Inheriting the Earth

I came across the following striking comment on Peter Hitchens’s weblog post on home-schooling (no, I’m not in the habit of reading the Mail, but I do read Hitchens’s weblog without shame – he’s probably no more conservative than I am anyway):

I was recently asked to sign a petition by an agitated teacher who was upset that she was losing her job as the local school was being closed due to lack of numbers? When I pointed out that the reason there were so few children was that she had spent the last 20 odd years telling all her pupils that it was important to pass exams and leave the community to go to University and that none had come back to have children and contribute to the village, she was dumbfounded and unable to speak as she realised what she had done. There’s more to life than exams and qualifications.

In the Old Testament, we see that when the people of Israel took possession of the land of Canaan, it was apportioned out to the different tribes and within those tribes to particular clans (Joshua 13-21) and that this was to be their perpetual inheritance. If during times of poverty, someone sold part of their inheritance, it was to be redeemed by a kinsman, or bought back by the seller, or eventually returned to the seller in the year of jubilee. If the people were faithful to the Lord their God, then the land would be blessed: the rains would come, the crops would grow, the trees would bear fruit, the vines would yield grapes, they would eat their bread to the full and they would be secure, at peace, protected, and able to lie down at night without fear (Leviticus 25-26). This was salvation. The Promised Land was meant to be a land and a civilisation transformed and restored to what it would have been like in Eden, and in the world before the fall, through God’s people living out the implications of their rescue.

Since the coming of Christ, the inheritance of God’s people is the whole earth (Matthew 5.5), over all which Christ has been given total authority, and which he commands to be discipled through baptism and teaching (Matthew 28.18-20). If this commission is to be fulfilled, then we need to learn from the principles of Israel’s life in the Promised Land, which was meant to be a type, a foretaste of this. If the gospel is faithfully preached in a town, and people are converted, and they are then taught to bring up their children (if the Lord blesses them with marriage and children, rather than with singleness) in the faith, that’s great: people will be saved from hell for heaven and the new creation, and their lives will be transformed as they are salt and light in their families, neighbourhoods, workplaces and so on. As the opening comment – in a non-Christian, non-church setting -  illustrates powerfully, this transformation will not be sustainable and there will be no lasting impact if those people move away, or their children go off to university, and then do not return to the community in which they were brought up, and work and raise their own families there. In time more people may come to the town and come under the sound of the gospel and be converted themselves, but there will be no transformation of the culture of that town, no building on the foundation of the faithfulness of the previous generation. We need to rid ourselves of the idea that everyone has to go to university, that a person’s place in society is measured by the numbers of letters after their name. People are different. We are made in the image of a Triune God. An university education is not for everyone.  In relation to this, we also need to stop the trend of making training for trades into university degree courses. I had a conversation with a retired nurse in which we concluded that nursing in hospitals (which is not to be denigrated and thought inferior to medical practice) has deteriorated since it became a university degree course. We need to affirm the value of apprenticeships and learning a trade and practising that trade locally. And those for whom university is the best option, should also be reminded that they do not have to move to London and become management consultants, lawyers or hedge fund managers, but ought seriously to consider whether to return to the communities in which they grew up and raise their own families there. We need to recover the sense of belonging to a particular place. Then there will be generations of Christians working for this company, in that shop. Then Christian businesses can be set up and passed down the family. Then Christian schools – and dare I say it, colleges, hospitals and doctors’ surgeries – can be established. And that will have social, economic, educational, moral and health implications.  That is how a place can be transformed by the gospel. That is what needs to be preached. We need to think generationally.

This was how the Puritans and their successors thought, with their optimistic eschatology, and long view of history:

Because of their outlook upon the future all the Scottish missionary leaders took the long-term view in evangelization, that is to say, they did not regard the number of individual converts in the present as the first consideration, but rather that energy should be deployed in work which would have the maximum influence upon nations in subsequent generations. Accordingly Alexander Duff, though few could have surpassed him as a popular preacher, gave his best time in India to education because he believed that the schools, if thoroughly based on Scripture, would change the tone of society and be nurseries for the Church of the future…

Alexander Duff put the case with his own characteristic forcefulness:

‘We think not of individuals merely; we look to the masses. Spurning the notion of a present day’s success and a present year’s wonder, we direct our views not merely to the present, but to future generations. While you engage in directly separating as many precious atoms from the mass as the stubborn resistance to ordinary applicances can admit, we shall, with the blessing of God, devote our time and strength to the preparing of a mine and the setting of a train which shall one day explode and tear up the whole from its lowest depths.’

In Africa this same long-term view was equally prominent in all Livingstone’s planning. Early in his career he had to choose between concentrated missionary endeavour among the individuals of a small tribe, or the opening up of Africa – surveying the Continent, locating healthy sites for mission stations, paving the way for a civilisation which would break the horrors of the slave trade and which would, by commerce, introduce a new social economy, using the products of the country to the best advantage. Livingstone followed the wider policy, not because he overlooked the need for the conversion of the individual – indeed ‘probably no missionary in Africa had ever preached to so many blacks’, – but rather because conviction compelled him to lay the foundation for broader results in the Africa of the future.

The Puritan Hope, Iain. H Murry, pp. 180-1

It is just worth concluding by saying that this is of course not absolute, and it is quite right that some individuals and families move from where they grow up to another area and act as a nidus for gospel proclamation and living, and lay a new foundation for future generations there.