Editorial July 15, 1972 Issue

Churches Can Survive

Carl J. Welz

People who have stopped going to church have some interesting things to say. Perhaps the most interesting is the complaint that churches do not deal with life's problems. Movies do, they say. Books and magazines do. Radio and television do. But churches do not. These people also argue that one does not need to be inside a church to be close to God.

Can we brush aside their comments with a simple "They don't understand"? We think not. If a church is to survive, it will have to be a church that helps one to comprehend the vital and practical facts of Life itself. And it will have to have something in its services that gives those who attend them a real sense of God's presence—a sense that affects every moment of their daily lives.

Christ Jesus' teachings and works set the standard. His Sermon on the Mount, for example, deals directly, and radically, with such topics as war, sex, social justice, hypocrisy, economic policy, law, and immortality. His healing works showed the scientific relationship between health and one's conscious relationship to God, the only real Life. People do not turn away from the church that helps them to understand the Science of the Christ, Truth—the Science Jesus taught. They turn from the church that fails—in their eyes— to do this.

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