Life in Exile

The first step believers must take is help one another to accept the reality that Exile is coming to the Western Church. Pretty much everything we have seen about how to plant, manage, fund, grow and lead churches is going to have to change. People’s expectations of career for themselves and their children will have to change. People’s commitment levels to church will have to change. 

Helping one another be open to the reality of Exile and its implications is the first step. I know of people who are developing friendships with believers who presently have more experience of these things, and I know of many who are spending hours reading about how the church has survived in previous ages that had similarities. 

Secondly the Church must accept that the Exile could well last centuries... and the full suffering of Exile is far from complete. The Egyptians and Babylonians had many ways to increase the suffering of God’s people: more bricks with less straw, a newly built golden statue, and the lion’s den. Our Exile will not be identical to the past Exiles – but it is clear in the Bible that Exile is often multi generational. The cycle plays out from parents to children to grandchildren to great-grandchildren and beyond. 

Given that, we must prepare for the future by investing in and helping the future leaders. They need to be prepared to suffer and serve in ways that we have not yet seen in our nations. At least not in living memory. How will we find the generation of servants to care for the church through perhaps centuries of Exile? 

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I am grateful to have found this dire warning from Rev.Peter Sanlon in an interview by Rod Dreher.
It's precisely what I am trying to do in my classroom and in my domestic church: preparing a generation that can survive Exile.

At the end of the interview Sanlon says that we should seek "the spiritual solutions that are local, small, quiet and more shaped by the suffering of Christ’s cross..."

It has ever been so.