I wrote this piece in celebration of the Diocese of British Columbia’s 150th anniversary. I’m an active member of Christ Church Cathedral, Victoria. The essay below is my own, and I solely take responsibility for its contents.
In Christ,
Justin
The Diocese of British Columbia will be celebrating its 150 year anniversary this weekend. These days I’m spending some of my time pondering the future of the Anglican Church. Skeptics from both the left and the right paint a dismal picture of the future for Anglicanism in Canada.
Gone are the days when every Anglican parish would have full attendance. The Church is experiencing in many ways the death of Christendom in North America and Europe. It used to be that people were expected to attend church every Sunday morning. Churchgoing was part and parcel of one’s own civic identity. For good or ill, Anglicanism has sometimes been historically characterized as a civic faith, in which its theology was strongly tied to British nationalism. We see its vestiges in the 1962 Book of Common Prayer, with its prayers for the monarch, the military, and Parliament.
And yet, 1962 could be seen as the last year of that stage of Anglican expression. The 1960s with the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement brought in an intense questioning of authority. The Church which have often seen itself as a paramount authority of morals and religion found herself criticized, often harshly, for being repressive, anti-democratic, and old-fashioned. People stopped automatically assuming “Father knows best” and started to assume that Father really didn’t have a clue. The wave of anti-colonialism brought into question the Church’s involvement with European imperialism. Feminism and gay liberation profoundly took issue with the Church’s sexual teachings. The increase in multiculturalism challenged the Church’s English identity, while the increased multiplicity of faiths called to question the notion that the Church was the only way to salvation.
Some Canadian Anglicans despair of the future. They look to Europe and see dismal signs, roughly only 10% of the population of France regularly attend church, and while the UK’s numbers are higher, most would predict that the future is grim for the Church of England. Churches despair of becoming simply shops in which people only think about faith when it comes time to get married, baptize their children, or organize a funeral. While spirituality may still be alive, organized religion is weakening.
But perhaps the problem is not:
1) Younger generations are lazy and immoral and refuse to go to Church
2) Secular liberals are winning the war against faithful believers.
Perhaps the problem is with us and our vision of what a faithful church should look like. I think we should stop thinking that every parish will be full and that every single person in our country will become a regular church-going Christian. In the short future, yes, some churches will close and congregations will disappear.
But I don’t think that our job is to have full churches. Our vocation is to proclaim Jesus Christ in word and in our lives, and to minister with and to people. Perhaps we should stop trying to evangelize by figuring out the next silver bullet that would fill our churches, and start actually living the way of Christ. Because while the Church as an organized religion might be dying, the message of Christ is not and IMHO is needed in our culture just as much as the people who first heard his voice on the shores of Galilee.
My vision sees the Church as a prophetic witness, articulating in its worship, its outreach, and its daily expression the way of Jesus in contrast to our increasingly individualist society. Our duty is not to fill our pews with bums, but to intentionally live out the way of Jesus.
In a world in which people walk past homeless beggars with hardly a glance, where some of us seem to always find enough money to buy the latest IPOD, but never enough to give to charity, the Church truly should be the home for the poor. Here in our spiritual communities, the voiceless are given a voice, the poor are fed, and the downtrodden are given hope. The Church should be a home where every gay teenager who has been kicked out of his parent’s house finds affirmation, love, support and acceptance. The Church should be a home where poor and rich break bread, laugh, and cry together and in doing so, the walls that divide us slowly come falling down.
In a world where the instant response is violence, whether in the case of nations dropping bombs on the poor on the basis of “justice”, or whether in our offices and homes where we are quick to emotionally and psychologically snap at one another after being offended, the Church should be a place where peace is actively nurtured and reconciliation practiced daily through forgiveness, caring, and support.
Perhaps we should stop figuring out a quick solution to get more bums in our pews. Instead, perhaps we should instead focus on truly living out the way of Jesus. My hunch is that if we started doing that, then people would at the very least give us a shot. When they see us actively living in the Kingdom, they will indeed come and see what this Kingdom is all about.
Happy Birthday Diocese of BC. May you continue to grow in your walk with Jesus, learning step by step to follow Him on the path of justice, reconciliation and peace.
