Lessons From A Dying Church - The United Church Of Canada Path To Extinction

On June 10, the United Church of Canada (UCC) turned 100 years old. As the Calgary Herald put it on June 7: "What's next?" 

Well, probably nothing. The Herald reports that, "statistically, the UCC closes a church a week and some predict it may be extinct within 15 years. The membership of the denomination is half what it was in the 1960s, approximately 1.2 million people."

Many of those people never attend services. A survey of realtor listings also reveals many old UCC buildings are up for sale. In Ontario, it has become popular to turn them into trendy new houses. 

The UCC was created in 1925 when several Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches amalgamated to create a new Canadian denomination. As the Herald pointed out, it swiftly became "a church that people claimed as their own whether they attended Sunday services or not. It was the church a community would turn to for rituals: funerals, weddings, baptisms." The UCC, in other words, was a utilitarian religious establishment for people who weren't particularly religious. 

The UCC, however, served another national function: It baptized, and indeed helped to midwife, the sexual revolution in Canada. Even in my community in rural Ontario, it is easy to identify a UCC building -- they are festooned with a wide range of LGBT flags, the garish secular symbolism of cultural collapse. Decades ago, the UCC earned itself the nickname "the NDP at prayer" for the social activism that defined it.

Indeed, when Canada's abortion activists launched the Abortion Caravan from Vancouver in 1970 and headed across the country with vehicles featuring slogans such as "Smash Capitalism" and "Abortion is Our Right," the UCC assisted with what would become the defining event of the abortion crusade by hosting the activists on their journey to Ottawa, where they dumped a black coffin on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's front lawn and shut down Parliament for the first time in its history by chaining themselves to its railings. 

By the 1980s, the UCC explicitly supported the decriminalization of abortion, essentially signing the death warrants of the more than four million unborn children who have died by abortion in Canada since 1969. As the sexual revolution evolved, the UCC evolved, too. The "Gender, Sexuality, and Orientation" section of their website currently states, "We affirm that gender and sexuality are gifts of God, and welcome people of all sexual orientations and gender identities." It also takes aim at Christian churches that still cling to biblical truth: 

Even as we seek to eliminate sexism, misogyny, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, we know that we, too, are guilty of these forms of oppression. We acknowledge the roles that Christianity and religion in general play in such oppression. We hear the call to take action to end all forms of discrimination. We acknowledge that the work of justice is not just about how we treat people who enter the four walls of our church; what matters is how we treat people out in the world. We are committed to journeying to where all people live in justice and peace together. 

Indeed, the UCC boasts about the LGBT "pastors" who serve their shrinking flocks; the minister of Calvary Pastoral Charge in Kingston, Ontario, identifies as "transgender." Famously, in 2018 the denomination decided against defrocking an atheist "pastor," Greta Vosper, who does not believe in either God or the Bible. Vosper could be forgiven for looking at the UCC and concluding that it was the perfect place for her to serve, as she represents the activism and cultural influence of the UCC far more than any lingering pretense of Christianity. 

As the United Church of Canada closes out a century on the slow but steady path to extinction, its collective suicide is perhaps best symbolized by one of their remaining functions: A useful ecclesiastical idiot used by the mainstream press to demonize Canadian Christians who still hold to Christianity's teachings on sex, sexuality, and the killing of children in the womb. When the press covers the opposition of a church community to LGBT ideology, they often get a quote from a (usually female) UCC clergyperson to emphasize that real Christianity is on the side of the revolution.  

The United Church of Canada will likely not survive to celebrate its 150th anniversary. They can take comfort in the fact that they served the sexual revolution well, and that their usefulness is at an end. Meanwhile, a 2017 study revealed that the only Canadian churches that are still growing are those that reject everything the UCC stands for.  

Originally published at The Bridgehead