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For 129 Christmases, the 12-spire Gothic tower of Welland Avenue United Church has beckoned people in St. Catharines, Ont., to celebrate the birth of God's son Jesus. This Christmas almost certainly will be the last.
The tower is falling apart. The congregation doesn't have $300,000 to rebuild it.
A church committee has unanimously advised the congregation to vote on Jan. 27 to leave the building, put it up for sale and merge with two other United churches in the city.
It is a textbook crisis scenario for Canada's churches, beginning to fall like bowling pins in the aftershock of institutional Christianity's implosion in the 1960s, a cultural and spiritual derangement still not fully understood.
Karen Thacker is chair of the church council at Welland Avenue United Church in St. Catharines, Ont. (Peter Power/The Globe and Mail)
It has moved at least one scholar of religion, Stuart Macdonald at the University of Toronto's Presbyterian Knox College, to ask — in the journal of the Canadian Society of Church History — if Christian Canada is dying.
Prof. Macdonald and others, looking beyond the 40-year steep decline in regular worship attendance, cite the unprecedented growth in the census of those who identify themselves as having "no religion" — from 1 per cent in 1961 to 4 per cent a decade later, to 16 per cent in 2001 (and a whopping 35 per cent in B.C.) — as well as those self-identified as unaffiliated Christian, or "Christian not included elsewhere": now 700,000 Canadians, double the number in 1991.
Denominational belonging is one of the final things to go in someone's attachment to institutional faith, Prof. Macdonald noted in an interview. "People's religious identity lasts a long time."
Scholars find significant, as well, the marked decline in occasional attendance, which means the churches are losing prospective membership recruits.
They cite the sharp declines in baptisms, church marriages and young people's confirmations or professions of faith marking full membership (the Anglicans, some years ago, abandoned confirmation instruction as a prerequisite to taking part in the Eucharist) and the disappearance of once well-known biblical references from our everyday speech.
And Michael Higgins, president of Fredericton's St. Thomas University and an expert on contemporary Roman Catholicism, sees a crucial absence of "credible moderate and liberal witnesses" for reforming the Catholic Church from the inside, people who remain strongly attached to the institution and haven't left. "They don't seem to be there."
All the demographics worked against Welland United. Its congregation shrank. It aged. The median age in all so-called liberal mainline Protestant denominations (United Church, Anglican, Presbyterian) is several years older than the Canadian median. And while Catholicism is being kept viable — just — by immigration, Protestant immigration into Canada is vanishing.
"So they can't bring in the next generation and they can't bring in the immigrants," said Peter Beyer, a religion sociologist and historian at the University of Ottawa. Suggesting the Protestants are up the creek.
Welland United could have paddled along a few more years. The congregation is lively; there are children; there have been a few new members. Two men who came to get married — the church offers a gay marriage ceremony — stayed on. But the falling-down tower was its death knell.
"Because of our building, we don't have another choice," said Karen Thacker, chairwoman of the church's council.
Such stories can be heard in thousands of congregations across the country that are either already in palliative care or a roof-leak or furnace-failure away from the grave. They are rural, urban, Catholic, mainline Protestant, Pentecostal (the Pentecostals show the second-largest census decrease in Canada after the Presbyterians) and other conservative sects such as the Salvation Army, Mormons, Mennonites and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Most scholars of religion now recognize that adherence to the country's pre-eminent faith — 72 per cent of Canadians self-identified as Christian in the last full census year of 2001, down eight points from 1991 (while fewer than 20 per cent regularly attend services) — has not been following some decades-long trend of gentle decline, as many had thought.
Rather, church membership steadily climbed before the 1960s and then abruptly collapsed.
