The New Man for Our Time - Continued
The command was to "seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (1:17). No one who knows the Bible at all can fail to be moved both by Micah's searching question of what the Lord requires and by his clear answers. (Mic. 6:8)
What is new today is not the social gospel, but the conviction that the social gospel can stand alone, and that it is the only gospel. Thus it is common to hear participants in Christian conferences say quite frankly that they have no patience with those who waste time on prayer and worship. The idea of a "quiet time" is held by some to be obsolete, because it interferes with possible action and service. The pure activist sometimes expresses open contempt for any who give serious thought to the life of personal devotion, because this seems to him to involve an escape from the urgent business at hand. Why should we read the classics of devotion when workers are needed in organizing the campaign for the allocation of more welfare funds? After all, it is foolish to pay attention to the thoughts of men who lived before the technological age and who cannot give us valid answers because they did not even feel the same problems.
One tangible result of this activist mood has been a lessening of emphasis upon public acts of worship. Some say openly that worship can be omitted without real harm to the Christian Cause and that the loss of Sunday from our culture would not be really damaging, since acts of mercy are possible on every day of the week and in every place. This present emphasis must not be confused with that of the recent past, to the effect that worship one day a week is not sufficient for a full Christian witness and that the crucial test comes in common life. The point of the extreme activist party is not that worship is not sufficient, but that it is not even necessary. The conviction of some highly articulate leaders today is that the scattered community of service does not need to be undergirded or balanced by the gathered community of devotion. Whereas we used to say that the service begins when the meeting ends, it is now fashionable to say that the meeting can be omitted entirely, without significant loss.
Though it might be argued, theoretically, that a Christianity in which men know how to picket, but not how to pray, is bound to wither, theorizing is not required, because we can already observe the logic of events.