1. What are the main challenges and issues the Canadian church is facing?
1. What are the main challenges and issues the Canadian church is facing?
There are three main challenges facing the church in Canada. First is transitioning from one generation to the next. The obvious area of dispute in this transition is worship. A contemporary and sometimes radical contemporary form is so disconcerting to older generations that it creates turf-wars within a congregation and ends up splitting not only churches but also families. More importantly it divides the resources and brings breakage in the potential synergistic effect of multi-generational cooperation. The importance of building a strong witness by way of congregation can be mitigated when congregations are not able to settle differences, and carefully and thoughtfully build strategies which allow the multi-generational needs in worship to be met.
The second challenge is to build churches in the growing urban world. Over the last 40 years, evangelicals have systematically moved out of the downtown urban areas, building churches in the suburbs and often in small towns. With the rapid urbanization of Canada and the increased number of people living in or near the core of cities, establishing church life here is critical. Given that the evangelical message seems to fit more easily into the suburban family and social context, the need to think strategically on how one can build congregational life within the urban world is at the very core of the challenge we face.
The third challenge is to decide if the role of faith in culture matters. If it does matter, how can we help the people of God-the laity-understand what it means to be the voice and presence of God in the marketplace? This challenge rises out of our historical bifurcation of spirituality and work. In defining faith as being that which happens in church and within the individual, we've allowed secularity to become the dominant cultural model. The church needs to decide whether the model needs deconstructing and if the actual call of Christ includes the church teaching its people what it means to be the people of God in the world.
2. What are the bright spots, encouraging trends, new movements in Canadian Christianity?
The first bright spot is the extraordinary amount of prayer activity. This is by way of community prayer groups, multi-prayer groups within the church, prayer networks, and organizations that are dedicated towards prayer. Never in my 45 years of public ministry in Canada have I seen this interest and unquenchable thirst for prayer. Indeed, this can be the most important element-establishing a strong beachhead of witness that Canada has not seen since the 1800s.
The second bright spot is the multi-level activity of witness going on across the country. Springing up are agencies, small groups, and para-church missions-community based, provincial, or national-looking to witness of Christ from the arts to helping the poor. These risings often happen because people, frustrated by bureaucracy or by simply observing a need, bring together like-minded people. And out of their passion to do something, they create small units, and indeed even movements in reaching those objectives. This is a prime example of the work of the Spirit in bringing answers to questions, fulfilling needs in the vacuum created by enormous wants.
The third bright spot is the number of church plants and church expansions taking place across Canada, including Quebec. I believe increased witness comes by way of increased church plants. A church plant in a changing community is often a new wine skin for new wine. Churches insensitive to change or unwilling to be innovative by necessity will die. Creating new congregational life developed in a variety of ways is vital. I was at a large church recently that now has four church plants. It began by sending a bus into a poor community to provide assistance in completing income tax returns. These churches were built based upon meeting the needs of the community and as a response to peoples' request for church. While some consider larger churches to be something that smacks of Americanism, many communities need one or a few mega-churches as a way of meeting needs. These mega-churches apply creative solutions to the needs of communities, which require significant financial and personnel resources to accomplish.
The fourth bright spot is the many voices of witness. These come from sports players, business people, politicians, those in theatre, and media. I was recently on a television show in which there was discussion about the so-called ossuary of the bones of one Jesus' family members. I sat next to a nationally known journalist with obvious liberal leanings. I expected that I would need to defend an orthodox Christian view on the resurrection. Before I was invited to respond to the matter of the trustworthiness of the biblical account of the resurrection, this person made it clear that without the physical resurrection of Jesus, there was no Christian faith. His orthodoxy surprised me and humbled me. I realized I had already concluded his social liberalism would lead to a theological liberalism. These many voices are creating a sense of legitimacy about the nature of the Gospel witness.
3. What is the character of the Canadian church?
A weakness of many congregations comes out of the organizational and governance side of their management. There is confusion as to how the pastor should relate to the congregation and the board, elders or deacons. While we have extremes-from the hierarchical Episcopal model to the congregational model that rule-it is important that congregations and churches decide on how they are going to operate. The movement of parishioners back and forth between various churches with differing governance models creates confusion. One day while consulting a major Mennonite Brethren church, I asked them this question, "Do you have people coming to your church from Pentecostal churches, which are more hierarchical, in that they are pastor led?" The pastor replied "Some from the Pentecostal or Alliance churches come to me and say, 'We have a problem with leadership here. We need leaders that are more visionary.' Then others from Mennonite or Baptist churches say, 'We have a problem with leadership here. What we need are more servant leaders.'"
Each person brings to their current congregation the model of governance they were raised with. If it's more congregational, they believe that's the way it should be wherever they go. If it's more Episcopal, or hierarchical, they think pastors should relate to congregations out of that form. So often pastors become vulnerable, and at times a victim of undefined models and mixed expectations.
4. How is the church doing qualitatively?
My sense is that qualitatively, the church across the many congregations is doing well.
The Canadian church is coming into a new self-understanding. As the United and Presbyterian churches continue to lose numbers and influence, and as Anglican churches move towards an inevitable divide, a vacuum is created. This is happening at a time when religion as a cultural factor is being revived. As the evangelical church becomes more self-confident (in many places the church is the centre of religious activity in the community) and as ministers become more skilled in public repartee, there is a new sense of boldness. However, as noted above, there are some denominations and many congregations that are struggling on the downside. Their numbers are decreasing, they're in financial difficulty, they're not able to deal with the changing demographics or urbanization, and they will simply drift until someone provides new leadership or there's spiritual renewal. But overall, there is a strengthening of the quality of organization, of public witness, and of spiritual life.
5. What is the attitude of the larger Canadian society to Christianity?
If 911 taught us anything it was that religion matters. In that case it was destructive. But this does not camouflage the larger reality that faith is important to a lot of people. One day I received a call from a Vice President from the University of Toronto. He asked me some questions on how to proceed on building a prayer room at the university. I was surprised for it seemed to me that this would be the last place where such a room would be created. They were driven by the Muslim community, who said that prayer was an essential part of life and they therefore needed a place to pray. These newly imported religions are creating a beachhead in society, giving Christianity, in an ironic way, an opportunity to give witness that in past decades was largely lost by way of secularism. The pendulum of secularism has swung as far as it can and it's now in retreat. We see this in the newspapers and reports in media on a variety of issues that often have nudged up against discussion of religious faith. While even a few years ago a politician who had a conservative theological view was lampooned, now we have a Prime Minister who is evangelical, and it's a non-story. I see this as evidence that the community is not so afraid of who we are or what we believe as they once might have been.
The question before us now is, "How will we respond now to this less alarmist view of us and the increased openness to matters of faith? As an evangelical community we must realize that if we are going to truly affect our world we need to raise up men and women who can take rightful leadership in places of business, industry, unions, media, arts, education, sports, and the list goes on. Will church leaders have sufficient vision of what it means to prepare the people of God to go out into the world as Christ's witnesses?
6. What is the ethnic makeup of the church in Canada and what impact is immigration having on Canada?
In Toronto, the newly arrived ethnic communities tend to be the spark plugs for evangelism. The multiplication of Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Black churches is stunning. There is a passion within the community to build churches that serve the needs of people of their own ethnic community; but in the meantime they're bringing new life to the wider church. Often I find that it's these newly arrived ethnic groups who evangelize other newly arrived ethnic communities. So the Caucasian church is learning an enormous amount from them, and while the underlying concern, as noted in the recent Ontario provincial election, is the potential impact of radical Muslim educational communities, my experience is that the arrival of these new ethnic groups has an enormous benefit to the witness of Christ in our society.
The important moral issues we face are self-evident-they're the ones we have been dealing with over the last number of years. Abortion will surface again. A recent article in the National Post by Dr. Margaret Somerville, head of ethics at McGill University, brings the concern of abortion back on the table, but from a different perspective. Her approach is one that was taken back in the early 1990s by the federal government, and one that was lost by one vote in the Senate. Now that the same-sex marriage definition has been redefined, I think what's important for us is to reflect especially over the last public issue and ask, "What did we gain by our battle and how did we represent Christ in the battle? What's the long-term benefit?" At the time, what I heard was angry and unchristlike chatter, and frankly, I was embarrassed by much of it. Even so it was important that we register our concerns and launch a public discussion. However, the question still remains, "Did we discredit Christ by the style and attitude which were the carrier of our words?" I don't think we were served well and neither was the Gospel. As a Christian, I was embarrassed by the vitriol, anger and public hucksterism that surrounded some of the debate. And once the issue was decided, there was no sense from any of those debates that the God of creation through Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world. It seemed that Jesus was otherwise.
We will be facing the larger issues of the sanctity of the human person in the various forms of cloning and embryo manipulation that will inevitably come down the pipeline. I recognize that this is a multifaceted issue. Even so, it is vital that leaders in those various communities help in ways that are unique to congregations, denominations and ministry organizations.