Crisis In The Church
Canadians in search of a meaningful religious experience are turning away from liberalized congregations and turning to evangelical Churches in record numbers.
Candis McLean - March 12, 2004
"There are times when we are all thrown out of paradise, so to speak. There are times when we all face a dry, lifeless wilderness in which we confront the challenge of finding our way out again. It is like falling into a deep hole and having to claw our way out." Those are the haunting words of Calgary United Church minister Reverend Mike Jones. They appear in Empty Houses, a book Jones
has been writing, and describe the dark experiences that many members of mainline Protestant churches are sure to face in coming years if current trends toward declining attendance continue.
Like any death, the demise of a church can create agonizing issues of anger, anguish and who gets the family silver. These "nuts and bolts of closure," as Jones calls them, are addressed in his
planned manual, which he'll finish this summer. He hasn't lined up a publisher yet, but all indications are that his book will be in high demand ? unfortunately. That's because across the country, mainline Protestant churches are putting up the shutters at an alarming rate.
Jones has seen it with his own eyes. But the statistics back up the grim picture for the future of what used to count as some of Canada's most popular denominations. In 2001, 43 per cent of
Canadians told Statistics Canada that they had not attended religious services in the past year, compared with only 26 per cent in 1986. And most of that decline occurred within the six largest denominations. Amongst Presbyterians there was a precipitous 36 per cent decline in occasional
churchgoers between 1991 and 2002 while Pentecostals saw a 15 per cent drop off in the same category. There were eight per cent fewer people reporting they belonged to the United Church, seven per cent fewer attending Anglican services and Lutherans suffered a five per cent fall off. But not all churches are waning. Last year alone Baptist membership in Canada increased 10 per cent
while some smaller, more fundamentalist Protestant congregations, such as Evangelical Missionary Church, have increased a whopping 48 per cent, opening huge new facilities to accommodate
the swelling crowds and conducting multiple services each weekend.
Many religious scholars say that Canadians' thirst for a relationship with God is as great as it ever was. But the reasons are just now becoming clear for the dramatic differences between those
denominations that will languish into the 21st century and those that will flourish. On the rise are churches that tend to be conservative, evangelical (they faithfully accept the Gospel), that offer their congregants a sense of certainty, and those that promulgate a supernatural faith
which believes that God plays an active role in people's lives. Politically incorrect, they are unapologetically historic. In short, it is the old time religions that are thriving.
In Calgary alone over the past three years, five of 34 United Churches, Canada's largest Protestant denomination, have ceased to exist: two closed altogether while five were forced to merge. For Jones' Calgary congregation at 93-year-old Trinity United Church in the inner-city Inglewood neighbourhood, it was rotting windows that signaled to the congregation that the church was in trouble. After 25 years of declining attendance, the fewer than 40 valiant members of the once 250-strong congregation were brought to their knees: Despite fund-raisers and digging deep, they couldn't even afford the sort of basic repairs needed to sustain their old, beloved church. A storm of meetings led to the painful decision in October 2002 to close the following year. Four months later, after managing a minor resurgence in attendance, the congregation was split over whether to proceed with the closure. The decision was made for them. In February 2003, Presbytery, the local governing body of elected lay and ministerial delegates, started to move in. It fired
the church board members and installed its representative as chairman, all powers granted to it by the United Church manual.
Any closure naturally unleashes a series of strong emotions, writes Jones in Empty Houses. At its worst, there's what he calls a "level five conflict" where "people carry on as if they were fighting some kind of religious war." But almost always, there is grief. "The intensity of a person's grief will be affected by the church's ?mode of death,'" explains Jones, leaning back in his chair in the United Church office where he is an interim minister (the previous interim minister quit three weeks before last Christmas and she herself had been called to fill in temporarily following the firing of a minister who developed an intimate relationship with a member of the congregation).
Jones recalls how, at Trinity United's closure, 30 members held their last Sunday prayer service one year ago this month standing outside in the snow, locked out by the Presbytery. Congregants had been notified of the premature closure but showed up just the same. "I've never seen anything like it," says Gordon Shrake, a former Calgary alderman and Conservative MLA, one of the congregants who was literally left out in the cold. "We had planned a little service and then our last church supper," he says. "Presbytery came in like storm troopers and changed the locks and the bank account."
The gracelessness led many, including Shrake's wife, Lee, to change denominations, vowing never to return ? "not even to be buried," she says. When contacted by the Western Standard, the Presbytery representative who was installed as chairman refused to comment. The motives for their seemingly
merciless treatment of failing churches can only be speculated on. But Jones says the problem might have something to do with the instability that is rife in the Church these days. "People get burnt out and it affects their performance," he says. In his book, he promotes the idea of a closure team, an assembly of clergy, Presbytery and lay people, trained in pastoral care, administration, conflict and grief brought in to make the experience of losing a Church less devastating for everyone involved, if that's possible.
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