CHURCHES TRY TO KEEP THE FAITH
CONGREGATIONS CONTINUE TO SHRINK
Six-month-old Angus Smith is a devout churchgoer. He doesn’t know it yet, but as a young, male Protestant in 2013, he is in the minority.
Angus watched proceedings at Grace Presbyterian Church’s Christmas Eve service calmly from his baby seat, rested on a pew next to his mom, Kathryn.
Spare seats were scarce at Grace for one of the most well-attended services of the year. Lead minister Victor Kim predicted a turnout of about 900 parishioners, well up from the 300 that attend on a usual Sunday.
Inside, the church had the special occasion atmosphere. It isn’t used to being this full. Worshippers clad in special occasion clothes were forced to make room for one another, sitting shoulder to shoulder in many pews. The chatter of bored toddlers was likely louder than usual.
Young Angus’s parents, Kathryn and Angus senior, moved to Alberta from the Scottish isle of Lewis two years ago. A devoutly Presbyterian island, even it couldn’t escape what has become a serious problem for Christians churches worldwide.
“Even there attendance is going down,” Kathryn said.
The Presbyterian Church is one of many Christian denominations in the western world drawing less of a crowd every Sunday. Church attendance over the past generation is down almost everywhere.
Calgary’s houses of worship are no different, and church leaders in the city generally agree on what happened and what needs to be done.
“For many generations it was assumed that the people that populate the churches that we attend would be our children and our grandchildren,” Kim said.
“We know that’s no longer going to be the case. We know that our children attend church at a far lesser rate and our grandchildren will attend even less.”
Kim’s Sunday attendance averaged about 350 people when he started at Grace 20 years ago. Today it is about 300, but Kim believes the church’s historically large congregation has buffered it somewhat. The decline is worse elsewhere.
The church needed to target new Christians, he said, rather than the lapsed descendants of old ones, to boost numbers.
“That forces churches to be clear and more intentional about what it is that we represent.”
Mainline Protestant churches had to stop clinging to their “past ubiquity,” he said.
“We kind of used to be everywhere. You planted churches every so often assuming that around that church would be a demographic that would come to those churches. We were everywhere and we could afford to be everywhere.
“I think we still sometimes get trapped in this sense of ubiquity — that we should have a church everywhere. I think that depletes us.”
The United Church of Canada has suffered a similar depression.
Rev Kelly Osgood of Calgary’s Robert McClure presbytery believes the church got complacent after the heady days of the mid20th century.
“We forgot how to do evangelism,” she said. “It was so easy. People were clamouring to get in the doors. (How) to raise your family in the 1950s, the United Church really knew how to do that.”
The church was slow to notice the change, she said, and when it finally did, doing something about it was “like trying to turn around the Titanic.”
“People always came to us and then when, as a society, people stopped coming to the church, we looked up and we didn’t have the skill set to go out and (win them back).”
The United Church measures Sunday service attendance in October and November every year, and its figures for the past three decades have recorded the decline perhaps better than in any other Christian church.
In 2011, 3,527 Calgarians attended a United church service regularly. The national figure was 166,936.
In 2000, Calgary drew 5,915. Nationally, 270,361 attended.
And so on. In 1990, the numbers were 6,538 and 338,040. In 1980, 6,286 and 389,492. The numbers are a source of inner conflict for Osgood. On the one hand, she knows she shouldn’t focus on attendance — “it hooks my ego and that’s really not a good place for me” — but the work of Christ is harder when fewer people are listening.
“You need people. (The numbers) do matter.”
At least one church in Calgary is bucking the trend, though.
When Calgary Bishop Frederick Henry was appointed to his post 15 years ago, census data put Calgary’s Catholic population at about 220,000. The 2011 National Household Survey put it at 290,000 — comfortably the biggest proportional and total increase of any traditional Christian denomination in the city. Henry estimates 40 per cent of those people are regular churchgoers.
“I have a crunch problem,” he said. “I don’t have enough churches to encompass all those people that want to come. My desperate need is for property in some of the more developing areas of the city, especially in the southeast.”
Henry isn’t entirely sure where the renewed faith has come from. The election of the popular Pope Francis helped a little, he said. The sex scandals that have engulfed the church in recent years had the opposite effect but, again, only a little.
“I think there is a new interest in spirituality. We’re finding out no matter how many toys and playthings you have ... there’s a restlessness for something more and deeper, and I think there’s a bit of a turn to religion to try and develop a spirituality.”
Nowhere is the restlessness more apparent than St Gabriel’s parish in Chestermere, where a congregation of about 500 worships at a Catholic school over three services every weekend while it waits for a church to be built.
“There’s a basketball net, pictures of student athletes and then an altar,” Rev John Nemanic said.
The pressure is showing elsewhere as well. About 40 per cent of Calgary’s Catholic clergy are now foreign-born, Henry said.
Worshippers who arrived at Christmas Eve midnight mass after 11:30 p.m. would have struggled to find pew space. One parish added three extra masses to its Christmas schedule.
Grace Presbyterian on Christmas Eve, its pews nearly full, could have made a strong case for its own popularity. But the festive surge can mask the chronic malaise.
Victor Kim admits he’s worried about the falling attendance over the past generation. When it comes to arresting the decline, he calls on a famous line, usually attributed to Albert Einstein.
“The definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” Kim said. “Today (we) are facing that reality. We do have to do things differently. We can’t just mindlessly keep on doing everything the same and saying ‘this time it’ll be different.’
“We need to be able to communicate in a way that affirms people. The challenge is for churches to connect with people who choose to go to church rather than grow up within a church.”
In that sense, young Angus Smith is definitely in the minority. Born to churchgoing parents, he will be one of the dying breed of inter-generational worshippers Kim referred to if he grows into a churchgoing adult.
On Christmas Eve his father, Angus senior, gave a forlorn assessment of devoutness among the young in his staunchly Presbyterian homeland.
“Everything’s more secular now with young people, I think,” he said.
He paused, before giving an optimistic nod to Angus junior’s generation:
“But there has been a bit of a revival.”