I had a busy day, but it's kind of one of those days where despite the fact that I did lots, I cannot look back on the day and list off what I accomplished. I just know that the day went quickly, and I did not do everything I had hoped to get done. The day was also punctuated with a thought-provoking message, that has had me thinking about it off and on throughout the day. For some reason I did not read the message until today even though it first arrived in my inbox on February 19, just a few days after I started this blog. I wonder how this blog would have changed if I'd read it sooner? The message was a forward of an email sent out by a ministry colleague in Vancouver. Over the past several years he has taken to plotting trends in such things as membership, church attendance, baptisms, weddings and funerals in United Church congregations. These are all graphed based on informaton provided in the annual yearbook of The United Church of Canada. The trends, if they are to be believed and there is no reason not to believe them because they are simply based on the numbers provided by those people in the church who file the statistical information, are quite sobering. To summarize the statistics, we are headed by the year 2025 to a very different church - one characterized by very small numbers - in membership, in attendance, in baptisms, weddings and funerals. The statisfics were accompanied by a commentary which paints a very dismal but not unrealistc picture of where we are headed in the space of the next fifteen years. Unfortunately it is the kind of information that can drag us down or draw us back. In my latest report to the Executive of Conference I reported that there are many things which seem to pre-occupy us in the church these days. They most often relate to the same kinds of information detailed in the report, namely lagging attendance and membership and the consequent dropping numbers of professions of faith, weddings, baptisms and funerals. In the same report I outlined how when I am visiting a presbytery, while acknowledging these concerns, I try to accentuate the positive aspects that I find. I really do believe there is something going on in the world as it relates to the presence of the Spirit among us. Whether it is The Great Emergence, or something akin to renaissance, reformation or the like I really do believe that a new and encouraging and exciting wind is blowing. I also realise how difficult it can be to look past old buildings and memories of the good times, and not want to have them back. But as I said recently at St. Paul Presbytery, this reformation, resurrection, and renaissance information is most of the time extremely important, if we can get past the stuff that will draw us down or drag us back. The church is not suffering through these agonizing times with the statistics that describe them and the tough decisions that accompany them because God is gone. God is still here, calling us to a new place, a new understanding of what it means to answer the call of the spirit in these times. But they are scary times - for sure, and we won't really know where we are until the emerging church, the emerging spirit, the transformed, reborn and reformed church has finished its emergence. And even then God will still be calling us to be something new.
It's kind of a tough way to end the fourth week of Lent, but the predominant feeling for me is one of hope, and anxious excitement about where all of this will lead - if we can only get past the things that drag us down or draw us back....
Yellowknife,March 16, 2010
What is the right metaphor for the times we find
ourselves amidst? Is it a whirlwind, a maelstrom,
or a puzzle?
