Eighty-five And Counting

No, I am not eighty-five even though some of my thinking is, inevitably, fossilized. It is the United Church of Canada that has reached that venerable age. I'm an historian as much by temperament as by education and I can't help looking at just about everything in the larger context of the last five thousand years. When you do that, eighty-five years isn't much. Christianity has been around for two thousand. The Presbyterian Church for four hundred. The Roman Catholic Church for eighteen hundred, though they would probably argue that they have been around for the full two grand. The sturm und drang that accompanied the birth pangs of this denomination are legendary...at least in the church. There are even a few around who actually remember the fist fights, threats, curses and general chaos that surrounded the debate. Change is hard on everyone in every age, I guess. My generation didn't invent change, after all. It just put wheels on it, a hemi engine in it, and painted flame decals on the outside. Let us be most generous and say that people were passionate about their denominational roots, their buildings, and their history. You could be sarcastic and say that they were passionate about which end of the boiled egg to open, but generosity is always the high road. The Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Methodist Church in Canada, and the Congregationalists were able to get enough people to think rationally to create a truly exciting experiment. Mark Twain proposed pretty much the same experiment in one of his essays called "The Damned Human Race" with a much more cynical expectation of the outcome.

Perhaps because we are the grandchildren of people of rationality and thoughtfulness, we have pursued a course of collegiality and consultation throughout our history. It has led us to take some great chances and to miss some great opportunities. It led us, for instance, to affirm that gay and lesbian (and, I think, transgendered) people were welcome to apply for positions in ministry. It led us to recognize our complicity in the shame of the Residential School System and to apologize to First Nations people long before it became fashionable to do so. It also allowed us to skim past some hard realities. We were so busy consulting, considering and giving sober second thoughts that we missed the fact that we were short of breath, had severe chest pains, and were sweating membership. Ralph Milton tells the story that while he was under doctor's orders to take things a bit easy because of a heart condition, he decided to build a deck at his home in his spare time. One day he dropped a hammer on his foot and jumped around in pain. He said the church was the same. We're yelling about our sore toe when we have a heart condition.

Our dedication to consultation is slowly killing us now, I'm afraid. We want consensus. We want everyone "onside". We want "buy-in". We want everyone to be happy. Maybe what we need are a few fist fights instead. We have spent endless hours in this presbytery alone, carefully stepping through the minefield of problems that have arisen just during the last two years I have been here. Although we have artillery at our command, we have used fly-swatters to deal with issues that fly-swatters won't fix. It's not that we can't see the problems. For instance, everyone agrees that everyone else should sell their church and use the money to fund ministry in more effective ways. But nobody, of course, wants to sell their church. Even those who have decided that their demise is a matter of time are slow to realize that every day wasted, every dollar spent to prop up aging buildings, every opportunity missed to stop being the church of yesterday and leap toward being the church of tomorrow hastens the day when we will be a church of history.

The saddest part is that there are still many people who are passionate about ministry, about faith, about spirituality, and about the future. There is energy, joy, strength, courage, and love in all of the congregations of which I've ever been a part. If we could arrange to have all of those people as part of one community, it seems as if we would be able to do great things. Maybe even create something exciting. Abraham and Sarah had a child when Sarah was over one hundred, so the Bible says, and Picasso fathered child at the age of sixty-nine. Maybe the United Church can give birth to something in it's old age, just as exciting and just as passionately as they did in 1925. Or maybe we will go on dreaming of the glories of our youth and adulthood and not notice that aging goes on, even when we are dreaming. I think that we have some hard but possible choices to make but we do not have forever to make them. The genius of our church has been our consultative nature but the time to consult is short, and the time for action is close at hand. The question that remains is "Will we take action, or will action take us?"