THE
P RTAL
August 2015
Page 3
Portal Comment
Will Burton has been giving thought
to a thorny problem.
Evangelisation: should it be of the individual or of the whole culture?
Our society, is it moral?
I
do not know if you have noticed, but car drivers
do not drive on the left in the UK anymore. They
drive on the right, well on dual-carriageways, at any
rate. Even when the inside lane is free of traffic, almost
everyone drives on the right – even Police cars and
professional drivers, all of whom ought to know better.
On motorways, we have had the “middle lane
hogger” for years. Now there is the “outside lane
hogger”. No one wants to drive on the left. I wonder if
we should abandon the British custom of driving on
the left, join most of the rest of the world and drive
on the right? Perhaps not, because one suspects that
if we followed that custom, everyone would then start
to drive on the left!
You see, it is about being lawless. Who among you
obeys speed limits? Now, be honest, who among our
readers keeps the speed of the car under the speed
limit, especially in built-up areas? I would take a
guess that less than 10% of drivers do.
Young children strapped in the child’s seat in the
back of the car, quickly learn that Mummy or Daddy
is not driving within the speed limit. Do not ask
me how they know, but know they do. The lesson is
learnt at an early age. The law does not matter. We
ourselves decide which laws to obey and which to
ignore. The real crime is getting caught.
All this flooded into my mind when I read the
accounts of Proclaim 15. The Portal has its own
account elsewhere in this journal. The event was all
about Evangelisation. “Introducing people to Jesus”
as one speaker put it. Individual conversions are fine,
and we need more of them, but are they enough?
Surely, our whole culture needs conversion as well.
Sadly, the drift is in the opposite direction.
Secularism is replacing religion in so many areas of
life. We seem to be losing moral standards as well. Is
this inevitable? Well, in my opinion it is.
Take God out of the equation and why bother to
do the right thing when no one is looking? As this
at ] YH Z