Reformátusok Lapja, 1971 (71. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1971-11-01 / 11. szám
6 REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA the laughter. With our young people being fed this kind of entertainment it is no wonder that we are reaping what we have sown. I wonder how many of you realize that the family unit is disintegrating at a much more rapid rate than ever before. In 1960 there were about 490.000 divorces and by 1969 that had climbed to 680.000 and today we’ve even passed that mark. I’m concerned that one out of every 3 first born children is illegitimate. I love music, but I’m concerned about the sounds that are passed off as music today. It is getting more suggestive and louder and louder. In a test run at a university on guinea pigs, it was found that after 88 hours of exposure to hard rock, the cochlear cells in the ears collapsed and shriveled up like peas. At the University of Knoxville, in a clinical test it was discovered that the hearing of many students had already deteriorated to a level of the average 65 year old person. We are seeing more and more strikes today than ever before. It is becoming a way of life among professional people as well as blue collar workers. In 1960 there were only three strikes by teachers. Now we number them in the hundreds. The problems faced by teachers, policemen, factory workers, office workers — labor or management — is not going to be resolved by the social gospel regardless of what ministers or politicians tell you. These problems will become increasingly more complex and increasingly more severe in intensity. In this supposedly great Christian nation we find that unrest is particularly evident in slum areas. Each administration, Republican and Democrat, said that they were going to eliminate or rebuild the slums. And yet slums grow instead of shrinking and become centers of riots. The welfare costs in all cities and states are rising, and yet poverty was going to be eliminated by a national war on poverty. While this unrest continues and while we search for dollars which we don’t seem to have, Americans will spend over $40 million on True Story, Confession and other magazines. We spend more money in America on dog food than we do on baby food. There was a time when people looked to the church for answers to their problems. Some still do, but I’m afraid that many of the churches are woefully lacking in providing the answers that will meet the needs of the human soul. More and more we are heading toward a One World Church, and I’m not convinced that this is the right idea. We see even in the Catholic churches growing unrest and a move on to lessen the power of the Pope. If ever there was a world wide church, it has been the Roman Catholic Church, and yet today they are losing their priests and members by the hundreds. And still we see the Protestants trying to create the same type of Super Church structure. The Church is playing the same numbers game that the rest of America is. They may not admit it, but many churches are more interested in numbers than they are in individual souls. Man is the worst culprit when it comes to pollution. Each year we spew more smoke, dust, heat, steam and chemicals into the atmosphere. The annual loss from air pollution is $11 billion. Nature has an efficient way of getting rid of its wastes through the process of decay and reclamation, but man defies nature to get rid of some cf the synthetic materials that we have developed. Some think that we don’t have a thing to worry about because the air will just blow all these pollutants far out into space and that will be the end of it. But the winds that ventilate the earth are only 6 miles high and at the 15 mile level there is almost nothingness. Each day we are filling this 6 mile umbrella that covers us, and one day the disaster that befalls us will be greater than what happened in Donora, Pa., and in London, England in the ’50’s. Our nation is becoming a gigantic dumping ground. Oxygen, which we need to exist, is being depleted by the pollutants and sewage. By 1980 it is possible that all of the oxygen in the 22 U.S. river basins will have been depleted. Lake Erie has already gotten there. Air pollutants are causing more and more respiratory illnesses. Emphysema has become a great killer of people. In the U.S. there are more emphysema patients than the combined total of lung cancer and tuberculosis victims — more than 1 million. There are many, many more areas of concern that I could elaborate on — starvation, rampant disease (believe it or not, syphillis and gonorrhea are on the increase in America), the walls that nations have put up, the weapons of destruction that nations have (napalm, atomic and hydrogen bombs, germ warfare), the arms race, rising taxes, rising needs, no praying allowed in the schools, and lawlessness — but time and space will not permit it. I am concerned about all of these, but I also feel that the social gospel is not the answer. I feel that if our church can be a lightouse in a world gone dark at times, then each individual can bring in his own ship of life to the shore which is Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Each one of these areas that I have touched on and some I haven’t even mentioned, are ones that will affect each one of us at some time or another in our lifetimes. Will we know how to cope with them? Will we have the strength to overcome them? There is so much in the secular world pulling us in so many directions. Let us not try to secularize the church but let us try to revitalize the lives of people so that as they walk the highways and byways of life they might change the world for Christ, for it is only as that is done that the problems of life — large and small — will be resolved. Eugene Szabó
