Christian Church - Today's World Author:Christopher Wright If the Church is dead, it certainly won't lie down. In Britain, it may be a far cry from the days of universally packed churches on Sunday morning, but still, wherever there are people, there are Christian churches, attended regularly by one in ten British citizens and active in a variety of ways throughout the week. In countries where Chris... more »tians face serious discrimination or even terrible persecution, they still publicly witness to their faith. In Africa, after the departure of the white man, Christian congregations, led by black priests and ministers, are flourishing as never before.
Christopher Wright traces the history of the Christian Church, beginning with the life of Jesus and the early Christians and telling how Christianity became the official Roman religion and spread to Europe with the monks. He looks at the Church's development in the Middle Ages and during the Reformation, and discusses its decline and fall from the nineteenth century and the Christians' position as a "minority group" in the twentieth-century world. Now that they are in a minority, he asks, are the Christians perhaps truer to the teachings of Jesus when he likened the true believer to a grain of mustard seed or to salt that hasn't lost its savour? He looks closely at the ways on which the Church is making itself more vital today, both in Britain and in the rest of the world; and he describes a late twentieth-century Christian style of life which seems to be emerging among both clergy and laymen.« less