Where is the church now? Where are the clergy? Why do so many church doors remain shut? Why do so many churches refuse to carry out the central mandate of the Christian Gospel and lift up the cross?

Some day they are going to have to answer the question: “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”
—Chris Hedges,  from post at TruthDig

Chris Hedges,  I discovered,  was at Harvard Divinity School studying to enter the ministry,  as his father did.  He discoverd,  along the way,  particularly in a pastoral role in a downtrodden urban setting,  that the church was alarmingly lukewarm,  and he discovered this most disaapointingly in the “liberal clergy” who,  as Hedges put it,  “spoke glowingly of ‘the poor’ but didn’t like “the smell of the poor'”.  I find it disappointing myself,  that the Occupy movement ,  a movement from the secular grassroots,  is what it has taken to begin to wake up a church that obstensibly is to be leading the world in calling these very same issues to the forefront.  Now,  it seems,  the least we can do is to stand with those who stand with the oppressed. Maybe along the way,  we might repent of this abdication of responsibilty.

Hedges is confronting and challenging as well as articulate:

The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women….

––Chris Hedges from post at TruthDig