Pastor and hymn writer Phillips Brooks penned these words in the 19th century, but they’re just as relevant for Jesus’ followers today:
“[People] are questioning now, as they never have questioned before, whether Christianity is indeed the true religion … Can [Christianity] meet all these human problems, and relieve all these human miseries and fulfill all these human hopes?
“It is for us, in whom the Christian church is at this moment partially embodied, to declare that Christianity … can do for the world [that] which the world needs.
“You ask, ‘What can I do?’
“You can furnish one Christian life — so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so determined not to commit every sin — that the Christian church shall be stronger for your living in it; and the problem of the world be answered; and a certain peace comes into this poor, perplexed phase of our humanity as it sees that new revelation of what Christianity is.”
NN 6.16