Only One Way Left

Description

Only One Way Left is based on a memorable series of the Cunningham Lectures delivered in 1954 by the founder of the Iona Community at New College, Edinburgh, where the audience increased from lecture to lecture until there was standing room only. Repeated as the Auburn Lectures in Union Theological Seminary, New York, these presentations created as deep an impression across the Atlantic. Disturbed by the Church’’s comparative failure to influence the crises of the mid-20th century, George MacLeod’’s analysis was that it had forgotten both the unique centre of the Christian approach– – that God became a human being – and the truth that the Christian faith can only be comprehended in a consciousness of total community. He claimed: ‘The great criticism of the Church today is that no one wants to persecute it, because there is nothing very much to persecute it about.’ Believing that the solution lay with local congregations, through these lectures he outlined in very practical terms a direction for recovery in their life and work if they were to be both true to the Word and seen as relevant to the problems of their time.