Arising out of The Great Courses DVD set, The World’s Greatest Churches—which is available in SSUC’s Library—this fourth instalment in what is a multi-part essay about “Church” considers the not-untroubled state of Canada’s churches.
“[P]eople across the country continue to turn their backs on religion.”
The country of irreligionists being reported is Canada. And the quotation comes in the opening paragraph of Ashleigh Stewart’s mid-April deep-dive—it took her months of fine-combing—for Global News into the state of religion in our nation.
She found her story in the results of a canvass, which had just been released, of 3,000 Canadians: “A new survey by the Angus Reid Institute suggests Canadians aren’t keeping their faith.” This vexing conclusion is buttressed by StatsCan data from late last year, which she also cites, and which leads her to assert, in Canada “Christian religiosity falls to unprecedented lows….”
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Church attendance “feels like a radical act of faith”
Remember Sarah Bessey? It was with a quote of hers from her book, Out of Sorts [find it in the SSUC Library], that the second instalment in this series commenced: “Church became the last place I wanted to be.” Yes, she, a writer living in Calgary, eventually returned to the fold. Mind you, there have been moments in the while since when she’s questioned the wisdom of her about-face: “Sometimes I still go to a church, and feel like running pell-mell, tumble-bumble, into the fresh air.”
“So, why do I go to church?,” she asks. Because, she explains four pages later, “some of my greatest wounds have come from church, and so my greatest healing has happened here, too.” And in this “fractured” world of ours, “intentional community—plain old church—feels like a radical act of faith, and sometimes like a spiritual discipline. We show up…[a]nd we remember together who we are, and why we live this life, and we figure out all over again how to be disciples of the Way.”
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Think she’s exaggerating? Think again:
Angus Reid found that just 16% of those it surveyed consider themselves to be “religiously committed,” with high levels of worship, prayer, and belief in God; that number increases to about one-quarter in the three Prairie provinces. Another 19% are at least “privately faithful”. But 19% of respondents classify themselves as out-and-out non-believers [among younger Canadians, that figure increases to 26% for men, and 22% for women]. While almost half of the respondents [46%] admit to being “spiritually uncertain,” that figure jumps up to 56% among those who consider themselves to be mainstream Protestants.
More than one in five [22%] Canadians believes that religion does more harm to society than good [31% say the opposite]. Here Stewart turns to University of Calgary sociologist Abdie Kazemipur, who reports “a ’nervousness’ or ‘discomfort’ from a modern-day society that does not know how to include religion anymore.” From a questioning of Rick Hiemstra, director of research at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, she reports, “[W]hile once there was a ‘social benefit’ of being considered religious, there is now a ‘social cost’ to it. ‘I watch Netflix just like everybody else. And really what you see…[are mostly] devout religious people…usually presented as deviants,’ he says.”
As for those Statistics Canada figures, they show that in 2019 fewer than two in three [63.2%] Canadians said they’re affiliated with a Christian religion—that’s down from 67.3% eight years earlier. Just 54% of all Canadians claimed that religion was important or somewhat important to them; in the middle of this century’s first decade that figure was around 70%.
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“Not what Jesus had in mind”
“May was not a good month for any branch of the [Christian] church—evangelical, Orthodox, Catholic, or mainline [Protestant],” Martin Thielen regretted in the June edition of his monthly online newsletter, Doubter’s Parish. He referenced Southern Baptist sexual abuse and coverup, the Russian Orthodox Church’s blessing of the war in Ukraine, how a Catholic archbishop is withholding communion from the speaker of America’s House of Representatives, and that the United Methodist Church schism has formally begun. “Given these sad (but commonplace) dynamics, it’s easy to see why so many people have left (or are leaving) institutional religion in droves.”
As well, he reported how he’d recently interviewed several persons, lay and clergy, to better understand their antipathy toward church: “The majority of them believe that…the church has mostly failed to follow the life, teachings, and example of Jesus. They provided legions of examples…. As a result, they finally gave up on it. […] Although you might assume this group is full of unbelievers, that’s not the case. Not one…self-identifes as an agnostic or atheist.” No, they still “believe in traditional Christian values…[and] also affirm Christian practices….” Why, some “still attend church, [though] most don’t.”
He then provides a link to an earlier of his writings in which he explained why he’d retired early from Methodist ministry: “…I finally came to grips with the overwhelming failure of institutional religion. […] [C]leary, the church as we’ve known it, both historically and currently, is not what Jesus had in mind.”
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More disquieting perhaps, at least for UCC church-goers, are StatsCan’s findings about the United Church of Canada, which, remember, is this country’s second-largest Christian denomination, after Catholicism: in 1985, UCC members made up 14.6% of the population; 11 years later that figure had dropped to 9.7%; and in 2019, it stood at 3.8%. Among denominations, the UCC reports the lowest number of folks who engage in religious activities at least once a month—it’s just 19%, not one in five. Ditto the Anglican Church.
In another of her several stories for Global News, Ashleigh Stewart turns to Neil Elliot, the Anglican Church of Canada’s statistics and research officer, and to the report he wrote in February of last year: “‘COVID has been a catalyst or a trigger for a pent-up change,’” he affirmed, “‘that was ready to emerge.’” Anglicans “‘are not using the [church] services that they used to, the ones people probably grew up with—turn to this page in the book, and you know exactly what’s going to be said. That’s gone out the window for a lot of people. […] A paradigm shift has happened. There is no going back to pre-pandemic patterns of church life.’”
In yet another report in which she first considers the StatsCan numbers, Stewart quotes Jason Meyers as declaring that, nowadays, “on average, the United Church loses one church per week across Canada, and he expects that to accelerate.” Perhaps surprisingly then, he, minister at downtown Toronto’s mighty Metropolitan United Church, turns out to be cautiously optimistic: “‘A traditional mantra that you hear in churches is, “We’ve never done it that way before, [so] we can’t do it [that way now]”. …[It’s a claim] that has been completely thrown out the window. And the church has certainly had to pivot, and adapt, and evolve,’ he says,” sounding like Elliot, the Anglican canon. Meyers forespeaks fewer UCC churches, but insists that “the ones that are able to build belonging across lines of difference…[will be] the ones that are going to stay and grow.”
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“I’ve had a kind of reverence for these spaces”
Church buildings, thither and yon, are being repurposed, the ones that aren’t simply razed—that’s become clear in this bundle of essays. But there are those that are so palpably “churchy” in their look, that each such structure deserves—don’t you think?—to be preserved as a church.
That, anyway, is Dave LeBlanc’s drift in his full-page story in The Globe and Mail’s real estate section on September 30. He, whom the newspaper describes as an “architourist,” visited and pointed up several noteworthy church buildings on the Niagara Peninsula [like the one pictured below], all of them examples of what he calls “Modernist ecclesiastical architecture”. He worries aloud, “[M]any of these buildings are over 60 years old, and could be demolished or renovated beyond recognition soon.”
The writer quotes cultural heritage planner Nigel Molaro: “’I’ve always been interested in places of worship,’ begins the 36-year-old, who admits that while he grew up Presbyterian he hasn’t attended a service in some time. ‘I’ve had a kind of reverence for these spaces of ritual and congregation and contemplation, and I’ve probably spent as much time looking at the architecture than listening to a sermon.’” [To see why, visit https:/fifty50.space, with its 50 photos of modernist churches, all in Toronto, all snapped by architectural photographer Amanda Large.]
For greater understanding, Stewart turns to Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, who teaches sociology at University of Waterloo, and who for years has been tracking changes to Canada’s religion landscape. In their exchange, the sociologist asks herself the question, Will the United Church “’die out?’”. She answers her own query, and sounds a lot like Meyers: “‘Probably not. There’ll be some [congregations] left over,’” but their number will be “‘quite small’.”
And some will be on shaky ground? “‘There are a lot of churches in downtown Toronto. A lot of those have sold, and become condos…. It tells you something about our society—what these places are becoming. We’re desperate for housing, and we’re not desperate for places of worship.’”
Ken Fredrick
To be continued. The fifth instalment in this essay about “Church,” which will tell how Canada’s churches are being “closed, sold, or repurposed,” will be posted to the SSUC Library website [ssucedmonton.com/library] on December 9th. Come again!
A sidebar
“For sale” signs sprout on seminary campuses
It’s not only church properties that are being sold off—nowadays, the theological schools which ready the ministers to serve these churches also are sporting “For sale” signs. A Religion News Service dispatch in June reported that, in America, at least 13 of them, some renowned, will downsize or “shed their campuses”; in the last dozen years, several have already done so. The result? Upkeep costs are shaved, RNS reports, and “flailing institutions” are being given “hope”.
“[A] slew of seminaries across the U.S. have proposed plans this year to sell part or all of their property,” Kathryn Post reports, “opting for more nimble education models, as the religious landscape continues to shift.” They include California’s Claremont School of Theology, Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School of Theology, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. “None of these institutions is ceasing to exist, each has made clear,” Post acknowledges.
“‘The seminary is not a building,’” McCormick’s president, David Crawford, told her, “‘and the work we do is not confined to these walls.’” He hopes that other seminaries “will find opportunities” to give up their “reliance on real estate.” Gordon-Conwell’s 100-plus acre campus, outside Boston, “simply no longer serves the school’s life,” Post has it, and cites its president, Scott Sunquist: “‘The property has become a problem, rather than a promise.’” So, the school will “leverage the economic value”—for tax purposes, its assessed value is $54.3 million—from its sale to move forward, the school announced last May.
As well, “[m]any theological schools have responded by extending their programs beyond aspiring clergy”; and they’re “embracing online learning”. This strategy looks to be working for Claremont. This United Methodist theological school “has been heavily investing in online learning,” she points out. “With some 70% of its students attending remotely, president Jeffrey Kuan said, the school plans to sell its current 16.4-acre campus, and relocate to a site with only three classrooms.” The seminary believes that “remote learning has secured a promising future for the school. ‘We have seen a significant reduction of cost as we began to move into this type of future,’ said Kuan. ‘This is what a lot of theological institutions are needing to do. The operational cost in higher education has gone out of control.’”
G. Jeffrey MacDonald agrees. Author of the 2020 book, Part Time is Plenty, he explained to Post, “’The ones that are facing the greatest pressures are freestanding institutions that don’t have large endowments, and don’t have a surrounding university…. They’re the ones that are most vulnerable, because they still have campuses that are costly to maintain, and costs are only going up. …[S]o they need a critical mass of students.’” Goodness, yes: declining enrolment and rising upkeep costs forced one seminary in Massachusetts, Andover Newton, “to cut most of its teaching positions.”
Such straits have Crawford urging seminaries “to be bold in making decisions [to downsize] now…rather than when they’re forced to do so. Times will continue to demand that we be creative, imaginative, and flexible, in the work we do.’”
Sensible, sure. But Post found at least one bitter-ender: “‘[T]o give up on residential learning altogether is to give up on…hospitality…and community,’” Kirsten Sanders, adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell, wrote in a recent article in Christianity Today. Such benefits “‘are far too valuable to lose.’”
