East of Eden: The Church in the Wilderness

The temptation of Babel and the violence of Cain

1. We are in the wilderness

There is a particular kind of grief that comes when something you have taken for granted begins to disappear.

For generations, the Church of England occupied a recognisable place in English life. Its buildings marked the landscape. Its clergy were known figures in their communities. Its language and rituals shaped the rhythms of birth, marriage, death and public remembrance. Even those who rarely darkened the doors of a church often understood something of its place in the nation’s story.

That world has changed. We can argue about when the change began, who is responsible and what might have been done differently. But we cannot pretend that the Church occupies the same cultural position it once did.

The 2021 census in England and Wales found that 46.2% of the population identified as Christian, down from 59.3% in 2011. Those reporting no religion had risen to 37.2%. These figures measure religious identification rather than church attendance or personal belief, but they reveal a substantial change in the place Christianity occupies in public life.

There is no single explanation for this change. Secularisation matters, as do individualism, changes in family life, economic insecurity and the growing distance between the Church’s moral language and the experience of many people. We must also reckon with the failures and scandals of Christian institutions. There are signs of renewed participation in some congregations, and recent Church of England attendance figures have risen. That deserves to be acknowledged, though a modest recovery in attendance is not the same as a reversal of wider cultural change.

There is no use pretending that all this is simply the result of a hostile culture. Some of the damage has been done from within.

For those of us who love the Church, this can be painful. We see congregations ageing, buildings closing, clergy stretched, and communities wondering whether the institution has anything left to offer. We worry about the future of parish ministry, the formation of disciples and the loss of a shared Christian vocabulary.

It is understandable that we want to recover what we have lost. We look for strategies, campaigns, structures and leaders who might restore our influence. We want the Church to matter again.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the Church to flourish. The question is what sort of flourishing we seek, and what we are prepared to become in pursuit of it.

Perhaps we need to recover a biblical imagination for this moment. Not a fantasy of restoration, nor a desperate attempt to make the past return, but a way of seeing our circumstances through the story of God.

We are in the wilderness.

In Scripture, the wilderness is a place of hunger and danger, but also of provision and formation. Israel discovers there how dependent it is upon God. It receives bread it could not provide for itself and learns, often painfully, what it means to live as God’s people. The wilderness is not proof that God has abandoned us. Nor is it a place we should romanticise. It is where the things we have relied upon are exposed, and where we may discover that God has not finished with us.

Perhaps some of the security we once drew from our buildings, our status, our influence and our place in the national story has been taken away. We are left to ask whether our trust was ever really in God, or whether we had quietly transferred it elsewhere.

The wilderness is where we discover what we worship. It may also be where we learn again how to be a people of God.

2. Building Babel

In Genesis 11, humanity gathers on a plain and begins to build a city with a tower reaching towards the heavens.

The builders have a plan. They have a technology, a shared language and a common purpose. They want to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered across the earth.

There is something recognisably human about this. The fear of scattering sits just beneath the ambition. They want security, significance and a future they can control. They want to hold everything together.

The text does not give us a simple explanation of precisely what was wrong with the tower. Its emphasis on making a name and avoiding dispersion nevertheless invites us to consider what happens when a community seeks security and significance through the power it can build for itself.

That is where Babel begins to speak to the Church.

We, too, know how to build. We have strategies for growth, plans for mission, institutional structures, leadership programmes and buildings that carry generations of memory. Much of this work is necessary and good. The problem begins when these things become our source of security, when keeping the institution alive becomes indistinguishable from serving the purposes of God.

A Church frightened of being scattered may begin to build a tower.

We want to be heard and respected. We want a seat at the table. We want the government to listen, the media to take us seriously and the public to recognise the value of Christian faith. We want to recover the influence we once enjoyed.

But the desire to make a name for ourselves can become difficult to distinguish from the desire to make God’s name known.

Seeking influence in order to serve our neighbours can be an expression of love. Seeking it because we are frightened of becoming insignificant is something else. The first looks outwards; the second gradually turns the Church in on itself.

The tower will always look attractive when we are afraid of being scattered.

Babel is not simply a story about human arrogance. It is about a community trying to secure its future through what it can build. That is why it should trouble us. We can spend so much energy trying to keep the Church standing that we forget what the Church is for.

The question is not whether we should build anything. It is whether we have begun to believe that our building can save us.

3. The temptations of Jesus

The wilderness story of Jesus offers another way of understanding our predicament.

After his baptism, Jesus is led into the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil. The temptations concern bread, power and spectacle. They are not random distractions from his mission. They go to the heart of what kind of Messiah he will be.

Jesus is hungry. There is nothing wrong with bread, and nothing shameful about hunger. The question is whether he will exercise his vocation on the tempter’s terms, turning his sonship into a means of securing himself rather than trusting the Father. His answer draws on Israel’s wilderness story: human life depends on more than bread, on every word that comes from God.

The second temptation offers Jesus authority over the kingdoms of the world. Here is power without the cross, rule without suffering, a kingdom available through compromise with the very forces he has come to confront.

The third invites him to throw himself from the temple and force God’s hand. It is the temptation of spectacle: to make God’s presence undeniable, to compel attention through a dramatic display of power.

Jesus refuses all three. He will not turn stones into bread to secure himself, gain the kingdoms of the world by bowing to another master, or manipulate God into proving himself.

He will be the Messiah on the Father’s terms.

The temptations have not disappeared. They have simply found new ways of presenting themselves.

We can be tempted by bread: the desire for security, resources and survival. We can be tempted by power, wanting to regain a place at the centre of public life and recover a lost authority. And we can be tempted by spectacle, believing that the right campaign, the right leader or the right church-growth strategy will finally make us impossible to ignore.

None of these things is necessarily wrong in itself. Churches need resources. Christians should participate in public life. Good leadership matters. The danger lies in the terms on which these things are pursued.

Will we trust God when we cannot secure the outcome? Will we serve our neighbours when doing so brings no institutional advantage? Can we remain faithful when the world does not applaud?

Jesus does not overcome temptation by becoming more impressive. He does so by remaining faithful.

His way leads not to the throne of Caesar but to the cross. The Church cannot claim to follow him while treating his refusal of worldly power as an inconvenient detail.

4. The lure of restoration

There is a powerful desire in parts of the Church to recover a lost Christian culture. Sometimes this comes through appeals to national identity, Christian heritage or the need to reclaim a public voice. Elsewhere it is expressed in more respectable language about restoring confidence, rebuilding influence or recovering the Church’s place in society.

We should be careful here. There is nothing wrong with valuing Christian history, defending religious freedom or making a serious contribution to public debate. Nor should Christians retreat from political questions or abandon the struggle for justice.

But restoration can become an idol.

It begins when we imagine that the Church will be healthy again once society recognises us as important. We start measuring faithfulness by access, visibility and influence. We become preoccupied with what the Church used to be and less attentive to what God is asking us to become.

Nostalgia also allows us to tell a flattering story about the past. We remember the social authority of the Church but forget those who were excluded, silenced or harmed by its institutions. We remember cultural influence but overlook the ways Christian language has been used to justify injustice. We mourn the loss of public respect without asking whether we always deserved it.

The past was not as golden as we sometimes imagine.

Nor is the present simply a story of decline. There are congregations growing, people discovering faith, communities of prayer emerging in unexpected places, and Christians serving their neighbours with quiet courage. God is not confined to the institutions and cultural arrangements through which previous generations encountered him.

Perhaps the task is not to restore Christendom but to learn again how to follow Christ.

That asks us to surrender the fantasy of returning to a world in which Christian faith is assumed and its institutions automatically respected. We must discover what faithful witness looks like when the Church has to earn a hearing through the quality of its life.

We may have less cultural power than we once did. We have not been given permission to love our neighbours any less.

But there is a deeper danger here than nostalgia. Fear of losing our place can turn into resentment towards those we believe have taken it from us. When the Church begins to imagine that its future depends upon defeating its enemies, a question about cultural change becomes a question about what we are prepared to do to other people.

That is where the story of Cain begins to speak.

5. The beast at the door

The story of Cain and Abel takes us further into the problem.

Cain brings an offering to God, as does his brother Abel. God regards Abel and his offering, but not Cain and his. Cain becomes angry, and his face falls.

God speaks to him:

“Sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

— Genesis 4:7

It is a remarkable image. Sin is not merely an abstract mistake or a failure to keep a rule. It is like an animal waiting at the threshold. Something is gathering in Cain, something that could still be resisted but is already drawing him towards violence.

God does not abandon Cain to his anger. He warns him. There is still a choice at the door.

But Cain does not master what crouches there. He takes his brother into the field and kills him.

The first murder in Scripture happens between brothers. The violence is not committed by a stranger or an obvious enemy. It grows within a family, within a relationship that should have been marked by care.

Cain’s violence is not simply about Abel. It is about what Cain does with his humiliation, anger and fear. His brother becomes the place where those feelings are discharged.

Church life is not immune to this. We know what it is to feel overlooked, threatened or diminished. Disappointment can become resentment; disagreement can turn into suspicion. Another Christian becomes the obstacle to our own flourishing, someone who must be defeated before the Church can be saved.

We can baptise our anger in theological language. We tell ourselves we are defending the truth, protecting the Church or saving the nation. Our cause seems so righteous that we no longer notice the violence growing in our own hearts.

The beast at the door is not always an obvious act of cruelty. Sometimes it is the slow hardening of a heart, the moment when we stop listening, or the decision that someone else’s suffering is an acceptable price for achieving what we believe to be a greater good.

This is where Cain meets Babel. A community frightened of losing its place can begin to look for someone to blame. An anxious Church can find enemies more easily than it finds the courage to repent.

Cain’s brother is not the obstacle to Cain’s salvation.

The Church must resist the temptation to destroy its brother in order to save its world.

6. The temptation to be acceptable

One of the quieter temptations facing the Church is the desire to become acceptable again.

We want people to like us. We want our neighbours to think well of us, to regard us as useful, reasonable and relevant. There is nothing wrong with being a good neighbour, and Christians should take care not to confuse faithfulness with needless provocation.

But there is a difference between being good neighbours and reshaping the gospel so that nobody finds it troubling.

The gospel offers comfort, but it also unsettles. It speaks of forgiveness and exposes sin. It proclaims the dignity of every person while challenging the arrangements through which some people are treated as disposable. It announces a kingdom in which the last are first, enemies are loved, wealth is held accountable and the powerful are not beyond judgement.

A Church that wants to be liked at any cost will eventually struggle to speak these things clearly.

We can become skilled at translating Christian faith into the language of whatever the culture already values. We talk about wellbeing without mentioning repentance, community without costly love, or inclusion without asking what genuine belonging demands of us. We celebrate success while quietly moving the poor, the distressed and the difficult to the edge of the picture.

The result is a Church that looks increasingly like the world it hopes to persuade.

Jesus did not seek conflict for its own sake. He ate with people others despised, welcomed those who had been pushed aside and showed extraordinary patience with those who struggled to understand him. His compassion was not a strategy for making himself acceptable. It was the expression of God’s kingdom.

His love did not prevent him from confronting religious hypocrisy or challenging the abuse of power. In the end, he was crucified by the forces that could not accommodate the kind of kingdom he proclaimed.

We should not romanticise rejection. There is no virtue in being disliked, and criticism of the Church is not automatically evidence of our faithfulness. Sometimes people reject the Church because the Church has behaved badly. The right response is repentance, not self-congratulation.

But public approval is not, in itself, a sign of God’s blessing.

The Church is called to bear witness to Jesus, not to become a chaplain to the anxieties of the culture or a public-relations department for its own survival.

Jesus will not be reduced to the chaplain of our cultural anxieties.

7. Another kind of people

What, then, might faithfulness look like in the wilderness?

Perhaps we should begin not with a strategy for restoring the Church’s influence but with a question about the kind of people we are becoming.

The early Christians lived in a world where they had little political power. They were a minority, often misunderstood and sometimes persecuted. They did not possess the cultural authority that later became associated with Christianity. Yet their communities developed a distinctive way of life, shaped by worship, shared meals, care for the vulnerable and a refusal to accept the usual boundaries of status and belonging.

This was not an escape from the world. It was a different way of inhabiting it.

The Church’s witness has always depended on more than what it says. It is found in how Christians treat one another, handle money, welcome strangers and respond to enemies. It is found in whether people at the edges of society discover a place among them.

This is why the local church matters, even when it looks unimpressive. A congregation that shares its life with people abandoned by everyone else may be bearing more truthful witness to the kingdom than a large institution preoccupied with its public standing.

At Lighthouse, I spend time with people who have been battered and bruised by the storms of life. Some have experienced homelessness, addiction, trauma, fractured relationships and years of being told that they are a problem. Many have learned to expect rejection before they have even crossed the threshold.

The work is rarely spectacular. It involves meals, cups of tea, conversations that take time, prayer, laughter, grief, practical support and the long work of learning to trust again. There are no easy success stories. Recovery is rarely a straight line, and sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is remain alongside someone whose life is still difficult.

But something happens when people are not treated as problems to be solved or projects to be managed. They begin to discover that they belong. They find that they can give as well as receive, that their presence matters, that they are more than the worst thing that has happened to them.

This is not a replacement for the Church’s wider calling. It is a glimpse of it.

The Church is not simply a supplier of religious services to individual consumers. It is a people called into a shared life, a community in which grace becomes visible through ordinary acts of faithfulness.

We do not need to romanticise the margins. Poverty is painful, trauma is real, and people need practical help as well as friendship. A cup of tea will not resolve the structural injustices that make people vulnerable. Christian compassion must include the hard work of justice.

But when people who have been excluded discover a place at the table, something changes. Those whom the Church once regarded mainly as recipients of ministry may become its teachers, companions and bearers of grace.

The question is not only whether the Church can reach the world. It is whether we are willing to be changed by the people God has already placed among us.

8. The alternative empire

The New Testament does not invite us to imagine that Jesus has no authority. It announces that Jesus is Lord. But it shows us a Lord whose authority is revealed through self-giving love.

Paul’s account of Christ in Philippians 2 is central here. Christ does not exploit his status for his own advantage. He empties himself, takes the form of a servant and becomes obedient to death, even death on a cross. His exaltation comes through the path of self-giving, not the seizure of power.

This is not a sentimental picture of humility. It challenges the world’s understanding of greatness.

The Church can confess Jesus as Lord while continuing to operate according to the instincts of empire. We can chase status, protect privilege, silence inconvenient voices and treat people as expendable when institutional interests are at stake. We can speak about the cross while arranging our lives around avoiding its cost.

The cross exposes that contradiction.

Jesus does not defeat the powers by becoming another version of them. He reveals their violence and refuses to let their logic determine his actions. He absorbs their hostility rather than returning it. The resurrection is God’s vindication of this crucified Messiah and the beginning of a new creation.

That does not mean Christians should be passive in the face of injustice. Cruciformity is no excuse for allowing abuse to continue or telling vulnerable people to accept their suffering. The cross challenges the powerful and calls the Church to stand alongside those who are harmed. Sometimes faithfulness requires confrontation, resistance and costly public witness.

But the means matter. We cannot build the kingdom of the crucified Christ by adopting the methods of those who crucified him.

The Church’s task is not to seize the throne and call it mission. It is to bear witness to the reign of God through communities shaped by the character of Jesus.

This is an alternative empire, if we can use that language: a kingdom in which greatness is measured by service, authority is exercised for the good of others, enemies are not denied their humanity, and the poor are not sacrificed to protect the comfort of the powerful. The language is deliberately provocative. This kingdom does not imitate the coercive power of earthly empires; it exposes their limits and offers another way of living together.

It will not always look successful by the standards of the age, and it may not command the attention we desire. But it offers something the world cannot manufacture through force or persuasion: a community learning to live as though Jesus really is Lord.

9. Patient ferment

Alan Kreider’s work on the early Church draws attention to the patient habits through which Christian communities grew. Their witness was not simply a matter of clever strategy or public persuasion. It was formed through worship, repeated practices, moral formation and a way of life that made the gospel visible.

The image that stays with me is ferment.

Yeast does not need to be impressive. It needs to be worked into the dough.

The kingdom of God often takes shape through things that are difficult to measure: a person choosing not to retaliate, a community making room for someone excluded, a congregation learning to share its resources, a Christian refusing to treat an enemy as less than human. These acts may never make headlines, but they are not insignificant.

There is, of course, a danger in turning patience into an excuse for inaction. The Church must still make decisions, address injustice, form disciples, care for its buildings and steward its resources. Patience is not passivity. It is doing the work in front of us without pretending that we control the outcome.

At Lighthouse, we cannot promise that everyone who walks through the door will recover, find secure housing or come to faith. We cannot resolve every injustice that has shaped a person’s life. But we can keep the table open. We can pray, listen, share food, offer practical help and tell the truth about the world without abandoning hope.

We can refuse to measure the worth of a person by how quickly they change. We can resist the pressure to turn every act of compassion into a success story.

Sometimes the work of the kingdom is simply to remain faithful in a place where life is hard.

This kind of patience asks us to accept that much of what matters most will happen beyond our control, perhaps beyond our lifetime. It is a discipline of trust: God is at work even when the evidence is thin, and faithfulness matters even when we cannot point to an immediate result.

The Church may need fewer fantasies about recovering its former status and a deeper confidence in the quiet, persistent work of the Spirit.

10. The risen Christ

We should not finish in the wilderness. The Christian story does not end with temptation, scattering or death.

The risen Jesus meets his disciples in their confusion and fear. He does not return as a triumphant Caesar, displaying the instruments of domination. He bears the wounds of crucifixion. The resurrection does not erase what happened on the cross; it declares that the violence inflicted there will not have the final word.

This is the hope of the Church.

Not that we will recover every building, restore every congregation or regain the influence we once enjoyed. Not that the world will eventually agree with us or that history will vindicate our institutions. Our hope is in the God who raises the crucified Jesus and is making all things new.

That hope allows us to tell the truth about decline without despair, acknowledge failure without giving up, and serve our neighbours without demanding that our service secure the Church’s future.

We can grieve what has been lost and learn from the mistakes of the past. We can challenge structures that harm people, build communities in which grace becomes tangible, work for justice and invite people into the life of Christ.

But we do not need to save the Church as though it were ours to rescue.

The Church belongs to God. Its future rests not in our ability to make a name for ourselves but in the faithfulness of the one whose name is above every name.

Perhaps the wilderness is where we begin to learn this again. Stripped of some of the things that once made us feel secure, we may discover that we can still worship, love, serve and bear witness. The Church is not finished simply because it no longer occupies the centre of public life.

The choice before us is real. We can spend our energy building Babel, trying to secure our future through influence and control. We can allow fear to turn us against our brothers and sisters, looking for someone to blame for our loss of status. Or we can follow Jesus into the wilderness, resist the shortcuts offered by power and spectacle, and learn again the patient way of the cross.

East of Eden, Cain is still tempted by the violence that crouches at the door. Babel still promises security through what we can build with our own hands. But the risen Christ opens another future.

We have a different work: to become, by the grace of God, a patient ferment, a people learning to live the life of the kingdom in the middle of a world that is still waiting for its redemption.

Further reading

• Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Baker Academic, 2016).

• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007).

• Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Abingdon Press, 1989).

• Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020).

For more information about Lighthouse see www.lighthouse.org.uk