I remember as a kid growing up in a small evangelical church in Northern, being
reminded in that context regularly that we are the remnants.
There are not many churches teaching the real gospel out there.
I don't ever remember seeing or hearing as
a kid about united churches up there in the north.
Maybe some Anglicans, some mostly
Catholics, Orthodox, the immigrant churches and a few evangelical churches.
We Christians were a minority looked down upon.
Most of our neighbors in the north in the
60s, would prefer to go their own way, living outside of Christ.
And of course, in the 1960s, pierre Fruto
was leading us towards Godless secular human, communist vision of society.
There was literally a little red flag
of the threats of pure food to the Java Christians.
Now, that little paragraph there is a
narrative, a way of crafting information or data that constructs a story of how we
should think and therefore act in regard to.
I can say that narrative was a scarcity narrative.
We just needed to be able to survive the onslaught.
That's not what I remember in the experience.
Church life.
I remember church life as full and vibrant
and warm and welcome, a place where the free teen I wanted to be.
It was a place of life and action and encouragement to my spiritual journey.
The narrative I was being given was of
scarcity the story I inhabited with one fullness.
Now, here's another narrative.
The reality is that our current membership
trajectory, conversion, falling attendance, the number of churches that
are in decline, as well as the churches that are only a few years away from
clothing, are leading us to oblique and unsustainable outcome.
Now, that's a narrative
that many churches in Canada are hearing on a consistent basis.
We are in decline.
I don't need to cite more sources.
That's a narrative that's coming to all of us from stats can, from news media
sources, from the sociologists, from the Undoing Fellowship of Canada, from the now
defunct Way base, and from our denominational offices.
That's not what I'm experiencing in the
church where I serve our local congregation.
St. Catherine's was birthed over 60 years ago.
It has seen its share of good days and bad
days, years of thriving, years of just surviving.
Today we're 70 ish people, and we're full
of politician, university students, young families with children.
The seniors and boomers are a small percentage.
We stayed relatively healthy and connected
through the pandemic, and we're now a larger community than we went into.
Yes, we lost some people, but we also gained people.
Right in the midst of the shutdown, people in our city joined us.
Not just my mother watching himself.
And our finances were never really followed.
One older couple who joined us
and months ago were wandering our city looking for a church after their
large multi psychic church kind of imploded years ago.
They are long time committed, active
Christians over the course of the year, they visited a number of churches in our.
City looking for they essentially come to.
The conclusion there were few churches
they were comfortable with theologically that felt alive.
They were preparing to stop looking for a
church, just have a weekly Bible discussion with other wandering friends.
They've heard that story before.
Then an old woman in their neighborhood
sold them to try to church her 20 something grandson and his family.
It turns out this couple lived just four blocks from our building.
They tell me the reason that they've been with us literally every Sunday since
they've walked through the doors is that this church feels alive.
It's not on palliative care waiting to die.
The narrative that we're being given is of scarcity and decline.
Story I inhabit is one of us.
Last year, James Emery White commented on
the Canadian report from Alpha, Canada Georgian congregation.
White is the former president of Gordon Conwell Seminary.
And White says the church is in decline because we are turned inward.
Instead, our hearts are not breaking for
what breaks the heart of God, which is people facing a crisis of eternity.
And sadly, only a simple invite is all that is often needed.
So that's the antidote that I hear in much
of this narrative of climb, is that we just need to do something.
We just need to do something.
James White says we just need to invite people.
We need to turn outward instead of inward.
Others say we just need to pray more or just modify our orthodox theology,
and then our congregation will be thriving again.
People will love us again, we'll be relevant again, and then we'll return to
the place of privilege and influence in Canadian society.
If that were ever true.
But is that really the goal for this brief reflection?
I want to connect with that Wesley and the
Methodist experience at a time of spiritual decline.
I want to connect with alternative perspectives regarding conclusion.
I want to reflect on an alternative Wesley
narrative, because we're always the alternative.
So.
In a blog post during a recent pandemic, bishop Richard Jackson.
At the. Beginning of the 18th century, thomas
Carlyle described Britain's condition as stock, well alive, soul extent.
The belief that God made the world, set it running, and then went on.
Something else was widespread.
Sir William Blackstone visited the church
of every major clergyman in London and said, I did not hear a single discourse
which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero.
Bishop Berkeley wrote that morality and
religion had collapsed to a degree that was never known in any Christian country.
We might say that the Church of England in
the early 1700s was eight of spiritual decline.
The religious hierarchy was well established as a state church.
What Whitfield and Wesley found in 1739 was that very few of their fellow
citizens, or at least the everyday common folk, were attending their local parishes.
Hence their resorting to field preaching outside the gates of the coal mines
Bristol and we might say that wexley had been attempting to do something about
those conditions for most of his adult life before May 1738.
He was studying, he was praying, he was
fasting, he was caring for the poor, he was accessing the means of grace, he was
preaching, he was exhorting to no avail in his personal life or his congregation.
And then God showed up.
We might say that western life is in a state.
His recent experience in Georgia, first as
a missionary, then as a parish minister did not turn out.
His contact with the Moravians during that
also left him to question his experience of the faith that he says he believes.
So let's think of this crucible point in Wesley's life as three encounters
encounters with God, Christian community world.
The encounter with a God who shows up on God's timing when our hearts.
Are ready to respond has been offered.
When we stop striving
encounter with Christian community which is instrumental in the preparation.
Of hearts open to.
And the encounter with the inhumanity of humans.
The fight of the world that leads.
To gracious hope filled engagement in
concrete terms of state of both the body and soul.
Perhaps these foundational
you might say transcendent encounters that Wesley has have something to offer us with
times in which we are becoming a secular society.
The church is in decline, we are losing our voice in the public space.
And we must something about that.
That's the word caution and concern.
So in his book A Secular Age don't worry, we're not going to do a of review.
In his book, Charles Taylor describes what
this shift looks like by naming three ways of secularization of express.
This more nuanced understanding adds
complexity to the competing narratives of religious decline on the one hand
or the narrative of social progress on the other.
So Taylor's first explanation indicates the religious worldview
from public spaces and spirits making religion a largely private matter.
Put in another way in a secular society
you can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God.
Do you realize how much God talk doesn't happen in Canada compared to self.
Of the border.
Another way or the removal the removal of the Christmas?
The second way of expressing secularization builds on the first
but is described as a reduction in religious involvement
when compared to other activities in an individual's life or importance.
So this is where decline in worship attendance and or discipleship practices
is identified as secularization and the third and formal form of final form of
secularity taylor describes as exclusive humanism.
A concept that defines the idea of good
without God or anything or anyone transcendent.
The first two dimensions of secularization
are the more obvious concerns of the narrative of but.
It's the third more subtle and pervasive
dimension and is perhaps not as likely to be resolved by doing something.
So I'm not going to defend my take on secular age.
That's that's the backdrop.
Now let me take you on a little journey of
my own reflection, that little book here, The End of Prison by Malcolm Mugger to
give a lecture when I was 18 years old at the University of.
I read this book two years later.
As I worked in a Christian British.
Journalist and social analyst 40 years ago delivered a lecture.
He was describing social circumstances
40 years ago that were contributing to the decline of Christendom in Western society.
I remember reading that the time a statement in this little book
in these circumstances, why should anyone expect Christmas to go
on forever or see in its impending collapse of cosmic catastrophe?
For that pessimistic reflection, he
offered this optimistic word amidst the shambles of a fallen Christian I feel a
renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation.
With Richard muggage then suggests where his renewed
confidence comes from the thriving of Christian faith and
community in location where it has been most repressed.
Now in his historical context back in the
he was referring specifically to the underground church in communist
my own experience in places like India and Sri Lanka.
I understand what he's getting at the conclusions.
Let us then, as Christians rejoice
that we see around us on every hand that the institution
for it's precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when
every possibility of help from earthly sources has been spotted and is not
forthcoming, it's then that Christ's hand reaches out.
Muckerish was describing the impact of modernity.
On the inherited forms of Christian, suggesting.
That that decline might not be a met there.
That was part of my early formation.
As a young Christian.
Never been too worried.
A couple of years after
mother is brugam and said I believe we're in a season of transition when we're
watching the collapse of the world as we know it.
Speaking to pastors 20 years ago, Roxburg said a bomb of course, had gone off in our
hearts and we've become aware that something is amiss, but practically
speaking, we don't know what to do about it.
A decade earlier he had connected the language of liminality in this experience
being that intermediate or in between state, between one way of constructing
reality and on the threshold of a new, as yet undefined state.
Roxborough helped us to understand that something new is in the process of being
birthed, something over which we limited control.
More recently, he summed up a challenge in
this manner our primary map has been modernity.
And modernity in many ways has profoundly
reshaped and even deformed the Christian imagination in our culture.
And he suggests that one of those inner maps tells us that we have.
To find a way of in order to make things work.
In the midst of this time of.
Deconstruction, Rockford notes the Spirit has continually
disrupted the church throughout its history.
Taking it to places where once accurate maps no longer applies.
This is not a time for fear or dire predictions.
So these reflections speak to the
narrative of decline as expressed in Taylor secular.
One two our present situation is not a surprise.
Anyone paying attention will last 50 or 60 years.
Some of us have been there.
If you've been paying attention for the
last 50 or 60 years, there's nothing surprising about the moment we're in.
Yes, it's happening, but it's not the end of the world.
Perhaps it's even the birth of something new.
What we need to pay attention to, however, is Taylor's secular.
All belief is contested and thus made.
Fragile.
Of Andrew roots was that we live in a
cellular age because we can imagine living.
And at times we do live as though there is no transcendent quality to life at all.
He suggested most of us live as though
there is no living God who enters into persons.
We hold to the idea of God, but a few of us are sure we can encounter this God.
And so it's in this context that Rude declares the church cannot produce.
So here's my big, bold statement the
response to our present moment is not we need to do something.
So this is the point where I'd.
Like to return to Wesley and his three
academics with God who shows up with Christian community.
In our current conversation, we might ask what would John Wesley bring to the team?
And this is just Danny's questions is.
There really something we should be doing?
Encounter with the other God shows up on the ship bound to Georgia, 1735, wesley
experienced fierce storms and waves with the fear of the ship being sun.
He was terrified, revealing to him the
weakness of his faith, producing personal shame.
The German Moravian believers on that
ship, on the other hand, seemed ready to meet their deaths with calm assurance,
continuing with worship and prayer in the midst of the storm.
Wesley writes he had never encountered such personally assured faith.
And he noted in his journal on seeing
their behavior this was the most glorious day which I have ever seen.
They all survived.
Three years later, Wesley's experience
that they all just gave society was in a similar in a personal crisis.
Doubting his own abilities and
spirituality depressed, wesley joins in a simple Bible study
format where believers are reading scripture and a praying for enlightenment.
I'm going to the non scholastic leader together in a simple Bible studying that
with no other efforts on his part, wesley has an encounter with someone who.
Is other than himself and he cannot.
Express it in any other way than that God warmed his heart.
Strangely.
A Wesleyan narrative might suggest that we wait upon God in
worship with prayerful expectation, not presumption spiritual disciplines.
The means of grace, waiting on God to show
up when God will show up in God's timing, allowing the space for the dialectic of
response to God's freely offered prevention, grace.
I wonder if that's how Wesley might.
Have expressed and the encounter with the.
Other, the community of God's people.
Wesley's encounters with God were often
realized within context of a gathering of believers.
As a frightened onlooker aboard that ship
to Georgia, wesley observed something transcendent in the gathered worship of
Ocaravians a few years later, despite his own attempt to assay his soul.
It was in the small gathered community of
believers that always that he had his breaking through moment with God.
And then, shortly following this
experience but he traveled to Germany to explore.
On the way.
To explore the Arabian Model ministry, he
realized that to them, the corporate aspect of conscious religious renewal from
living faith signified, as it were, the recapturing of the life of the faith.
Of the primitive Christian.
Commenting on the class meeting as a
prudential means of grace, wesley argued, there is something not easily explained in
the fellowship of a spirit which we enjoy in a society of living Christians.
Wesley wisely discerned the beginnings of faith in a person's heart could be
incubated into saving faith more effectively in the warm Christian
atmosphere of the society than in the chill of the world, I should say.
But commenting on Carl Bart's
ecclesiology, our Snyder suggests, and I know it's because he's having
conversation the significance of the church is that as
a provisional representation, it is the place of the demonstration of Christ
reconciled work community is the central fact of the Church's being.
It's coming together.
It's gathering together in Christ's name.
So a Wesleyan narrative suggests that the
intentional gathering together in these smaller groupings is a prime
setting counted with God, mediated through the fellowship of the Spirit.
All that one another in the New Testament require intentional fellowship.
So allowing space of the dialect of
response one to another in the fellowship under this framework of Christian love.
Wonder if that's how wealthy might have
expressed this and then encountering the stranger as
other acts of mercy transformative what these encounters with the poor and other
marginalized people were like to transform them.
He connects engagement with the poor and the marginalized.
Whoever is being others as a means of grace, as a practice necessary to
sanctification the transcendent spirit of God, is present
in transforming servants in the act of service.
Jamie Robertson has suggested that this is
one of the new little book there that a distinctive of Canadian Christianity is
the way in which successive ways of immigrants have brought their expressions
of the faith to renew the faith of those who are previously.
This is something that's happening in an unprecedented manner presently.
As Stuart commented on this, and I would
say it's perhaps being overlooked as a source of renewal in the Canadian
is the dynamic faith of newcomers to Canada meaning welcomes?
And are we adjusting our practices in.
So?
A Leslie narrative requires working out our salvation through encounter God.
How we treat our neighbor, both the.
Unbelieving stranger and our fellow believer of another.
In a recent article in Faith Today,
chris Bosh and Long Wong comment that there are negative like the behind the
Christianity the local church can't do nothing about.
Death is a part of human life.
It's part of life of churches.
They go on to say, a healthy church can benefit from asking questions
why it exists, not how to do something, but why do we exist?
Why does this called out immunity?
That's a question I reflect on fairly well.
Not on a sense of despair, but to continually adjust my focus when things
are getting blurred by this narrative of concern or that strategic plan.
Taylor that connects again the importance
of social imaginary, where she says, the articulation of a story, a narrative that
shapes who we are and where we want to go, what we're trying to bring out.
If I was continually reflecting on the
narrative of decline that seems many are, that would probably lead to despair.
If I was to continually reflect on the
narrative of we've got to do something, that would probably lead to burnout
Matthew eleven jesus laments or denounces the towns that were unresponsive to
administer, including Caperni, where he has invested significant time.
And then he carries right on and I praise
you bother because you've hidden these wise and to these guys.
And then he concludes that little parikopy
there come to me all you who are weary and burdens, and I will give you rest.
I hear a narrative in this passage.
All my energy invested there.
Jesus said limited results.
The Father reveals to whom the Father
reveals, and this is who he gave come to me and I'll give you rest.
That's an alternative narrative to you're not being effective.
So you need to speed up and do something.
So here's my Wesley narrative, my alternative narrative, not a formula, but
a story I tell myself the center of my home.
We're living in challenging times
and most people are finding that God seems to be absent,
doesn't really care about the conversation.
Our task is equipped to prepare the.
Congregation for their daily ministry
interface with this set of circumstances in which we find ourselves.
I've got five people in my church.
Who are on strike.
These are people all with master's degrees in one.
They're immigrants.
They've been living here in Canada for a dozen years.
They did a master's degree or a PhD at Rock University.
For five years I wrestled with how do we do something?
And this narrative right here has been
wrapped up around actually I just need to help them be able to
interface with the church in every sphere in.
Which they live their life.
And so my ministry is to encourage, to
we need to experience the living, resurrected Christ present in our lives.
We need to experience the encouraging,
spirit directed promptings of our brothers as life giving as necessary.
And we need to experience opportunities
for engaging, serving those who are different from us.
In short, we exist to affirm the living god is not absent from our.
Society and that the truth of that.
Impacts how we live.
And as we do this, we bear faithful witness.
My literal conclusion is here.
Our task is to simply facilitate the observance of and participation.
And in doing so, it'll have the most
consistent record of God showing powerful ways to convert to sanctifying the news.
That's the narrative that gets me out of the market.
Will the work survive?
That's a question for the God of the ages.