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Showing posts from 2015

Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls to the Ground

The following is an article I wrote for the January 2016 edition of the Anglican Journal: This past summer, my father-in-law took us to see the church in which he worshipped as a child. Church of the Herald Angel, just outside of Orangeville, Ont., has been closed for many years and is now a well-cared-for home. A workman was repointing the mortar of one of the buttresses when we stopped to take a look. Many churches simply fall into disrepair and eventually vanish. It was good to see this church lived in and loved, and yet, there was a certain sadness in realizing the church no longer served its intended purpose, that the life of its worshipping community had come to an end. It was a bit like visiting the grave of a loved one in a well-tended cemetery; even amidst the beauty of the place, there is a profound and enduring sense of grief and loss. Like the Church of the Herald Angel, many churches across our country have closed or are facing closure. Sometimes those churches are in &

A Generation Lost?

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The following is a column I wrote for the March 2015 edition of the Anglican Journal, and is reproduced here with permission of the editor. There was a general feeling amongst the elderly in the community that a whole generation was being lost.  Their adult children had fallen away, and their grandchildren knew nothing of the faith at all.  One of them proclaimed, “O sir … our children are growing up faithless and our little ones have never been baptized!”  This might very easily be the lament of any of our senior parishioners on any given Sunday in one of our churches.  Yet, these were words spoken to the Rev.  Featherstone Osler, the first resident clergyman of West Gwillimbury and Tecumseth in Upper Canada , shortly after his arrival in 1837.  The shortage of permanent resident clergy and the failure to build churches over the preceding thirty years had led to a whole generation of settlers falling away, and their children never coming to faith at all.  It is into this wor