Dear Vision 2019,
*I am the rector of a rural parish with 3 points. What follows is a personal reflection: it it not the fruit of discussion or consultation with the parish. I would like the contribution to remain anonymous — just describe me as a priest in rural ministry in Saskatchewan.*
We are very small, and remain financially viable because I am half-time and have another half-time job. The parish is friendly, generous in giving (we pay more than our assessed fair share levy to the diocese) both to our own church and to other charitable causes, and the three points support each other very well. We are old — my youngest parishioners are in their middle to late 50s and most are well above 65. We do hospitality well, generosity well, and support for each other within the community reasonably well. One point has an inter-church youth group which is flourishing, and parishioners pray, support its regular program financially, and dig deep to find scholarships for kids to go to church camp. Only a few parishioners turn up for bible study or mid-week programs (one point is better than the others), and most parishioners are not articulate about their faith. Sunday attendance in my big parish averages about 15, in the second parish about 11, and in my smallest parish a steady 2.
We teeter on the edge of viability, and apparently the parish has done this for the last 20 years. There is a sense of inevitable decline. For many the biggest hope is to keep a priest and a church going long enough to bury them. Saskatchewan farmers are used to living precariously on the edge of disaster, so they do not carry the level of depression about all this that one might expect.
I encourage my parish to celebrate what they can and do achieve, to trust God for the bigger picture for the Church, and to be faithful witnesses in their generation. I preach a lot for personal conversion and deepening of spiritual life, as I sense that many of my parishioners are churchgoers more by habit than out of a passionate relationship with Christ. They are missing out and I don’t want them to!
Where will the Anglican Church of Canada be in 2019? My guess is that we are on the edge of cataclysmic change. Numbers are plummeting, finances are crashing, and we will no longer be able to maintain our traditional structures. The only way forward for my diocese I think is to amalgamate with the two others in Saskatchewan — we are just too small to support the expense of an episcopal structure/synod office alone.
But we have to ask a more fundamental question: what is the reason for us keeping on keeping on? If the only reason for keeping a parish going is habit and attachment to a building, then probably it is right that the parish should die. The brutal question each parish and diocese needs to ask itself is: if we vanished from the face of the earth tomorrow, what would be missing? That question might help us sort the wheat from the chaff.
One thing is clear — we must change or die. My hunch is that many will choose to die rather than change, and if that is so, so be it. The gospel will not perish, and God’s Kingdom will go forward. I see signs of a new young generation of passionate Christians and Christian leaders emerging — the possiblity of a renaissance — but little within Anglican structures. We are largely too wedded to the (Victorian) immediate past.
Lest you mistake this song of woe for a call to radical liberalism, I need to tell you that I am a theologically orthodox traditional Christian, loving catholic spirituality, evangelical passion for Christ, and charismatic ministries of healing and discernment. At the root of our trouble as a church, I believe, is that we have become lukewarm in our devotion to Christ, replacing that inner fire with cozy socializing, mediocre worship and good works.
My hope is that by 2019 (the year I am due to retire, by the way, so I hope the pension fund still exists!) what is left of the Anglican Church of Canada will have a deeper faith in Christ and a stronger conviction about what our distinctive contribution, as Anglicans, is to the whole Body of Christ. We will have to let go of most of our buildings. Our clergy will be mostly unpaid. We will need to train new clergy without the luxury of residential training in well-paid, well-heeled institutions. All the mediocre, luke-warm pew-sitters will have departed — either to the grave or to other pews. With the chaff blown away, we will find out if there is any wheat left: and if there is, then perhaps it will begin to grow.
“Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it remains alone: but if it dies, it will bear much fruit.”
