First a subsidiary question:

Is the Church's calling to make people more religious - to promote religion as a thing in itself? 

It is not at all obvious to me that religion, in itself, is a cause for good in the world. The Church's task is not to bear witness to religion but to Christ as the Saviour of a lost world. This is very different from telling people to be more religious.

It is true that when we, by the grace of God, find forgiveness for our sins, we will want to respond by prayer, Bible reading, and Church worship. However we will have come to that knowledge of God not because someone told us to be religious but because we heard that God loved us, and that Christ died for our sins, bearing the suffering and death of all the world.

The problem of religion for religion's sake is that it so easily becomes the means by which man tries to justify himself before God. The Bible from beginning to end shows us that this is impossible. We live and are redeemed by His grace alone. When religion is used to justify ourselves, we inevitably turn it into a system of impersonal rules and doctrines that actually turn us away from the love of God. This is what the Pharisees of the New Testament times did. At the time of Jesus they were the most religious of all people. They claimed to believe in the teachings of the Bible, but they so codified the Scriptures that they lost touch with the living God. So when God in Christ came in Person to them they were not able to recognise Him and instead they instigated his crucifixion. So it was religion itself that rejected the true God!

There is another way in which religion can be distorted and have very damaging results and that is when it becomes identified with particular racial or ethnic groups. In the time of the Jesus the `zealots' were those who wanted to fight for their national pride by using the traditional religion of their forefathers. It was not so much the living God to whom they were devoted but the their national identity. They used their religious heritage to bolster their national identity. The combination of religion with nationalism is always a dangerous mix. It then becomes, not the means of the self-justification of the individual person, but the means of the self-justification of a whole racial group. The result is often conflict and war.

In recent years we seen this in so many of the world's conflicts. For example, in former Yugoslavia, the `Serbs' are identified by the `Eastern Orthodox Church' and their enemies the `Croats' by the `Roman Catholic Church'. It is not that they have studied the doctrines of these respective Churches and made a choice for themselves. They probably know very little about the teachings of these Churches. However they need the respective religious ceremonies and symbols to identify and justify themselves as Croats or Serbs.

There are many other examples in the world which we could mention - including Northern Ireland.

I do not see myself as in the business of the promotion of religion. I simply want to lead people to Christ whose humanity, I believe, embraces all peoples. Every person of whatever race or nation will one day have to kneel before Him. He alone is the one who takes away the sins of the world by actually bearing in His body all human sin and wickedness. That could only be accomplished by Him who is both God and man and it can only be done once.

I am a Protestant minister but that is not because I want to propagate `protestantism'. The reason why I am a Protestant and not a Roman Catholic is that I believe that the Protestant tradition is less bound up with hierarchies, religious traditions, and self-important claims, than other forms of Christian religion. (That is not to say that the Protestant Churches do not have serious faults - they do. Nor is it to say that there is not much good in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and other religions - there certainly is.)

So what about people who have never heard of Christ? Can their prayers be heard? To answer this I finish with a story from my own recent experience. It concerns someone whose native religion was `Shintoism' - the traditional religion of Japan.

I was giving a series of lectures on the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. The class that day was on Romans Chapter 2 in which Paul speaks about `Gentiles' who have never heard God's teaching. I quote three of the verses here:

 When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them. This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.(Romans 2:14-16.) 

I was very moved by what that Japanese young man told me. I cannot but believe that his mother, though she did not know it, had a real though dim faith in Christ Himself for Christ is none other than the revelation of the love of God. As far as I know she did not come to make her prayer because of the influence of the religion of Shintoism; it was probably in spite of Shintoism that she spoke to God. In recounting that story to others I have been told similar accounts, from many parts of the world, that strongly imply that ordinary people have a vague awareness of `one God who would be known and who wills to save a lost world'. This sometimes faint awareness, is usually something quite separate from the established religious practices of the culture in which the person lives. 

If these religious practices (including Christian religious practices) have anything to do with man's desire (or an ethnic group's desire) for self-justification before God then they actually will be a hindrance to the true knowledge of the love of God and become a potential cause of conflict.

The story of the Japanese student is, then, not the slightest concession to the widely held view that all religions are really the same. It actually reinforces the conviction that Christ is the only Saviour and Lord. He is the one whom the Scripture calls `The Desire of the Nations'. We work for, and patently wait for, His peace.