A Generation Lost?
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...