gospel, cultural and policy decline in my lifetime. I bring to them the personal stories of our modern faith heroes – teachers, medics, civil servants, therapists – who refuse to bow the knee to Baal and lose their jobs and reputations for it. I show them the mums and dads and children that have stood against the agenda but who end up, but for the Lord, broken, ostracised, shunned and forsaken by society.
Britain – it is time to understand. Church leaders – please – it is time to understand.
I’m taking what I have lived to the nations of this world who, sadly, once saw Great Britain as a land of freedom and welfare but today see its moral devastation.
May the Lord protect BVI, Korea and South Africa. And may we, here in the UK, repent, that Jesus might once more reign.
