Hollywood seldom portrays faith well. On one hand are glossy depictions of near-perfect characters who prosper if they pray hard, look right and win enough converts. On the other hand, Christianity is displayed as destructive and colonial. What happens to the stories in the middle, the ones that expose the harm of the church while showing…
I was ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacraments over 45 years ago. It happened on a Thursday night because of Halloween, of all things! The elders of the rural Southern Alberta congregation that had called me, a 25-year-old seminary graduate, to be their pastor, had first scheduled the event for Friday night….
In Prime Minister Mark Carney’s famous Davos address, he offered up a phrase that deserves reflection beyond its political moment: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” For churches shaped by deep memory and long tradition, the line names a familiar temptation: the quiet drift from faithful remembrance into paralyzing idealization. That is, trying to do what…
As of January 28, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is the Reverend Sarah Mullally. She is the first woman to lead the Church of England and the global Anglican Communion, as is her charge. Anglicanism has often served as an ecumenical bridge between Catholicism and the Reformed tradition, as it has for my wife, Brenda,…
Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in…
If your church died, would anyone in the neighbourhood notice or come to the funeral? That’s the question being asked by Laurence East and Brian McKenzie of Reframe Concepts in Kelowna, B.C. “If your faith community vanished from the neighbourhood map, would your city feel the loss in its gut, or just notice a fresh…
Growing up, like many Christians, I attended worship services with my family. Church was never something I did alone; it was a shared rhythm of life, deeply embedded in family routines. When I began studying at a Christian university, I either returned home on Sundays to worship with my parents or attended a local church…
“What gives us permission to disregard Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17:20-23, and to split and start yet another denomination?” Recently, I have been asked this question and variants of it. Christian Reformed (CRC) churches and folks are wrestling with questions of disaffiliation and forming a new denomination or network of churches. Given the…
“Everyone is unshakably good (no exceptions),” writes Father Gregory Boyle in his new book Cherished Belonging. He also says, “We belong to each other (no exceptions).” The statements by this Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention program in Los Angeles, could be a bit shocking to those who grew up in a…
I’ve noticed that many churchgoers your age aren’t involved with the youth at all. Everyone assumes that young people will just keep coming back every week, even though the stats show a steady decline in Canadians engaging in religion. The number of people proclaiming their faith has declined from 90 percent in 1985 to 68…
Ron Greidanus was born with the twin gifts of being prodigiously talented and being gay. But being born in the late 1960s, the fifth child of six to a hard-working, modestly-educated farm family in the Dutch immigrant community in Huron County, Ontario, it would take a long time before he could accept both of those…
Several years ago, my father gave me a copy of our family tree going back seven generations. It was quite grounding to see where I came from and how I fit in. Interestingly, our family genealogist (a distant relative in the Netherlands) chose to include two important pieces of information alongside many of the names…
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