Monday, June 9, 2025

United Church of Canada - 100th Anniversary Sunday - June 8, 2025

Today’s reflection, shared by Rev’s Shannon Mang and Greg Wooley, alternated between verses of VU 644, “I was there to hear your borning cry”, a baptismal hymn by John C. Ylvisaker which traces the ages of a person’s life, and reflections on the life of The United Church of Canada when it was at that age & stage of its life.

Sing verses 1 & 2, then reflection:

“I was there to hear your borning cry,  I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,  to see your life unfold.

I was there when you were but a child, with a faith to suit you well,
In a blaze of light you wandered off to find where demons dwell.

1925 to 1939: formation of The United Church of Canada, to the start of World War II

I suppose that my (Shannon’s) section of this story starts with the gestation period that brought the United Church of Canada to birth. Church union in Canada began with a conversation that started 40 years before the union of the Methodist, Presbyterians and Congregationalist took place in 1925. In 1902 the formal union discussion began between the three founding denominations.

I grew up in First United Church, Melville Saskatchewan. My church in Melville, was the very first Local Union Church, incorporated in 1908. That was 17 years before the birth of the United Church of Canada.  Local union congregations grew out of young, strong rural communities who set aside denominational differences to have a Protestant presence in their town. While the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists deliberated for 23 years, (with a significant pause in the union talks during the First World War from 1914-1918) the local union congregations went ahead and formed worshipping communities, with a “get ‘er done” attitude. At the time of Union in 1925 there were 9000 congregations that came into the union and 3000 of them were local Union congregations primarily from the Prairie provinces and northern Ontario.

There was a great deal of celebration with the birth of the United Church of Canada on June 10, 1925, but… 38 percent of the Presbyterians voted against the Union and they formed the “Continuing” Presbyterian Church in Canada. The brand-new United Church of Canada was embroiled in legal battles until 1937 dealing with church properties and whether they would become United Churches or stay with the continuing Presbyterian Church of Canada.

Another challenge for the brand-new church was its first big internal fight that started in 1925 when Lydia Gruchie asked to be ordained. That request was refused.  Her presbytery in Saskatchewan, and the Saskatchewan provincial Council asked the General Council every two years to ordain her, and they were refused 5 times, and each time there were lengthy theological debates about why women should, or should not be ordained. At the 6th General Council in 1936, the Saskatchewan council prevailed and Lydia was ordained.  The fight for women’s ordination was won, but only with very tight reins around it: women who were ordained ministers and deaconesses could not be married- if they got married they had to give up their ordination or commissioning. This policy held until 1966 when those tight reins were taken off and married women were able to reclaim their orders and return to work in the United Church of Canada.

then verses 3 and 4, and reflection:

When you heard the wonder of the word,  I was there to cheer you on;
You were raised to praise the living Lord, to whom you now belong.

If you find someone to share your time and you join your hearts as one,
I’ll be there to make you verses rhyme from dusk till rising sun.

1940-1965: WWII and Baby Boom, Peak of attendance in 1964-65.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was hailed as the war to end all wars, yet by 1939 Canada was drawn back into war.  The United Church of Canada was only 14 years old at the time.  As the largest Protestant denomination in the land, with a strong commitment to civic duty, we saw tens of thousands of our members volunteer for military service.  This impacted our Church for a long time, as in many towns even up to the 1990s, the leaders of the local United Church congregation and the local Royal Canadian Legion were often the same people.

With the end of World War II in 1945 the United Church of Canada, age 20, entered the baby boom. Every congregation needed to find extra space to house Sunday schools that were full to overflowing; by the mid-1950s, established congregations were building Christian Education wings, and in newly formed suburbs in Canada’s cities, new congregations sprung up, close enough you could walk to them.  People who lived through these years remember the energy of so many young families, such huge Sunday schools, and the optimism that filled much of Canada also filled the Church.

From its earliest days, we were a denomination that met you where you were.  In rural areas this meant that rather than having a hub Church in the nearest city or large town, expecting that people would travel an hour or more on Sunday, there would be Church services in every village, in rural schoolhouses and, in each suburb.  The United Church of Canada also intended to meet you where you were, theologically: while we had the 1940 Statement of Faith, faith development was based less on the memorization of doctrine, and more on having a faith that made sense, informed by your life experiences and the life experiences of the world.  In the aftermath of World War II, the notion a God who was in control of everything no longer withstood scrutiny as we learned the Nazi agenda of exterminating Jews, people of diminished capacity, and the LGBTQ population. With our desire to serve every community, and engage the hard questions, our theology needed to be broad.

Continuing the pattern of two stars and a wish, I celebrate the spirit of civic engagement in these years of The United Church, and our willingness to meet people where they were.  The lament is the shadow side of these two positives.   At times, we went along with government policies too easily, or allowed our voices to be muted; for example, while some voices here in BC opposed the  internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II, the United Church as a whole was less eager to say anything that might look “unpatriotic”; and,  in attempting to be all things to all people, we’ve been accused of having a theology that is a mile wide and an inch deep. At times, I admit that this critique hits home, as our desire, especially in those baby boom years, to include every opinion in our big tent has been both exhausting and unhelpful.

then verse 5, and reflection:

In the middle ages of your life, not too old, no longer young,
I’ll be there to guide you through the night, complete what I’ve begun.

1965 to 1990: The New Curriculum… A socially progressive Church

This next time frame is the first one I (Greg) can speak of from first-hand experience.  When I was four years old, in 1964 our suburban Regina congregation started using the United Church of Canada’s recently developed New Curriculum.  This curriculum arose, because so many fresh graduates from seminary complained that when they brought their new learnings from seminary to their settlement charges, people were either baffled or outraged.  The thought, then, was to align our Christian Education, from early readers to adolescents to adults, with the learnings of liberal Christianity which had shaped our seminaries since the 1940s.

In some communities this new Curriculum was vilified but that’s not my memory of it.  It helped me, as a child, make the connection between the way I lived my life and the ethical teachings of Jesus.  My relationship with God was not just geared toward entry into heaven; it was about how I treated my neighbour, and if I stood with them when things needed to change. And alongside the New Curriculum, the release of our New Creed in 1968 brought our theology in line with the “brotherhood of man” ideals of the civil rights and social justice movements.

The mid-60s to early-90s were also the years when the predecessor of Broadview magazine, The United Church Observer, along with Church-mandated studies, helped open our eyes to the destructive power of capitalism and colonialism. Our General Council spoke an apology to the first nations of this land, stating  “In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ we were closed to the value of your spirituality….We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be”.  I am proud of those words, spoken by a Church that was willing to admit its failings.

From these years, I celebrate our willingness to engage social issues bravely, openly and honestly.  What I lament, is that these important moves have not been more eagerly received by the progressively-minded sector of our society.  I say this, fully aware of how hard it was here in Osoyoos and Oliver around 1990, when roughly one third of each congregation, angered by the United Church’s open discussion about gay ordination and the general liberalization of the denomination, left to form their own congregation.

Especially in places where 1988 was tumultuous, I lament our lack of connection with folks whom I think would love the social teachings of Jesus, and continue to I long for greater connection with unchurched folks, and members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, and others who are suspicious of religion but would bring so much to us if they were to join the fold of the United Church.

verse 6, then final reflection:

When the evening gently closes in and you shut your weary eyes,
I’ll be there as I have always been with just one more surprise.

1990 forward: “Engaged Retirement” with promises of resurrection!

In 1990, the United Church turned 65, and I (Greg) was preaching in rural Saskatchewan, wondering aloud if it was time for the United Church to call it a day and retire.  While I’ve not been able to unearth that sermon, I recall saying something like, “many of you are retired, and I keep hearing from you that you have never been busier.”  Now that I have reached the age of 65, I think I’d say the same thing: may the gifts of active retirement be ours in abundance!

In this section, I’m going to start with the lament. The lament is a lifelong one. As one who can now officially call myself a Senior Citizen, even before I entered ministry at age 21, there haven’t been very many people younger than me attending Church, with the exception of one congregation I served in a suburban neighbourhood full of young families.  With this being the case, we are now stuck with the task of trying to pique the curiosity of neighbours who have not only have no personal Christian Memory, but whose parents and grandparents weren’t Church folks either, folks whose impressions of Church are coloured by the regrettable actions of the loudest and least inclusive.

I lament that, yes. But there have been, and continue to be blessings. I must mention how influential the Okanagan has been in this season of life of The United Church of Canada.  Starting with the Whole People of God curriculum, which brought local, in-house, Canadian resources to our Sunday Schools, the now-closed Wood Lake books brought terrific scholarship to us.  So also, the influence of Naramata Centre was huge, in our families and many others.  In the mid-1990s the day summer registrations opened at Naramata was like phoning a box office to get tickets to a big rock concert: you got on the phone and you kept dialling until you got through.  The connection forged at Naramata between earth and spirit, families and seekers and singers, was a gift that keeps on giving across western Canada.  

In these years, the work of Church growth experts like Tom Bandy and Bill Easum and the Alban Institute, and the scholarship of open-minded Christian thinkers like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan helped us find new life. The extremely well-run Emerging Spirit campaign of 2004-2005 gave strategies to reach folks from age 30 to 45, and an online community called Wonder Café gave a virtual meeting place for those who had not found Christian community in their town.  These moves, while not providing the hoped-for numeric growth,  served us well in March of 2020, when the pandemic hit and everybody needed to become instant experts in Zoom and YouTube and other means of digital connection.  While those COVID years took a lot out of all Churches, charities and volunteer organizations, we survived, with resilience, resourceful and adaptability that continue to serve us well. 

+ + +

Come to think of it, those God-given gifts of resilience, resourcefulness and adaptability, have always been part of the DNA of this national, Canadian-born Church of ours.  The early vision of a Church where all could gather, coast to coast to coast required a lot of adaptability, and ever since then we have been checking our context, going deep into our personal and spiritual resources, and engaging in self-examination and repentance.  All of this has fed our yearning to be the body of Christ in this wide and varied land.  We cannot know with certainty what the future brings, but we can give thanks for the one God, experienced as Creator, Christ and Spirit, whose presence is tangible on this day, and who continues to be our horizon line as we in our generation walk the path of Jesus.

And we conclude with singing verse 7 to close this section of the service.

I was there to hear your borning cry, I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized, to see your life unfold.”

 

Hymn words and tune © 1985, John C. Ylvisaker. Reproduced by permission via  Osoyoos-Oliver United Church’s OneLicense subscription, A-740532  

Message © 2025, Rev’s Shannon Mang and Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

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