SCRUTINISING THE STATE, PRAGMATISM AND FUNCTIONALITY OF THE 21ST CENTURY CHURCH
Abstract
Religion easily represents all sorts of divine-human relationships aside from being a fundamental factor in life. The phenomenon so become an all-man concern from diverse stands and approaches - psychological, philosophical, historical, social, scientific, spiritual, and up to religiosity, an interest and participation in religious activities. Howbeit, charismata would work with character for more manifestation goodly. Religion as a non-static phenomenon but dynamic in developments, has given many pathways, from world religions down to church denominations and missionary propaganda. Particularly, Christianity wrote her gospel that believers believe Jesus is Christ, and have eternity or salvation after overcoming evil. Unfortunately, even a casual look around reveals a profusion of evil like hypocrisy, hatred, injustice and more of the things, the Church was chosen, called out and fortified to stamp out or never allow to overrule the world. To compound this, no other time in mankind's history has the Church boasted of a membership boom than now. Therefore, it is the thought of many that the Church as it is today has failed in living up to expectations of even God, talk-less of the society suffering the resultant mishap accruing therefrom. However, all hope is not lost, hence a call on the Church to come back to more work, especially as recapitulating a people’s rich heritage mostly the ecclesiastical propensity, for harnessing the potentials of the past and present in a ‘well-coordinated splendour helps to activate a better posterity’. The investigation adopted qualitative methodology, allowing a phenomenological approach same-time multi-dimensional, and thus recommended examining past ecclesiastical potentials for better posterity.