News & Views

Archdeacon Glyn Cardy, of Auckland, New Zealand's St. Matthew's in the City, and a colleague in the progressive movement, aimed to spark debate about some of the conventional beliefs around Christmas.  Did he ever get it!  Within hours of unveiling a billboard, it was defaced with paint and the religious community was in an uproar.  Read the BBC article.     Read Glynn's sermon and following comments.

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With thanks to Scott Campbell for the link.

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It 's a great big pat on the back for the many presenters at the Explore the Elements conference last week who were from West Hill United! Participants were over the moon about the calibre of the presentations and the challenging perspectives they encountered during the weekend long conference held at the Crowne Plaza in Don Mills.  Leadership was provided by

Trisha Bower walked participants through the grief process associated with the loss of foundational religious belief systems

John DiPede, who offered a workshop on Values-based community

Debbie Ellis led a workshop on Progressive Personalities

Scott Kearns who offered two workshops, one on language and one on the roots of progressive Christianity

Janice Meighan took on the challenge of engaging participant on the value of symbols and ritual in progressive community

Dana Wilson-Li touched on all the messiness that leading a congregation through change can be

It was a deeply rewarding opportunity for me to see others inspired by the gifts members of this community had to offer!  Thank you to each of you for making the conference such a success!!

 

 

 

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Saturday, September 26, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m., at the church

West Hill United has, for the last several years, been at the forefront of what we call the “progressive movement” within the church.  What we had come to know about Christianity from courses we'd taken, books we’d read, conversations we’d shared, thinking we’d done, and experiences we’d had had moved us to a place where what we did and said in an ordinary Sunday service no longer reflected our understandings.  We chose not to do nothing about this; rather, we began a journey toward creating the non-exclusive spiritual community for which we are now known across Canada and around the world. 

The journey continues to be exhilarating. The relationships we nurture, the lives we touch; the music, songs, prayers, and hope we release into the world; the community we continue to build are all life-giving facets of this engaging work. We’re passionate about it and that passion shows in what we do and in the responses to it, both positive and negative.

Already, people across Canada, in the United States and the United Kingdom, in Sri Lanka, Australia, France, Nepal, and Brazil, have contacted us to express their gratitude for what we are doing. Others, for years to come, will share in the benefits of our willingness to risk being on the bleeding edge of change and setting a course that they might follow.

We find, however, that as a single, small community of faith, on our own and without significant changes, we can no longer sustain this considerable, and, we feel, essential work of transforming Christianity.  As a committed band of hardworking, visionary people, we have borne the burden of this work and paid its costs up front. Our recent donor losses, realized as a result of our work, have placed us in a highly critical financial position; we are very close to reaching the depletion of our resources.

This morning, I shared with the congregation the news that, with current revenue trends continuing and with additional expenditure scrimping, we can expect to keep our doors open for a limited number of months. Our surplus funds will support us until the end of May, 2010.  At that point, we will begin to use our overdraft, secured by $20,000 in Canada Savings Bonds. Those funds will be depleted at the end of August, 2010 at which time the bonds would need to be cashed in and turned over to the bank which holds them. We could no longer pay staffing, mortgage, or building costs.

What does this mean? Clearly, it means that we must make some major changes or find some significant donors who can support us through this difficult part of the journey to the place of strength we know is possible. Clearly, it means we need to examine all our options and determine which are viable, desirable, acceptable.  Our meeting on Saturday will be a first step in determining what those options are: what we want to do, what we must do, and what we can do.

If you are at all able, please join us at the church on Saturday the 26^th at 1:00 to help strengthen the foundations of this new Christianity we represent.  We will endeavor to have childcare available; please let us know if you require it.  If you are at a distance and would like to participate, please contact us and we will work toward making that possible.

Until then and beyond, please hold the community in your heart and your prayers.

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In April I posted a piece on clergy compensation, pointing to the $600K package that New York's Riverside Church had offered its newest minister. Little did I know then that complaints about compensation were symptoms of a greater ill that has prompted some to suggest that it goes even to the core of the progressive Christian project.

Two months after the compensation fiasco, Rev. Brad Braxton resigned. While the compensation issue was cited as the reason for his departure, as this NY Daily News article hints, other concerns may have been influential. For one thing, Rev. Braxton was the second black pastor in a row at Riverside, and some speculate that there was growing concern that the church was becoming "too black." For another thing, Braxton tended to preach from the Bible and introduced a more evangelical style into the worship space. This would be problematic for a church which describes itself as progressive and which does not ascribe to the Bible any special authority.

This has raised debates about how far a progressive congregation can go. How does the white Protestantism which underpins the progressive movement deal with race (and difference more generally)? What does it mean to be tolerant and inclusive? See “God Needs You To Get Out of the Bubble”: Riverside Controversy Exposes Theological, Racial Fault Lines of the Christian Progressive Movement, by Peter Laarman and Jonathan L. Walton. This is a conversation which appeared yesterday in Religion Dispatches.

But even more interesting is the response posted by Rita Nakashima-Brock - "We Might Need the End of Progressive Christianity". Some of what she writes is tainted by vitriol and she admits that it's a "rant", but I make the assumption that because she writes from one within the progressive perspective, she is pained by the conflict that has gripped Riverside. She is purposefully raising larger questions which need to be raised. I invite you to read her article in full but here is a sampling:

I don’t think progressive Christianity can offer a compelling vision because we are at the end of the fumes of the Protestant reformation that created us. We carry in our bones its reductionism, focus on individual salvation, and visions of the elect and eschatology.

We need a new paradigm.

Progressives, especially, value tolerance, which creates dispassionate, lay-them-side-by-side-respectfully-as-equals approaches to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. They have a smattering of shallow ideas about other religions that are largely intellectual. They dabble appreciatively.

So here are a few questions to ponder:

First, does Rita Nakashima-Brock's "Progressive Christianity" describe what we do at WHUC? Do American proponents like John Cobb jr. & the TCPC describe something different than what we're accustomed to? Does the Canadian experience free us up to do a different kind of work?

Can we learn from the Riverside experience? We have recently enjoyed conversations about intercultural church with Michael Blair, intersexuality with Calvin Neufeld, and have declared ourselves an affirming congregation. Are we just making nice? Or do we have to go further and enter into places that make us really uncomfortable?

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This is a presentation of the first part of VisionWorks (2009) titled "Our Grounding is the Interconnectedness of all Life."  You can read the text here.

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Compensation packages for ministers is always a touchy subject.  On the one hand, if church is too generous (so the reasoning goes), this may distract the minister from the spiritual focus of their call.  On the other hand, if church is too tight-fisted, this can have long-term detrimental effects upon the vocation.  Most clergy have at least as much education as doctors and lawyers, but often enter their first charge carrying enormous student debts without the promise of a future income stream that their professional counterparts enjoy.  Undercompensate and fewer high-calibre people will enter seminary in the first instance.

The United Church of Canada has tried to address this by establishing guidelines for compensation that take into account factors like education and experience, manse vs. housing allowance, and regional variations in cost of living.  This has helped avoid certain biases that creep into compensation negotiations e.g. low-balling women whose salary represents a second houshold income.  The push to create a clergy bargaining unit also helps to keep congregations on their toes.  No more assuming that the minister's wife (who has a full time job and is an atheist) is just dying to bake cookies for the bazaar. No more assuming that, because the church owns the manse, this entitles congregation members to drop in whenever they please. No more assuming that the minister has no social life beyond the church community.

Sometimes it's useful to look beyond our own denomination as a way to gauge how we're doing.  Consider the latest package offered to the lead pastor of New York's Riverside Church which is estimated to be worth US $600,000. Maybe we just aren't thinking big enough. But the part that's most surprising in Chuck Currie's article is that a group of congregants has filed a petition in a New York court, presumably for an injunction.  What's surprising isn't their objection to the compensation package, but their complaint that Riverside is moving "toward a conservative style of religious practice."

Maybe West Hill is taking the wrong approach.  Maybe some of our members should launch an action and sue the United Church of Canada demanding an injunction against stodginess.  Or not.  So far, the courts in New York have refused to intervene.

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