It's 1982....I just picked a year from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. You've got four channels on your television set.....three major networks and a UHF channel. Pentecostalism as a denomination is doing well with Assemblies of God just about everywhere. Billy Graham is pumping out his crusades at a regular rate....and there are Christian bookstores everywhere. I worked in an industrial environment....maybe eight hundred men and a corresponding office building....hardhat and steel toes....and a lot of crosses etched on the hardhats in magic marker. We all....well most of us....used the term....born again....to describe what had happened to us. We 'witnessed' a lot....at times not all that wisely. We would be described as....born again Christians....as if there were some other type of Christian that didn't need to be born again.
As a member of an Assemblies of God....with a 700 club pin on my hat....if in conversation someone told me that they were Presbyterian....I would try to form a smile.....and then give an innocuous....'Oh'....poor chap doesn't know what he's missing....the problem was that I didn't know what I was missing.
They were the best of times....and they weren't the whe worst of times....a take on how Dickens would begin his....A Tale of two Cities. It was a Country of Beulah as Bunyan would describe it in Pilgrim's Progress....a period of rest....to praise God....for those who felt so inclined. Vietnam was over....Jimmy Carter was a fresh face...and then Ronald Reagan was a reassuring face. Thatcher was in control in England. We didn't have a lot of money....401s hadn't started to pay off yet. A good vacation was one of the motels at Wildwood or Virginia Beach.
We were as different as night and day from the fifties....and now we are as different as night and day from 1982. Today it is the worst of times....and never the best of times. Oh how we like to call Jimmy Carter names but we had no idea the horror that would come after Carter and Mondale. The Assembly of God that I spent my first years as a Christian in....changed its name....I only found out a few days ago....and have no idea why. Megachurches have been a disaster. Pastors became more CEOs. The cross was a little too offensive to have hanging around the church. No one knows what being born again is all about....it becoming a kind of perfunctory appellation.
I looked for Christian bookstores on a recent trip south. They are hard to find. I located one on the Internet....only three miles off the Interstate. We took the detour and it looked like it had been closed down for years. A military phrase here....our supply lines have been cut. We blew off the pandemic....instead of humbling ourselves under God's Judgment....and blamed it all on Fauci. We get no warnings from our pulpits at all. Everyone thinks that their pastor preaches great....because they have nothing to compare it to. We do not want Jesus to return....we want the Republicans to return. This is the quintessential perfect storm that is bearing down upon us. There is only one harbor of safety....but we do not have the common sense to take soundings to avoid running aground.
