Epilogue
Epilogue
Where will the parade of the Christian faith lead in future generations? Monumental changes have occurred since believers were first called Christians in Antioch—even in the five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door. In my own lifetime I have seen significant changes. No longer are denominational differences underscored. And the old debates about Calvinism and Arminianism are easily shrugged off by a generation that does not really care. When I think of the future, I wonder if Jayber Crow might represent the direction the faith is headed:
I kept on as janitor of the church…. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don’t attend altogether for religious reasons…. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don’t want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn’t want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I’m a literal reader of the Scriptures…. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.
Jayber, a small-town Kentucky barber, is the creation of Wendell Berry in his novel Jayber Crow. He represents a mindset that will undoubtedly grow in coming generations. But organized churches will surely not cease to be. So how will the final chapters of church history be formulated in the twenty-second century and beyond? Might North America be as Europe is today—a massive museum of a once-vibrant Christian faith? Will the Catholic Church be headed by a female pope? Might Christianity be expanding most rapidly in Iran and Iraq—and North Korea?
Will the Sunday morning sermon be a relic of the past? Instead of going to church, might Christians be downloading to a gold ear stud all the spiritual songs and sermons and Scripture they could ever want?
Might the earth be in ruins in the wake of a nuclear catastrophe? A day of utter doom and gloom. People crawling out of caves and picking through rubble. The marks of civilization wiped out—but for a tattered old textbook, Parade of Faith.
Whatever uncertainties the future holds, Christians of all generations and cultures look forward with hope, knowing the grandest of all parades—that vast multitude from every tribe and tongue and nation—will one day end in New Jerusalem when the saints go marching in.
O Lord, I want to be in that number.