Secularization opens up the possibilities of new freedom and of new enslavement for men. We have no doubt that it is creating a world in which it is easy to forget God, to give up all traditional religious practices, and at the same time lose all sense of meaning and purpose in life. Yet we are overwhelmingly convinced that tit is not the mission of the Church to look for the dark side and to offer the Gospel as an antidote to disillusionment. We believe that at this moment our churches need encouragement to get into the struggle far more than they need to be primed with warnings. It simply does not do for us to talk about the problems of affluence, too much leisure, and so on, to those whose backs are breaking under loads we never had to bear. It is no longer possible for Christians simply to deplore the process of secularization; they have to understand it, as the Mexico meeting tried to do, in the light of the Bible.