The Half Time Huddle
The scoreboard as final authority
Australian Football is the best game played by men. It combines speed, strength, endurance and skill in a way that I haven’t seen in any other sport. A feature of the game is that the best players have an uncanny sense for where the goals are, such that when in range they only need a whisker of space and time to get the ball on the boot and through for a goal. The defender could smother his opponent for a full half except for one brief touch, and the stats sheet would say that he had been outplayed. What is true of the part is also true of the whole. When the half time siren sounds and the two teams run to their huddles they may tell themselves all they want that ‘we’re all over them’, but the scoreboard on the far wing will always be the authority on who is winning the match.
The Christian Scoreboard
My goal is to have a look at the scoreboard to see how we Western Christians have been doing of late. God willing this will act as a precursor to a post on brewing tension between Christians of different eschatologies, explaining why I think the premillenials will be at fault if any rupture does happen within the reformed camp.
My belief is that we post-resurrection Christians have two complimentary sets of marching orders from on high. The two sets of instructions are…
1. Genesis 1:28
“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’.”
2. Matthew 28:18-20
“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
It should be clear that these marching orders have a variety of expressions which are context specific, and we have the whole rest of the Bible to give us an interpretative framework for these commands. However, these are the commands. If you walk up to a Christian and say, “What are you doing here?” they should respond with, ‘Filling the earth and subduing it; and converting, baptizing and teaching all the nations of Man.’ These commands are helpfully quantifiable to a large degree. For example, we can ask ourselves how full the world is, and whether it is getting fuller. If it is not full, and not getting fuller, then we are not doing very well. Naturally, we could quibble over what ‘full’ means, as we know that ‘filling’ has just as much to do with distribution as it does with raw numbers (Genesis 11), but such quibbling should not prevent us from a broad agreement on what the goal is on the macro scale. This gives us the opportunity to get out our maps and calculators and figure out whether things are becoming more or less like how God told us to make them.
Filling is just one example. With a little more difficultly we could make some quantifiable metrics of subduing, and we can definitely make quantifiable metrics of converting, baptizing and obeying.
No doubt we all feel like we have been trying very hard, and we probably have. But as we have already seen, ultimately success or failure depends on the numbers on the board, not on how dirty the guernseys are. With this in mind, let us have a look at the scoreboard.
Metrics
The following metrics are Australian specific and so, though my intention is to characterise the success of the Western church, we will need to make a rather large assumption that we can extrapolate from our own context to the situation as a whole. These stats are the work of a 26 year old with 3 hours up his sleeve, and hence though I am confident in their accuracy I have deliberately not attempted precision.
1. Filling
Australia is nowhere near full. We are currently home to 27 million people (ABS 2024), but could easily find room for 100 million and give them all a better quality of life than they currently have.
The birthrate in Australia has been below replacement since the mid 1970’s. As of 2022 it sits at 1.63 births per woman (ABS 2022). Our population has grown during this time and is still growing, but this has been as a result of migration rather than propagation. We have also increasingly concentrated our population in major urban centres, which has lead to a population decrease or even collapse in non-trendy rural areas. It is a guess, but I would think that the population density in Mullewa or Salmon Gums was probably higher before the colonial era than it is currently.
In conclusion, we are a mixed bag for this command. We are meeting the population growth criteria on a technicality though we ourselves are too lazy to procreate. We are going backwards on the distribution part of the requirement, and we will be unlikely to stop do so until some of us bite the bullet and move to the less attractive areas and raise children there, so that they have the God given natural affinity for the less obviously desirable places.
2. Subduing
This is the only metric where I will allow myself to be vague and qualitative. I say without hesitation that we live in an uglier, less ecologically rich and ultimately less God honouring landscape than our ancestors did, due to our choices of urban planning, agricultural practices, wildland management and architecture. Naturally this is not true to an equal extent in all places, and there are probably some places in the West where Godly dominion is increasing.
3. Converting and Baptizing
The rate that Australians identify as Christian has halved since 1970 and currently sits at around 43%. Between 2016 and 2021 the number of Australians identifying as reformed dropped by over 100 000, though this is probably somewhat compensated by an increase of 75 000 in ‘non-denominational’ (read ‘Baptist’) Christians.
Rates of church attendance are harder to find and are probably less reliable. However, the best bet is that church attendance rates have probably been stable over the last 2 decades (Roy Morgan 2021).
In summary, the church is currently clinging on to a draw in this metric. We are haemorrhaging nominal Christians but the percentage of saved Australians has probably remained steady for some time.
4. Obeying
We could choose from hundreds of different specific examples of law keeping to determine whether Australians are becoming increasingly obedient or disobedient to God. I have chosen the three below because they are serious and relatively easy to get data for.
a. Illicit Unions
As of 2021, 38% of children in Australia are born out of wedlock. By comparison, the rate of out of wedlock births sat near 5% from 1900 through to the early 1960’s (AIFS 2023). When it is considered that contraception and abortion are much more readily available now than they were prior to the 60’s, it is safe to believe that the 7 fold increase in out of wedlock births under-estimates the weight of guilt our culture is carrying for the sin of extra-marital sex.
b. Abortion
Australian abortion figures are not perfectly established. As a rough guide, it is likely that there have been just under 100 000 abortions per year in Australia for the last 40 years (Chan & Sage 2005; Children by Choice 2024), which would mean a small per capita decline in the abortion rate over this time due to the increased population size. As an interesting side note, the abortion rate is just under a third of the current birth rate, meaning that if all these children were brought to term we would be sitting on a replacement birth rate.
c. Divorce
It is a very crude metric, but currently in Australia for every 2 marriages there is more than 1 divorce (AIFS 2023b; AIFS 2023c). In 1900 it was closer to 35 marriages to 1 divorce. Apart from a brief explosion of divorces immediately following the implementation of no-fault divorce in 1976 the rate of divorces when compared to marriages has been on a somewhat steady upward trend for 120 years (AIFS 2023b; AIFS 2023c).
On the topic of obedience, I do not have hard data for the following but they are intuitively fairly obvious...
· Gay marriage is currently legal in Australia.
· Porn use is rampant. It is probably not increasing due to already being near saturation.
· There is a well established mental health crisis in Australia, particularly in the younger demographics. This mental health crisis includes significantly higher than historical rates of people desiring to be the opposite sex from what they are, though the current medical establishment does not treat this as a mental disorder.
· Our tax system is either ambivalent or somewhat disadvantageous towards traditional family setups.
· Federal and state governments in Australia are shedding any last vestiges of Christianity and increasingly flexing their muscles in interfering with the Church. For example, during the so called Covid pandemic state governments from time to time effectively banned in person Communion through stay at home orders.
In conclusion, moral decline in Australia has been steady though not precipitous for at least 50 years, and where the decline appears to have stabilized (such as in abortion), this stabilization is likely to be due to saturation rather than repentance.
Time for the coach’s address
As we Western Christians jog in to the half time huddle it is hard to ignore that we lost the last term. When it comes to filling, subduing, converting, baptizing and teaching the scoreboard says that we are losing ground. Having said this, we are still in the game. The most important statistic is the rate of church going Christians, and we have probably managed to keep this fairly steady.
Word runs round the group that the opposition made a serious procedural violation before the game, serious enough that the higher ups will need to disqualify them at the next board meeting of the league. The four points are in the bag, but there is still another half to play. Several players seem to be eyeing off the post match esky and one or two are asking to spend the rest of the match on the bench. The coach notices and begins an impassioned speech demanding that the team play out the game with the same spirit as before. As the speech reaches a crescendo the assistant tugs on his sleeve and points out that the same spirit as before produced a 5 goal deficit in the previous term, and rather blandly states that we are going to need to switch to a more attacking game plan and make some left field positional changes if we are going to win this thing on the field as well as in the board room. A hush falls on the huddle, an awkward tension settles on everyone, except for the original culprits who steel another glance at the beers.
To be continued…
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) Births Australia. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/births-australia/2022#data-downloads [29th March 2024)
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) Religious Affiliation in Australia. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia [29th March 2024]
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024) Population Pyramid. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/population-clock-pyramid [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies a (2023) Births in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/births-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies b (2023) Divorces in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/divorces-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies c (2023) Marriages in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/marriages-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Chan A, Sage LC (2005) Estimating Australia’s abortion rates 1985-2003. The Medical Journal of Australia 182, 447-452. Available from: https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/182/9/estimating-australias-abortion-rates-1985-2003 [29th March 2024]
Children by Choice (2024) Abortion Rates in Australia. Available from: https://www.childrenbychoice.org.au/organisational-information/papers-reports/abortion-rates-in-australia [29th March 2024]
Roy Morgan (2021) The shrinking proportion of religious Australians. Available from: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/the-shrinking-proportion-of-religious-australians [29th March 2024]
