Introduction
Does this sound like an opening phrase of your Pastor’s sermon introducing a new series on the book of I John? “You are part of a community of welcomers where people from all walks of life can belong and be well, regardless of financial circumstances.” Well, it certainly could be. However, this is the opening line in the latest promo piece from my local YMCA. Do you remember what those letters stand for? I suspect that many of our local members do not. I watch my fellow members strutting through the huge exercise room filled with machines to help perfect every muscle to peak performance, and it is evident that the intention is more than good health. Or I listen to the music (I wish I could block it out) that provides the rhythm for the cycling class. It, too, says someone, or many, have no idea what the “C” in YMCA represents.
Historical Illustration
Yet, this sentence describes the spirit of the YMCA. It is a beautiful visage of its roots. Those letters stand for the Young Men’s Christian Association. Here is a brief history:
The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded in London, England, on June 6, 1844, in response to unhealthy social conditions arising in the big cities at the end of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1750 to 1850). Growth of the railroads and centralization of commerce and industry brought many rural young men who needed jobs into cities like London. They worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week.
Far from home and family, these young men often lived at the workplace. They slept crowded into rooms over the company’s shop, a location thought to be safer than London’s tenements and streets. Outside the shop things were bad — open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, lovers for hire and abandoned children running wild by the thousands.
George Williams, born on a farm in 1821, came to London 20 years later as a sales assistant in a draper’s shop, a forerunner of today’s department store. He and a group of fellow drapers organized the first YMCA to substitute Bible study and prayer for life on the streets. By 1851 there were 24 Ys in Great Britain, with a combined membership of 2,700. That same year the Y arrived in North America: It was established in Montreal on November 25, and in Boston on December 29.
The idea proved popular everywhere. In 1853, the first YMCA for African Americans was founded in Washington, D.C., by Anthony Bowen, a freed slave. The next year the first international convention was held in Paris. At the time there were 397 separate Ys in seven nations, with 30,369 members total.
The YMCA idea, which began among evangelicals, was unusual because it crossed the rigid lines that separated all the different churches and social classes in England in those days. This openness was a trait that would eventually lead to including in YMCAs all men, women, and children, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. Also, its target of meeting social need in the community was dear from the start.
George Williams was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1894 for his YMCA work and buried in 1905 under the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral among that nation’s heroes and statesmen. A large stained glass window in Westminster Abbey, complete with a red triangle, is dedicated to YMCAs, to Sir George and to Y work during the first World War.”
Danger of Secularization
For all practical purposes, the YMCA has become a secular organization built upon Christian ethics without the gospel as its heart. There are many similarities between the YMCA and the nations of England and America. Each is dependent upon its origin in the ethics of the gospel. As that ethic is eroded, so are these institutions eroding.
Whether the YMCA, England, America, Germany, hospitals, the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army.; whether Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, Fundamentalism, or Evangelicalism, all are doomed to demise as they become ethical institutions without the heartbeat of the Gospel. When there is no Spirit, there is no life. It is the Gospel that initiates the Spirit in the lives of individuals. It is this Spirit that not only insights passion for the right but also defines what the right is.
Necessity of the On-going Work of God
Without the Spirit to lead us into truth and to keep us grounded in it, we will eventually deteriorate and find our culture has embraced what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida proclaimed.
Truth will become a social construct. It is like a letter that never reaches a destination, as demonstrated by philosopher John Caputo, who extrapolated Derrida’s work, The Post Card. A text remains coherent but can be parsed differently by different readers in changing cultural contexts. Hence, the text is always arriving. He then applies this to the Bible and concludes that if Jesus were teaching in the current cultural context, he would adjust his teaching to embrace what we call homosexuality, though, in the time of his and the Apostle Paul’s writing, they condemned it.
Conclusion
History is essential from Genesis onward. Without the history of origins and the history of the fall, the history of redemption becomes the Postcard that never arrives, interpreted by diverse fallen people, yielding an endless dribble from multiple idols to whom sacrifices must be offered, to the Freudian and Darwinian speculations, to postmodernism’s “your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth” nonsense. The only ones who make any sense at all, if there is no God, no redemptions by Christ on the Cross, and no Holy Spirit to rebirth a human being who is thereby redeemed, is Existentialism—all that matters is this moment for me all that I can squeeze out of it.
Thank God He did not leave us to our devices. He has given us truth in the Person of Jesus Christ, who is among His attributes, The Logos, the Word of God, and he is the Alpha and the Omega.
- He is HOPE amid despair.
- He is STABILITY amid chaos.
- He is TRUTH that unmasks the Evil One, the father of lies (John 8:44).
- He enables us to glorify and please Him.
- He enables us to live individually and socially successful lives.