Original subtitles

Let us pray.

Christianity is now almost 2,000 years old.

It has been transformed from a small Jewish sect

in the Middle East to the biggest and most influential

religion in the history of mankind.

But today, in Western Europe, it faces the greatest challenge

in its history.

Modernity and the arrival of secular society.

The Catholic Church has opposed with all its energy everything

modern.

With traditional churches being closed,

ever decreasing numbers of believers,

and a world obsessed by money and material goods,

can Christianity really survive?

Rumors of the death of the church

have been greatly exaggerated.

In the developing world in America,

Christianity is thriving.

Oh my goodness.

That's big.

And it is still a powerful political force.

President Bush is open about the role of faith in his life.

In this film, as a practicing Catholic and barrister,

I want to look at how Christianity in the West

has faced up to the momentous social changes of the last 100

years.

Of why the traditional churches are perceived to be in decline.

And consider the challenges of the future

for the world's biggest religion.

I was born in 1954 and brought up in Liverpool,

one of the most Catholic cities in England.

I was raised by my mom in the home of her mother-in-law,

my grandmother, who was a Catholic.

Her house is in a working class and very Catholic area

of Liverpool.

I haven't been back for over 20 years.

It's very strange coming back into this house.

This was my grandma's best room, the front parlor.

I don't think her Catholicism was overt.

She certainly didn't spend her whole life

talking about doctrine.

In fact, some things about the Catholic Church,

she felt were very wrong.

I always remember how annoyed and angry

she'd been when my auntie Audrey got married,

she married a non-Catholic, and how they were forced

to marry at the side altar because he wasn't a Catholic

and wouldn't convert.

And she thought that was a load of nonsense, really.

Oh, this is my bedroom.

I was really privileged because I

was the one who got my own bedroom.

This was my domain from about the age of 8 to 18.

My grandmother was the driving force

for me be being a Christian.

And it would sadden her to see how everywhere you look today,

churches are being closed, Christians often being

marginalized, and faith is something

few people like to discuss openly.

What has happened to Christianity?

Why do so few people now go to church?

Has the 2000-year-old faith that I

learned from my grandmother really lost its way?

I believe the problems began for Western Christianity

many years before I was born, at the start of the century

of some of the worst acts of violence

in the history of mankind.

[GUNSHOTS]

At times it has seemed as if that most fundamental

of Christian beliefs, the golden rule of love thy neighbor,

was forgotten.

Europe is today full of the graves

of those killed in conflicts caused by Christian fighting

Christian.

The last 100 years has seen human suffering

on an unprecedented scale.

War, genocide, and political oppression.

And Christianity, or at least Western Christendom,

has been at the heart of it.

In 1914, the nations of Christian Europe

started the most brutal and bloody war

the world has seen to date.

With sermons, prayers, and blessings,

the traditional churches of Europe

helped send millions to their deaths.

20 years later, most of Europe's Christian nations

united to fight the evil of fascism.

Ever since the Roman Empire was converted over the 1,600 years

ago, Christianity in much of Western Europe

has been closely connected with the state.

A national religion, handed down from on high.

And no where was this more obvious

than in mobilizing the nation for war.

One of the few major Christian ceremonies

still observed publicly in Britain today

is Remembrance Day, the British date

commemorating its war dead.

But elsewhere, a weakness in Europe's close relationship

between church and state was exposed by a heinous episode.

The Holocaust was possibly history's most Godless act.

The almost complete extermination of Europe's

Jews by Hitler's Nazis.

This place is called the Valley of Death.

The corpses were first just dropped down here,

and then the SS built a ramp with a lorry on it,

and they put the corpses in and put them down to the crematory.

And then they were burned.

They burned about 70 to 90 corpses a day.

Although the Holocaust was no Christian crime,

many of its perpetrators were baptized Christians.

And Germany's churches did little to lessen the slaughter.

But some Christians did resist, either

in saving Jews from the death camps,

or standing up to the Nazis.

One of the bravest was a German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Renate Bethge is Bonhoeffer's niece.

She tries to keep the memory of her uncle alive.

Most Christians, of course, didn't stand up

against the Nazis.

In fact, some of them actually were involved in what happened.

And of course you could say that anti-semitism

itself came from the idea that the Jews were the people who

had persecuted Christ.

What made Dietrich see differently?

Our family had a lot of Jewish friends.

And they were quite good people, so we

didn't see anything wrong with the Jews.

But it's one thing to say, well we

didn't see anything wrong ourselves, personally.

It's another thing to actually disagree with the state.

Of course you were frightened, but not everybody

dared to utter this kind of thing and to--

Well to stand up.

Yeah.

No, they didn't.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

Right from the start, Bonhoeffer saw it as his Christian duty

to speak out against Hitler and his anti-Jewish racial move.

He abhorred the traditional German church's unholy alliance

with the Nazi state.

This was a problem for the whole family,

because they were all Christian, but they

thought Hitler was like the devil.

So, to kill him would save other people.

Bonhoeffer later joined a plot to assassinate Hitler.

When it failed, he was arrested and imprisoned.

Bonhoeffer was brought from Buchenwald

in the evening of the 8th of April,

and he was brought to the detention building over there.

In a cell like this, Bonhoeffer spent the night

before he was murdered.

In the morning hour, they had to undress themselves.

And then be naked, taken away the last human dignity,

and the group around Bonhoeffer, they all were hung,

one after each other.

Did you in fact say goodbye to him or?

Yeah.

Yeah, we said good-bye, but of course one

didn't know what would happen.

For me, Bonhoeffer's brave stand against the Nazi state,

when the German churches were largely silent,

illustrates the Christian duty to speak up for the oppressed

and not simply to accept the status quo.

In resistance against dictatorship and terror,

gave their lives for freedom, justice, and human dignity,

Father Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his co-resistors, murdered

in the morning hours of the 9th of April, 1945.

But despite all the horrors of the 20th century,

Christianity worldwide didn't suffer

in terms of overall numbers.

In fact it grew to include over 1/3 of the world's population.

It was another factor altogether that

caused a crisis in Christianity all over Western Europe,

that it has never recovered from.

The massive social and political change of the 1960s.

It was not the horrors of two world wars that

caused a crisis for Christianity in Western Europe,

but the massive social and political change that

happened in the 1960s.

It was a time when everything was brought into question.

The old order was under attack.

And that included Christianity, and in

particular the role of the church.

It was also a time when I was a teenager.

At the age of 11 I was sent to a Catholic girls' grammar school,

a convent run by nuns.

The school is still in Crosby.

It's still Catholic.

But the nuns have gone, and now it admits boys.

I want to find out how much Catholic Liverpool has

changed since I was a schoolgirl.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Stephanie.

Hello Stephanie, nice to meet you, too.

Are you on the sixth floor?

Yes, I am.

So, are you going to take me around, Stephanie?

So, this is the chapel.

So what do you use chapel for now?

It's used a lot, the chapel, actually, for assemblies.

And then they also have a mass each week,

that is voluntary if you would like to attend that.

And do many people attend?

Yeah, people do attend.

I think, especially, it's nice if maybe you've

had something happen in your life.

I was hoping to get married.

When I was Stephanie's age, I was

a member of the Young Christian Students,

and we used to do a lot of campaigning on social issues.

It's what got me into Christianity in a big way.

I'm glad to see the school still retains that ethos.

So is the school very much into campaigning about issues?

I think it's into-- I don't think it tries to force on you,

but it's into making you aware of what is going on,

of things that you could do.

Well, when I was here, we all seemed

to do lots of campaigning.

Yeah.

I remember we did this great thing,

which was a 24-hour fast, for people who were starving

in the world, which was a great excuse for the girls

in Seafield and the boys of St. Mary's to get together

and spending the night--

Yeah, because it was an all-girls school.

This was an all-girls school.

So what does it mean to you to be

a Catholic in the 21st century?

For me, I don't necessarily think

it means going to church all the time.

I don't think you need to do that.

It's, I think, it's just how you carry out,

you know, and care for other people.

And also I think you pick up your models and things

like that, from religion, so you know

what is right and wrong for religion.

We can't change the world, obviously.

We're not--

Why not?

Well, we'll try.

You've got to try, absolutely.

If at 17, you don't want to give it a try.

I still want to change the world and I'm 54.

God, I am.

I'm 54.

And you're going to give a good go.

I am.

We'll try together.

Figures for regular church attendance in Liverpool

had declined steeply since my youth.

And if you look at the whole country,

it's a disastrous picture.

In 1964, 74% of people said they belong to a religion,

or attended church services.

Today the opposite is true.

And it's the same all over Western Europe.

That leaves a huge headache for the church authorities.

Hundreds of redundant churches, many of them

historic buildings.

How is it that we have this position in Liverpool

now that all these churches have gone?

The city has been depopulating steadily, certainly

since the Second World War.

The north end of Liverpool in particular

has gone through a phenomenal rapid change.

Where there used to be 250,000 people,

there are now about 2,000.

If we refer to the [INAUDIBLE] here,

if I look at that whole picture now of the north

end of the city, there are about three buildings

standing still now.

While the social change since the '60s is just,

less priests is also the sense of the whole community going.

In 20 years, I know nine churches that went up town.

In my youth, St. Mary of the Angels

was one of the city's Catholic landmarks.

But today it's no longer a working church.

It was closed eight years ago, and is now

being used by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

as a rehearsal room.

Some people are very upset that some of these very beautiful

churches have not been preserved as churches.

I mean, how do you make decisions like that?

Well in that particular case, within half a mile,

you've got five other churches that

are particularly beautiful.

The decision was never to destroy it or knock it down.

All we knew is that we couldn't use it anymore

as a viable church.

The bigger problem for the church authorities

is that every time a church is closed,

its surviving congregation maybe alienated,

exacerbating even more the drop in numbers.

It's a vicious cycle of decline.

We see the buildings closing.

What we've also seen is actually the congregations shrinking.

Now what do we do about that?

Why is it, in fact?

I don't know.

I would say what's happened in practice

is that the breakdown of the family has been quite severe.

I've got massive amounts of single parents.

So I think we've got a big responsibility as priests,

making people feel wanted.

The problem is that many people don't

feel wanted by the church.

And in the Catholic Church, that often means women.

The Scarat family live in the same area of Liverpool

in which I grew up, and went to the same schools.

Like me, they were brought up as Catholics.

But today, while Angela still attends church,

Noreen has largely stopped going.

I think the church has had a bad press because they preached

certain things against abortion, and their views from it,

which are predominantly male, that are coming up,

saying all these things.

And I used to get very angry when the letter would

come from the archbishop saying, there's never

going to be a mother or give birth in his life, you know,

telling these women.

And I got angry with the church at one point.

To me, because I'm a feminist, how

could I have done all things I've

done if in fact I hadn't used contraception?

Because actually, every time I didn't use contraception

I seemed to have a baby.

Yeah, I just can't believe that the church hasn't moved on

with that.

Because you look at the third world countries,

that people have got AIDS and they're still having children

because the church say you can't use contraceptives.

And then they pass it on to the children.

It's just, it's just not right.

But do you think maybe that has affected the way that women

look at the church, and therefore they

feel they're not really engaging with women's concerns,

and therefore they feel alienated from the church?

Especially, abortion as well.

Hopefully, none of us would ever have to go through that

or have a disabled child.

And that is your choice and for the church

to turn around and say you shouldn't be even contemplating

that.

That's one thing I could never get my head around.

And I don't think that the church should

have any power to that, really.

They should be supportive.

They're going to lose everybody eventually,

and I think they've got to get more modern, really.

One of the fundamental weaknesses

of modern Christianity is its ambivalence

to women, and particularly for Catholicism.

Until the traditional churches fully

resolve their relationship with the female half

of the population, how can they expect Christianity

to have a future in the modern world?

I first met Gerry Proctor when we both joined the Young

Christian Students-- the YCS-- in 1968.

He later became a priest.

When we were growing up in the 1960s and '70s,

we were both full of hope that our church

could change with the times.

I don't think since I've ever felt as energized

and fascinated by the Catholic Church as I did then.

But it was all very much a part of that whole '60s explosion,

wasn't it?

Yeah.

Society was changing because of Vatican too,

the church was changing, too.

It was.

We thought.

In 1962, Pope John XXIII set up the Second Vatican Council,

with the intention to open the windows

and let in the fresh air of change, as he put it.

For three years the Catholic leadership

debated how best to modernize the church.

But 40 years later the decline of the Catholic Church

in Western Europe has now reached critical proportions.

And what about the future of the church then?

What's the key to its survival?

I think the key to its survival is the gospel, simply

the gospel.

And the person of Jesus.

But the model of church we have implemented

for well over 1,000 years is not working any longer

in our present culture.

The Catholic Church has opposed, with all its energy,

everything modern for the last 400 years.

We've been constantly opposing every development

of society since the Reformation.

Only with the Second Vatican Counsel

did we have a glimpse of a different stance

towards the world.

But I'm afraid now in the Catholic Church

those windows that were opened by John XXIII

are being firmly closed.

The drawbridge is being pulled back up

and we're being encouraged to go back into the castle

and survive within the ghetto.

But that's not the church of Jesus.

It's not just the Catholic Church

that appears to be in terminal decline.

It's the same for almost all of Western Europe's

traditional churches.

It seems to me that Christians in Western Europe

have a choice.

Either we can retreat into ourselves,

preserving the purity of our faith as an exclusive club,

or we can turn this apparent crisis into an opportunity.

And do what other Christians have done across the world

and take the timeless values of the gospel

and reconnect them with our culture today.

But there is one country in the West

where Christianity is not in crisis.

A place where it has helped lead the transformation of society

and is now flourishing.

America.

America is the largest Christian country in the world.

Today more than 3/4 of the population

profess to be Christian, and more than 40% of Americans

claim to attend church regularly.

In Britain, it's less than 7%.

All the traditional Western denominations

have a major presence in the United States.

Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans,

Presbyterians, Anglicans, the Pentecostal movement, and also

a huge variety of other nondenominational churches.

When we look across Europe today, particularly

Western Europe, Christianity seems a pretty marginal force.

Very few people attend church regularly, or read the Bible,

or even profess a belief in God.

Religion has little relevance in their lives.

But here, in America, the complete opposite is true.

Christianity is still a potent force

at the center of a large majority

of people's daily lives.

Why is that the case?

Why is Christianity flourishing in America?

And can its success here provide a template

for the future of Christianity in Europe.

The United Methodist Temple is in the center of Chicago,

and is the city's oldest established congregation,

predating the city itself.

It has three chapels, including one

at the very pinnacle of the skyscraper.

Although Methodist, the Chicago Temple

has broken free of the restrictions of denomination

and serves the whole of the city.

The church does not exist for itself.

The church exists for others.

We were very explicit about welcoming people,

because we think that the call of Jesus Christ

is to all people.

So who are we, then, to begin to distinguish between who's in

and who's out?

Rose Martinelli is a leading member of the Chicago Temple's

congregation, and a lesbian.

Tell me, Rose.

What does this church mean to you?

For me here at Chicago Temple, it's

just been this place of acceptance.

Oftentimes I'd go to churches where

I had to really separate my life.

I'd either be a Christian or I'd be a lesbian,

but I couldn't be both.

I went to a number of churches when

I lived in Philadelphia that wanted to cure, or heal me.

And there was a few other churches

where I could be gay, or lesbian,

but where there the current commitment to Christ's word

and to service and to being called to something greater

than yourself was lacking.

Christianity has always been at the forefront of life

in America.

But unlike in Britain, church and state are separate.

America's Constitution specifically

forbids any one established religion.

Christianity is free of any ties to the establishment.

This has had a dramatic impact, with Christianity remaining

an independent and powerful political force.

When the United States was founded,

the very First Amendment, the first thing

in the First Amendment of the Constitution

in the Bill of Rights is freedom of religion.

And freedom from the government ever establishing

a government religion.

Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush

faced widespread criticism abroad.

His avowed religious convictions and the supposed influence God

had on his political decisions.

It's a very fine tightrope, this division between religion

and public life.

And it can lead to assumptions and unfair criticisms being

made about the motivation and reasons

why politicians take the decisions that they do.

And people, then, taking it from that

that somehow you're saying that everything I do

is justified by God.

That's right.

You know, because President Bush, for instance, was

open about the role of faith in his life

and how important faith is to him, then people went,

took it the step farther to think that,

or to make up, really, that he thought God told him things.

Which, of course, he doesn't.

He doesn't think he's Moses, does he?

That is part of the tightrope of it.

People used to suggest that Toni and George

we would actually pray together and that never happened--

Never happened, absolutely of course not.

I mean that is part of the problem of anyone mentioning

what their religion is, and why I

can see that [INAUDIBLE] would not

want the prime minister to say God bless our country.

Because there is criticism.

In the 1960S America underwent the same massive

social, political, and economic changes

as the rest of the West.

And in some ways, it was even more violent and cataclysmic,

with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, both

bringing massive transformational changes

in society.

Yet this period had widely different long-term effects

on the church and Christian belief in the two continents.

Whilst in Europe the 1960s provoked a crisis

in the church, here in America it became an opportunity.

A liberation from the old ways and a reinvigoration

of Christianity.

Red and yellow.

Brown, black, and white.

We all precious.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was at the forefront

of the civil rights movement, working alongside Doctor Martin

Luther King.

He is also an ordained Baptist minister

and his own church in Chicago.

Tell me, do you think that the '60s civil rights

movement would have achieved its goals,

or even come about, had it not been

for the religious faith of yourself and others like you,

in particular, of course, Dr. King.

It was our faith that changed the law.

The law did not change our faith.

The American that we see today was born of the sacrifice

that we made defining the Christian faith.

One could argue that our religion makes us political,

that politics don't make us religious.

Is that religious force that makes

us be willing to do justice, and love mercy.

And the fight for those whose backs are against a wall.

Here in America, the church, or Christianity,

is seen not so much as disconnected

from society as it is in Europe, but as

a dynamic force within it.

Churches, both black and white, were

at the forefront of the civil rights movement,

helping to transform America from a society that

was founded and dominated by whites, to the multiracial one

that it is today.

The Constitution was an immoral document.

It defined African people, God's children

as 3/5 of the human beings, we have

to change the Constitution.

That was the turning point in our country.

And though it was a legal change,

it was driven by the church defining humanity as one.

In many ways, the inauguration of Barack Obama

earlier this year, was as much a victory

for American Christianity as the civil rights movement.

President Barrack Obama runs the last lap of 54-year race.

This was a marathon race, and in that race,

many runners were killed, and martyred, much suffering

and pain, but the end of that race, Barrack Obama

is now America's first African American president.

Today there's a new America that's

more multiracial, more multicultural

because we changed the laws.

For me the strength of Christianity in America

is that it has obtained its ability

to reinvent itself very quickly, time after time,

to suit each new generation's needs.

In the 1970s, while the traditional churches in Europe

began a steady period of decline,

churches here were breaking free from the constraints

of ancient worship, creating whole new ways

to do Christianity.

Some of the most successful are the megachurches.

The first was Willow Creek Community Church.

Hi Sherie.

Welcome.

My name is Jim Mellado.

How are you?

I'm very well.

This is an amazing place.

Well, it's not too old.

We opened it up in 2004, and it's--

It's big.

Oh, well, we've enjoyed it.

Lots of folks come here.

Jim Mellado is the president of the Willow Creek Association,

whose mission is to spread the Willow Creek success

story around the world.

Willow Creek started in 1975 when a group of young people,

fed up with their traditional church,

decided to set up on their own, in a rented movie

theater in a suburb of Chicago.

This is our food court.

Again, to share a meal together.

In fact, you think of Acts 2, in the early church,

they broke bread and they shared and they went house to house.

And so we want to do everything to foster

that church unit, that 8 to 12 people where they can have

true community, share meals together, share life together.

So you come, go to the service, then you come get your meal,

and then kind of sit and do community.

Good morning, everybody.

I want to welcome you.

My name is Nancy.

Come on in and take your seats.

Gracious Heavenly Father.

From the start, women have played

a major role in the church.

Nancy Beach was one of the founding members,

and is now a vice president of the church and a teaching

pastor.

--and see.

We praise the Lord.

From the very beginning, Willow Creek

has believed that God did not distribute the gifts according

to gender, that women can lead and teach and do

all of the gifts, just as men can.

So I haven't had a ceiling over me, which I'm very grateful

for.

At Willow Creek, there are no crosses, no Christian symbols,

nothing that looks like a traditional church.

And today, its average weekly attendance

is over 23,000 people, and it's growing every year.

It's like a rock concert.

The main auditorium seats over 7,200 people

and is the largest theater in the whole of the United States.

All right, let's sing this together.

[SINGING]

While in Britain we are closing churches,

Willow Creek is now so successful

that it is developing new sites every year all over Chicago.

Well welcome the Willow Creek McHenry County.

My name's Steve Gillen.

And I lead our regional ministry here at Willow.

And this is one of our four sites.

This one at McHenry County in the town of Crystal Lake,

is in a warehouse and every weekend about 2,000 people

gather for our services.

Right over here is an extension of our cafe.

We want to make sure everyone has--

Compared to Europe, they are now just so many ways

that you can be a Christian in America,

that it would be hard not to find something

to suit everyone.

I would hope and pray that you would

say I'm in for this series, I'm in for building contentment

muscles in my life.

I'm in--

Willow Creek is still led by its founder

and charismatic senior pastor, Bill Hybels.

The culmination of each week's service is his sermon.

Somehow--

The entire service and his message

are filmed and packaged for distribution

worldwide by the Church's own audio/visual team.

Ashawn's going to sing the first verse--

Looking around this place, this is not a traditional church.

How do you do church at Willow Creek?

We've never tried to be a traditional church.

We've tried to look at the model in the New Testament,

which is a radical thing.

So we started in a movie theater and most of the people

who came our way had no Christian background.

And what they liked about the movie theater

was that it was neutral territory.

If they came as husband and wife,

they didn't really have to have a big fight,

are you Baptist, are you Catholic, are you Presbyterian.

Because there were coming to an interdenominational church that

was based right out of the scriptures as best

we could understand them.

[SINGING]

Unlike Europe's traditional churches,

Willow Creek is not restricted by ancient traditions,

historic buildings, or divided denominations.

The real secret in addition to that big congregational

assembly, is that all of these churches

are honeycombed with very small groups of 10, 15, 20 people.

In fact, in some ways, I think the real secret

is the way they come combine the large with the small.

And they realize the boundary between the church

and the world.

[SINGING]

Willow Creek's work is not limited to its own members.

It also operates one of the biggest public care centers

in Chicago, handing out food and advice to the needy.

And it is run with the efficiency

of a modern business.

Now, David, why are you here today?

Times are tough with the job situation.

I haven't gotten a paycheck now in over two months.

I haven't received any money, and I'm just,

I'm asking for help.

[SINGING]

Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity

once again to serve.

What do you expect from someone who comes into this community

to join the community?

I did a message last year called faith with guts,

and it was just kind of the repeating phrase.

So you say you have faith, where's your guts?

Where's your guts to stand up for it?

Where's your guts to overturn systemic injustice?

Where's your guts to stop racism in your place of employment?

Where's your guts?

Christianity is supposed to be something

that calls the best out of us.

So you don't want your people to be too comfortable.

No.

[SINGING]

There are now somewhere between 5 and 600 megachurches

in America, and they're growing in number every year.

So a significant portion of people

who are in church on a given Sunday

are going to be in megachurches.

It's not a peripheral development.

Some of the megachurches' ideas have already spread to Europe.

But the traditional European churches

would do well to study their success story in detail.

What Willow Creek has done is radically

rethink the way church can be done in the modern world,

and may provide a template for the future of Christianity.

What they've done really, is to take

the kind of mall layout-- the architecture, if you will,

of the mall-- and use that for a church.

You hardly know when you're inside or outside

of a megachurch.

And you can come dressed informally.

The ministers almost never wear neckties.

They surely never wear vestments.

And talks about how Christianity applies to the life

that you're living in the world today.

There's very little talk about eternal punishment

or preparing for the next world.

That hardly ever comes up.

It's how you live today.

So I really believe that the megachurches,

they're, in some ways, the wave of the future.

When I see the current vibrant state of Christianity

in America, and the leading role that it

has played throughout history in transforming this society,

and I try to compare what's happening here

with the story in Europe, I firmly

believe that this crisis of Christianity

is not a crisis of faith, but of organization.

The traditional churches of Western Europe

were built for another age.

And they don't fully work in the 21st century.

If Christianity is to regain its place in Western Europe,

then it has to grapple with change,

or its voice will be ignored.

Christianity in Western Europe is

perceived to have lost its way, and to have

abandon the dynamism that over the last 2,000 years

transformed it from a small Jewish sect,

into the world's largest religion.

But for me, this is not chiefly a crisis of faith itself,

but of how we practice it.

The political, social, and economic upheaval

since the 1960s have seen the church

in Western Europe pushed to the margins of people's lives,

with church attendance in decline and increasingly aging

congregations.

Yet at the same time, many people

are still looking for meaning in their lives,

beyond mere materialism.

All desires known.

[SINGING]

And across the globe, in the US and in the developing world,

the churches are booming.

So what is to be done?

Christianity in Western Europe is inevitably

shaped by 2,000 years of history,

so that today it is perceived to be too closely

connected with the old established order,

and the old ways of thinking.

In Britain, the Church of England and the Catholic Church

are in crisis.

Church attendance is in seemingly terminal decline.

Is it all too late?

It's interesting, as the last census some years ago,

71% of the people in England said

they thought they were Christians.

In other words, the residue of faith of Christianity

is still there.

You take God out of society totally-- this

is what some of the secularists and atheists

want to do-- that it seems to me you

have a society that's, in my view, very dangerous.

I think what is needed is a radical overhaul.

Christianity has to look again at its organizational

structure, to rethink how it does church.

For me, it has to break out of the old straitjacket

of a religious system dominated by ancient static buildings

built for another age.

Christianity is not a physical building, but a body of people.

Beautiful as these buildings are,

my faith is not about architecture,

it's about community.

Maybe the problem is largely one of the historic churches.

Take the Church of England with its land and its power,

or the Catholic Church, generally speaking,

were rooted in our laws and our history and, in a way,

it's almost the industrialized world has passed us by,

and if the Church of England has got

to become the church of the people once more,

touching the lives of ordinary people.

Last year I was asked to give a speech

at a conference at the Vatican in Rome,

on human rights, women, and the church.

The church's message can be distorted

in the eyes of others, by the cultural attitudes which

linger in the church, longer sometimes than they linger in

wider society.

And I believe this is particularly

true in our attitudes to women.

Traditionally, it was women who passed religion

on to their children and who kept the church going

through the good times and the bad.

But when it comes to the public face of Christianity,

women are virtually invisible.

I see a genuine complementarity between the gifts

of women and men in the terms of the mission of the church.

But despite that, if you actually

look at the formal structures of the Catholic Church,

you don't see a woman's face when

you see people speaking for the Catholic Church.

Can we change that?

I don't think that would develop towards priesthood

or episcopacy because of the tradition

of the church in that role.

But I do see the roles of the gifts women being,

not just appreciated, but used more fully.

I firmly believe that Christianity in Western Europe

can be saved, but there are a number of urgent steps

that need to be taken.

Down the centuries, women have formed

the backbone of faith communities.

But their public role has reflected

the culture of the time.

Today, whilst women remain marginalized,

Christianity cannot flourish.

Women and men must be equal partners

in 21st-century Christianity.

And that opening up of the church

must apply to all sections of our modern society.

There are groups of people in our society

that it would be very difficult for me

as a priest to mix with, without being severely

criticized and considered suspect.

I mean, working with prostitutes is extremely difficult.

Being connected with the gay community

would be immensely damaging or difficult to do.

But for Jesus, there was nobody he wouldn't talk to.

Christianity in Europe has to regain its role

as a transformer of society, as the champion

the poor and the oppressed.

After all, one of the first human rights charters

is found in the gospel, the Sermon on the Mount.

I suppose when religion becomes privatized and cease

to be a source for transforming and cease

to challenge the immorality or inconsistent with the state,

it ceases to be alive.

Those churches are dead and their memberships tend to die.

To many in the outside world Christianity still

looks divided by ancient enmities.

And in a world of disbelief, Christians

should work together around the core faith that they all share,

rather than worrying about the doctrinal

beliefs that separate them.

I think it's hard for any denomination

to say we only have the entire truth about God.

The good thing about the United Kingdom,

generally, is that the relationships are very good.

But, we're still defeated.

We haven't reached that full unity

which we know God wants us to have.

And finally, Christianity has to reach out

to other faiths with humility and partnership,

in a way which respects difference rather than trying

to eliminate it.

Christianity should be building bridges between cultures,

but not creating barriers.

Many people in the 20th century started

to write off the church and Christianity as a force.

Here we are in the beginning of the 21st century,

we've got a church that's lasted 2,000 years, one

form or another.

Is this the end for the church?

No.

Rumors of the death of the church

have been greatly exaggerated.

You cannot kill the spirit of the church.

You can kill some people, but you

can't kill the activity of God in human life.

In America, the lesson to be learned

from the success of churches like Willow Creek

is the simple Christian belief in the word of God,

and the urgent desire to put it into practice.

The whole Willow thing has been a supernatural experience,

with a phrase we use all the time around Willow.

Just two words, it says only God.

And it's true.

I firmly believe that Christianity is not

on its last legs.

That the faith I learned from my grandmother

is still as strong as ever.

If the traditional churches of the West

can only resolve their problems and reach out to and work

with people of faith across the world,

then Christianity can not only survive, but prosper.

[MUSIC PLAYING]