THE EDITOR, Sir:IAN BOYNE deserves congratulations for his well-researched and clearly written article, entitled 'Has the Church dropped the Emancipation Struggle?' The article provides a good critique of the declining influence of the church on post-Emancipation Jamaican society over the past 170 years, against the background of the nation's growing social crisis. It also appears at a crucial time when the church community pauses to reflect on its glorious achievements during the post-Emancipation period, beginning with its role in the abolition of slavery.
One would only hope that the leaders of the church in Jamaica, as they reflect on the declining influence of the church in the nation, would take time to read this article for what it is worth and to respond appropriately.
There is, however, an important issue which Mr. Boyne has overlooked in his analysis, one which would no doubt bring balance to his arguments particularly in reference to the current state of the church in Jamaica, and which therefore deserves comment.
What Mr. Boyne failed to point out is that what made the church the most important social institution in the early post-Emancipation period was the fact that the church was at its pinnacle of spiritual health, having been impacted by revival in the early 1800s. In fact, as Mary Stewart Relfe, implies in her best selling book, The Cure of all Ills, it was the influence of this revival on the church that led to its involvement in the abolition movement and ultimately to much of the social development that was accomplished by the church during the early post-Emancipation period in the Western world including Jamaica.
In understanding the effects of that revival one is able to place Ian Boyne's concern about the church's marginal and declining influence over the lives of Jamaicans in proper perspective. But before we can do so we need to reflect on conditions in the world prior to the 1800s. So deplorable were the social conditions following the American Revolution (1775-1783) that Dr. J. Edwin Orr, the eminent Revival historian, considered the period as "an unprecedented moral slump."
The great church historian, Kenneth Scott Latourette, wrote of the period, "It seems that Christianity is about to be ushered out of the affairs of mankind." The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court wrote, "The church is too far gone to ever be redeemed," while the famous atheist, Voltaire declared, "Christianity will be forgotten in 30 years." The revival of the 1800s changed all of this. Mary Relfe suggests that revival always occurs in a day of deep moral darkness. "When the spiritual state of the Church has plummeted there is a corresponding moral, social and political decline." Put another way, secular society mirrors the condition of the church.
The church in Jamaica is clearly in need of revival to be able to create the kind of earth-shaking reforms that it undertook in the nation during the early post-Emancipation period. To think otherwise is to live in a fool's paradise. The church in Jamaica has not just simply dropped the emancipation struggle; it has lost its godly passion to make the struggle any longer possible.
I am, etc.,
REV. NEWTON GABBIDON
IPMIorg@aol.com
Intercessory Prayer Ministry International
PO Box 360-356
Brooklyn, New York
