canadianchristianity.com interview with John Stackhouse, professor of theology and culture, Regent College, Vancouver

1. What are the main challenges and issues the Canadian church is facing? How are we doing at dealing with those challenges and issues?

The Canadian church largely acts as if good intentions will suffice to lead, structure, and act as the church in the future. We do not prize a highly-educated clergy who can discern the times and bring a rich knowledge of church tradition and practice to bear on our challenges. Instead, we put pressure on seminaries to cut back on the requirements for the standard M.Div. degree -- as if pastoral work has somehow become less challenging than it was a generation ago -- or we happily choose pastors who seem charismatic and speak well, but whose exciting personalities are rooted in very thin soil. We continue to pay pastors badly as a rule, so that they cannot pay back loans and therefore have to seek the cheapest, rather than best, theological education. We therefore show our hypocrisy: we think engineers, lawyers, and physicians deserve high salaries, but not pastors.

We do not prize a well-educated and dedicated laity to share leadership and ministry with pastors. Instead, any well-meaning person can be eligible for the senior decision-making bodies in our congregations, regardless of actual aptitude for this kind of leadership.

We do not support sustained and expert research to understand what's happening in Canada, nor do we often call upon the relatively few experts we have to advise us--as congregations, denominations, or other Christian organizations.

In all of this, we demonstrate a kind of amateurish complacency that would be intolerable in business or the professions. One is reminded of Malachi thundering at the Israelites for presenting to God what they would never think of offering up to their secular governor.

2. What are the bright spots, encouraging trends, new movements in Canadian Christianity? How will the Canadian church and Canadian society change in the future? What future trends and issues will we have to deal with?

The slow but steady growth in size and maturity of our few Canadian Christian universities is encouraging, even as each one of them still has a long way to go to become financially secure.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada continues to exert prudent pressure on our federal government and courts, and frankly deserves a lot more support to do this work better. So does the organization Citizens for Public Justice.

Leaders of some large churches and some growing church plants in Canada do not reflexively look to America for all wisdom, but have grasped that Canada is different, and its regions are different from each other, so we need to undertake truly indigenous ministry. As we do so, furthermore, we should be looking more at Britain, Australia, and New Zealand for models of church life in cultures more similar to ours than are most of the regions of the USA.