Posted on 12/15/2008 11:06:19 AM PST by Alex Murphy
It's that time of year when millions of Canadians wonder about venturing into the church of their youth for a Christmas service.
The longing of those Canadians who don't regularly attend church usually comes from a mix of tradition, nostalgia, personal dissatisfaction and the search for a deeper connection to the sacred.
The Canadians who are most likely to be feeling an unusual tug to again try out church at Christmas -- who have kept only a loose link to their Christian identity-- are typically mainline Protestants.
Evangelicals, by contrast, have a higher rate of regular church attendance than mainline Protestants. And Catholics seem more polarized about the church in which they were raised: They either remain highly active in it, or they harshly reject it.
Mainline Protestants - such as members of the liberal United Church of Canada, as well as Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians - tend to be in-betweeners.
They often harbour mixed feelings about their church: They don't hate their mainline Protestant upbringing; they even have some fond memories of it.
But they've also drifted away -- often because of inadequate theology or the allures of the dominant secular consumer culture. Going to church is just not cool in much of Canada, especially B.C.
Since I'm bumping into a lot of mainline Christians this month who are wondering about whether to give church another try this Christmas season, I'm offering this revised version of something I wrote last year about a renewed sense of commitment to the church among liberal Protestants.
IT STARTS HERE:
"Hello. My name is Jennifer.
"I'm a physician, and an Anglican."
As far as introductions go, this one is as unlikely as they come in Canada. And not because Jennifer is a female doctor (that's yesterday's news), but because openly declaring
(Excerpt) Read more at communities.canada.com ...
The hardest challenge for confessing one's faith appears to be for mainline Protestants. Measured by numbers and influence, mainline Protestants have taken a savage drubbing since the Second World War. Now, instead of comprising almost half of Canadians as they did in the 1950s, just 20 per cent of the population now identify as mainline Protestants. It doesn't boost their confidence at cocktail parties. As well, many United Church members, Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians are in an awkward spot because they tend toward the political centre, or in many cases the liberal or progressive side of the spectrum.
C & E’ers.
Well, either go to church today, or mosque in the future. Choice is yours, but one of the two will occur.
The church of my youth ... I obviously wasn't paying attention because the liberal part left no impression on me whatsoever.
Ah yes. Gotta love Chreasters!
Honestly, what are they worried about? Mainstream Protestantism in this day and age is nothing more than the pursuit of fashionable left wing social and political causes. It has nothing to do with Christianity, so they should feel right at home in secular cocktail parties and the like.
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