United Church of Canada

Encyclopedia : U : UN : UNI : United Church of Canada

140px

The United Church of Canada (French: l'Église Unie du Canada) is Canada's second largest church (after the Roman Catholic Church), and its largest Protestant denomination.

The United Church is a 1925 merger of the then largest and second-largest Protestant denominations in Canada, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Methodist Church of Canada, and the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, a numerically less significant but historically extremely important stream in evangelical Protestantism. As Evangelical Protestanism has in political and theological terms drifted steadily towards the right, particularly in the United States, the United Church has maintained a liberal position, especially regarding its stances toward the social gospel, women's and minority rights and relations with the wider Christian Church.

About 250,000 people attend United Church services each Sunday, although some 2.8 million Canadians, or about 9% of the population, reported the United Church as their religious affiliation in the country's 2001 census. This is a significant fall-off from previous censuses, in which the proportion of Canadians identifying as United Church has been as high as 25%. Canada is a secular country, generally little interested in religious expression, but this fall-off can also be explained by

(1) Canada's very high immigration from countries not having a substantial liberal Evangelical Protestant population and

(2) discomfort on the part of conservative churchgoers with the denomination's increasingly liberal stances on such issues as homosexuality and biblical interpretation.

The United Church describes itself as having a presence in "all parts of Canada except rural Quebec." In rural Quebec the United Church exists as "l’église mitaine" — i.e., the mitten church, so tiny that only a handful of people can fit inside (though another explanation for the expression "mitaine" could be a corruption of "meeting" place by French-Canadian farmers).

The current Moderator of the United Church, elected for a three-year term, is the Rt. Rev. Peter Short.

Contents

History

Inauguration

The United Church of Canada was inaugurated at a large worship service at Toronto's Mutual Street Arena on June 10, 1925, and recognized and legitimated by Act of Parliament as well as provincial laws dealing with church property. It was the merger—negotiated and planned over more than twenty years—of three prominent Protestant denominations, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Congregationalists. Also participating were a number of "local union churches" that had already been established using the Basis of Union in small towns in the rapidly developing Canadian west. The Mutual Street Arena inaugural conference of the United Church coincided with the last General Assembly of the pre-Union Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Presbyerian Moderator, George C. Pidgeon, became the first Moderator of the United Church.

The Non-concurring Presbyterians

A substantial minority of Presbyterians remained unconvinced of the virtues of church union and their threat to the entire project was resolved by giving individual Presbyterian congregations the right to vote on whether to enter or remain outside the United Church. At the time of the ultimate merger on June 10, 1925 approximately 30% of the Presbyterian congregations in Canada — mostly in southern Ontario — chose to withdraw from the institutional Presbyterian Church and reconstitute themselves as a "continuing" Presbyterian Church in Canada, although the majority of Presbyterians who entered the union nevertheless still constituted the largest constituent of the United Church.

A major legal issue in the 1930s was whether these non-concurring Presbyterians were entitled to designate themselves as the "Presbyterian Church in Canada," given that legally the body bearing that name continued as part of the United Church of Canada. Ultimately in 1938 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the non-concurring Presbyterians could so-style themselves, the name having been in effect vacated by the United Church. Of more practical significance was the large volume of litigation through the 1920s and '30s regarding the ownership of disputed church property, including Knox College in the University of Toronto, whose faculty and students as well as the United Church itself had assumed it would become the principal clergy training facility of the United Church. These "United Church cases" constitute a minor but significant chapter in the evolving law of trusts.

In the early days of the United Church, relations between "non-concurring" and "continuing" Presbyterians (it was a matter of some controversy which Presbyterians were entitled to the term "continuing") were somewhat abrasive, particularly in small towns where congregations were divided. The uniting Presbyterians in the United Church were assertive in their view that they were the continuing Presbyterian Church, and many historic United Church buildings to this day proudly bear cornerstones showing their original identity as "Westminster" or "Knox" or "St Andrew's" (etc.) Presbyterian Church. In due course relations settled down and in today's Canada it is a matter of indifference which sort of Presbyterian one is. Many Canadian United Churchpeople are unaware of their own contentious history, and most Presbyterians have no issue with, say, "St Andrew's Presbyterian Church" being now a congregation of the United Church.

Similar church unions outside Canada

Such a merger was unprecedented in world history; Canada was the first country where the Protestant churches elected to pool their resources and become one large nondogmatic church, and the creation of the United Church was a model for similar unions that followed in England, the USA, South India, North India, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and elsewhere. The United Church has continued a policy of openness to church union.

Further church union discussions in Canada

In 1968 the Evangelical United Brethren Church of Canada (EUB or "Unionists"), having been orphaned when the parent body in the United States joined what became the United Methodist Church, joined the United Church of Canada. Union talks between the United Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in the 1970s stalled at the eleventh hour when the Anglican houses of laity and clergy voted in favour of union but the house of bishops voted against. There have also been conversations about union with the Disciples of Christ, who were involved in the 1960s and '70s discussions with the Anglicans. The United Church is active in the Canadian Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

Relations with the Anglican Communion

During the 1960s the ecumenical movement was particularly strong and — particularly during the primacy of Arthur Michael Ramsay in Canterbury and Ted Scott in Canada — the Anglican Communion was particularly receptive to increased intimacy with the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches. The United Church made overtures to the Anglican Church of Canada with respect to creating a broader Canadian church union along the lines of the Churches of North India, South India and Pakistan, to which the Anglican Church of Canada responded with alacrity. In the course of church union discussions a compendious draft basis of union was prepared which involved the United Church agreeing to accept episcopacy and arrangements being contemplated for the recognition of United Church ordinations. A common hymn book was published, whose reception in both Anglican and United Church congregations in Canada was equivocal, suggesting that the grassroots were not quite ready for so radical a union, though the soon-to-be-united Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist, together with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches of Australia enthusiastically adopted a second, Australian edition of the hymn book.

At the congregational level there was considerable indifference to the proposed merger of communions; but the United Church Observer espoused it wholeheartedly. The Anglican Church adopted the joint Hymn Book and began ordaining women clergy, as the United Church had done since 1936. Invitations by Anglican cathedrals to United Church clergy to preach were responded to with enthusiasm by Anglican congregations, who had the benefit of the preaching of such United Church divines as the Right Reverend Bruce McLeod.

However, the Anglican House of Bishops vetoed the church union, despite the approval of the Anglican Houses of Laity and Clergy. It seemed to the bishops that the smaller Anglican Church of Canada would be swallowed up in the much larger United Church and that episcopalian sensibilities, despite the good will of United Churchpeople — and indeed despite the United Church's express willingness to accept episcopacy — would be lost in a wider union. Since then, institutional relations with Anglicanism have been cool; the joint Hymn Book of 1972 has been resoundingly denounced by both denominations, for musical as well as ecclesiastical reasons. Both denominations have produced separate successor hymnals, and common endeavour has been somewhat soured at the national level.

About the United Church

General

The United Church consists of a range of congregations from moderately conservative to very liberal, but it is one of the most socially liberal of the world's large Protestant denominations. It began ordaining female ministers in 1936 and has long shied away from a rigid interpretation of the Bible. United Church of Canada members moving to the United States often find themselves at home in the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church in the USA and the United Methodist Church, to the United Kingdom in the Methodist Church of Great Britain, United Reformed Church or, in Scotland, the Church of Scotland and to Australia in the Uniting Church in Australia, though none of these denominations entirely corresponds in ethos to the uniquely Canadian United Church.

In 1997 the limits of the Church's liberal stance were tested when the Church's Moderator, the Right Rev. Bill Phipps commented that he was not sure the resurrection of Jesus was a scientific fact and that Jesus' nature was fully human. This sparked great debate in the church, and heated condemnation from some former moderators for what they considered a departure from basic Christian doctrine, not to speak of the theological statements in the church's Basis of Union, with some congregations passing motions asserting their faith in Jesus' literal resurrection.[1]

The polity of the United Church is largely Presbyterian, with a hierarchy of governing bodies (Presbyteries, Conferences, and the General Council) each having equal membership from ministers and lay people. Its social policies owe the most to the Methodist strain in its heritage. The freedom available to individual congregations owes much to the Congregationalist part of its roots.

The United Church issued a Hymnary in 1930, The Hymn Book (jointly with the Anglican Church of Canada) in 1972, and a new hymn book under the title Voices United in 1996. It is in the process of compiling a supplement to the latter, expected to be titled More Voices. [link]

Liturgy

For its first 40-odd years United Church congregations largely followed the historic Presbyterian Book of Common Order in the layout of their Sunday worship services, as with Evangelical Protestant communions throughout the world, and United Churchpeople could reliably expect to find a familiar liturgy in Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist and Baptist churches anywhere in the anglophone world. Beginning in the late 1960s, as Roman Catholics and Anglicans began experimenting with new liturgies, the United Church similarly began broadening its churchmanship. Nowadays one may find United Church congregations which worship in a wide range of styles, from free-form Evangelical Protestant prayer meetings with pentecostal gospel music to essentially Anglican Book of Common Prayer sobriety, with a highly literate set liturgy and communion at what amounts to an altar rail. There is an acute awareness and inclusion of the hymnody of the Wesleys and the heritage of the Presbyterian metrical Psalter.

Official doctrine

The Basis of Union sets out the doctrines concurred in by the uniting denominations; it

"affirms" "belief in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the primary source and ultimate standard of Christian faith and life";
"acknowledges" "the teaching of the great creeds of the ancient Church" — that is, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed; and
"maintains" "allegiance to the evangelical doctrines of the Reformation, as set forth in common in the doctrinal standards adopted by the Presbyterian Church in Canada, by the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, and by the Methodist Church."

Weekly recitation of the Apostles Creed was a routine feature of Sunday worship until 1968 when the Church promulgated an additional specifically United Church Creed, entitled A New Creed. It should be noted that the United Church emphasises its participation in the universal small-C catholic church, and that the ancient creeds are not displaced but only supplemented; that being said, it is the new United Church Creed that rather than the ancient creeds is most often recited during Sunday worship.

The United Church in national life

While Canada has not officially endorsed any religious persuasion since the 1840s when the establishment of the Anglican Church and the issue of clergy reserves became a major focus of popular discontent with the colonial government in Upper Canada, the numerical significance of the Presbyterians and Methodists and later the United Church in anglophone Canada has until recent times given the Church considerable political influence. According to John English in Shadow of heaven: The life of Lester Pearson there was a time when Canadian Prime Ministers consulted with United Church moderators as British Prime Ministers did with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The United Church followed its antecedent Presbyterian and Methodist constituents in promoting the social gospel and United Church clergy have historically taken strong stands in provincial and national political discourse. Many political leaders have been United Church clergy, including Donald MacDonald (federal Liberal cabinet minister in the 1960s), Stanley Knowles (elder statesman of the CCF-NDP), Don Faris (Saskatchewan NDP cabinet minister) and Lorne Calvert (current Saskatchewan NDP Premier). Numerous non-clerical political leaders and persons of influence have demonstrated the influence on them of United Church priorities; Lester B. Pearson was a son of the United Church manse and Madam Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada was a wife of the manse. (Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada 1921-26, 1926-30 and 1935-48 an early proponent of universal health care, was a pre-Church Union Presbyterian when he established his views on the subject.)

The church newspaper the United Church Observer, particularly under its 1960s editor A.C. Forrest, took an early stand in promoting the interests of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, vis-à-vis the state of Israel, at time when wider Evangelical Protestant opinion was generally uncritical of Israeli government policy.

Until recent times when public sensibilities became more attuned to the undesirability of imposing the views of majorities on minorities, it was common for the United Church Hymnary to be distributed to public school children for use in daily and weekly assemblies, and Presbyterian and Methodist hymnody was a common fund of reference and allusion in public discourse.

Several United Church moderators, notably the Very Rev'ds Bruce McLeod and Art Moore, have expounded on the heritage of Evangelical Protestantism of literacy, both literal (so to speak) and figurative (in terms of broad awareness of the world of letters beyond narrow Evangelical Protestantism, as demonstrated in antecedent denominations' founding of such institutions as Harvard College and Yale College, and its literary heritage of Milton and Blake), and the urgent need for the United Church to proselytize for "literacy" among less worldly evangelical Protestant denominations and to reach out to its historic sister churches. Bruce McLeod in particular preached in Anglican Cathedrals across Canada during the debate on further Church Union with the Anglicans and his charismatic personality and highly literate preaching did much to persuade Anglican laity and clergy that union with the United Church was desirable.

Causes

The United Church has been forthright in the defence of liberal social causes — often well in front of more conservative Evangelical Protestants, and often followed at greater or lesser remove by more cautious but politically akin denominations such as the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. Many of its historic causes which may initially have been controversial have in the long term become matters of common Canadian accord:

The espousal of universal medical care was very early the bailiwick of outspoken United Churchpeople;
the ordination of women (1936 in the United Church; 1974 in the Anglican Church of Canada);
the championing of the interests of the Palestinians (in the 1960s the United Church Observer's editor A.C. Forrest comprehensively startled United Churchpeople with his reports on the plight of the Palestinians and the question of re-assessing Evangelical Protestant uncritical support of Israel);
the defence of homosexual rights, including equal marriage.

One notable lack in the United Church (and its antecedent denominations)’s mission has been ministry to indigenous peoples. Apart from a notable mission among the indigenous people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the United Church has not especially ministered to this group. In the short run this has been a financial boon to the church in that claims against the Anglican Church and against Roman Catholic orders by persons who were abused by sexually disordered mission personnel have not correspondingly involved the United Church in humiliating and financially crippling litigation. In the long run, the credibility of the United Church in speaking on behalf of the interests of indiginous Canadians may be limited since there are very few aboriginal United Church clergy and laity.

The United Church in popular culture

Prominent United Church members in national life

Nellie McClung was a Canadian feminist, politician, and social activist. She was a part of the social and moral reform movements prevalent in Western Canada in the early 1900s. Her great causes were women's suffrage and temperance, both early Methodist priorities. She championed dental and medical care for school children, married women’s property rights, mothers' allowances, factory safety legislation and other reforms. She served as a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta and was one of The Valiant Five who, in 1927, put forward a petition to clarify the word "Person" in Section 24 of the British North America Act (the Persons Case). On October 18, 1929, the Privy Council found that "Person" includes female persons, thereby making women eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate.
Ralph Connor, Charles William Gordon, aka Ralph Connor (1860-1937) was a Presbyterian and then United Church cleric and author. Born in Glengarry County, Upper Canada, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he graduated from the University of Toronto and studied at Knox College and the University of Edinburgh. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1890 and was an active social gospeller and advocate of temperance. He became senior Protestant chaplain to the Canadian forces during World War I. As Ralph Connor, he was a prolific and popular novelist. Much of his work concentrated on the Western Canadian frontier, with good confronting evil in the plots. His best-known books — The Man from Glengarry, Glengarry School Days, and The Foreigner — are concerned with young men and their development. In the years before World War I, Ralph Connor was one of the world's best-selling writers, and his work always found an audience. Scholars today find him uninteresting as a literary craftsman but he remains interesting as a time capsule of middle-class Anglophone Canada.
Margaret Atwood would not describe herself as a churchperson and possibly not as a Christian, but in her early life she was a Sunday School teacher at Leaside United Church in Toronto and her early grounding in the Scriptures from a United Church perspective has amply informed her fiction, particularly in The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Laurence was one of Canada’s greatest novelists (This Side Jordon, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God (filmed by Paul Newman as "Rachel Rachel"), The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, The Diviners) and a figure of prominence in the late-20th century emergence of anglo-Canadian literature in world letters. She was a close friend of United Church Moderator Lois Wilson; her novels bear the firm imprint of her avowedly Scottish Presbyterian sensibility.
Northrop Frye (see below) was an eminence grise of anglo-Canadian culture during the '50s through the '70s; a United Church minister and Milton and Blake scholar. He served on the Canada Council and other cultural bodies, bringing to bear a sternly literate Christian voice. Wooed by Princeton and other American universities, he resisted invitations to join their faculties, aware that he had become a Canadian institution.
Alice Munro's fiction, increasingly in literary criticism slotted into the category of Ontario Gothic is set in Southern Ontario and her characters are of the agrarian and urban middle class; they frequently identify as "United Church."
Don Harron, a journalist, author, comedian, actor, director, and composer. Harron has been a fixture of Canadian entertainment and letters since his 1956 direction of the television film "Anne of Green Gables" (which led to his libretto to “Anne of Green Gables: The Musical”). He was host of CBC’s "Morningside" 1977-82 and has — perhaps somewhat regrettably — been featured in his "Charlie Farquarson" persona, a parody of a Canadian rustic (scorned as "vulgar" by Peter Gzowski), on US television’s "Hee Haw." He has been an exemplar and spokesperson of United Church sensibilities in national life. He hosted the United Church’s 50th anniversary celebrations at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre.
Lester B. Pearson, the son of a Methodist and later, United Church minister, he was Minister of External Affairs in the St Laurent government and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in defusing the Suez Crisis. During his tenure as prime minister (1963-68), he introduced universal health care, student loans, bilingualism, the Canada Pension Plan, and Canada's flag. He is regarded as one of the most influential Canadians of the twentieth century.
Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister, was a Manitoba CCF-NDP parliamentarian from 1942-1984 with a hiatus from 1958-62. After the CCF’s decimation by the Diefenbaker Tories in the 1958 federal election he together with David Lewis was responsible for regrouping the social democratic left as the New Democratic Party. He was an articulate and credible spokesman for the social gospel — he is credited with persuading governments to increase Old Age Security benefits and for the introduction of the Canada Pension Plan, as well as other features of the welfare state — but was also the recognised expert on parliamentary procedure. During Liberal minority governments of the 1960s he was pivotal in the exercise of the NDP’s hold of the balance of power to persuade Liberal governments to introduce progressive, social gospel legislation. When he retired from politics in 1984 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau gave him the unprecedented position of honorary table officer of the House of Commons, permitting him to spend his retirement viewing parliamentary debates from the floor of the Commons.
Vincent Massey, first Minister of Canada to the UK and first native-born Governor General. The Massey family contribued vast sums to the cultural life of Toronto and Canada, including the Massey Foundation, the Massey Lectures, Massey Hall in Toronto, Hart House at the University of Toronto, Massey College and not least, to Metropolitan Methodist, now United, Church in downtown Toronto.
Egerton Ryerson was a minister, educator, politician, and public education advocate in early Ontario, Canada. Ryerson helped found the Upper Canada Academy, of which he was the first principal, in Cobourg; it later became Victoria College, now a part of the University of Toronto. He fought for many secularization reforms, to keep power and influence away from any one church. Such secularization also led to the widening of the school system into public hands. He became Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada in 1844. His study of educational systems elsewhere in the Western world led to three School Acts, which would revolutionize education in Canada. His major innovations included libraries in every school, an educational journal and professional development conventions for teachers, a central textbook press using Canadian authors, securing land grants for universities and universal mandatory free education for all school-age children. The Ryerson Press, long the foremost publisher of Canadian works and owned by the United Church, was of course named for him as is Ryerson University in Toronto and numerous Ryerson United Churches across the country.
Robert Baird McClure was a Presbyterian and then United Church medical missionary in China and India and the first non-clerical Moderator of the United Church (1968 - 1971). He assumed an extremely high profile in national life during his tenure as Moderator, attracting favourable (if at times controversial) notice for the United Church, the Social Gospel, Christian Missions and liberal Evangelical Protestantism through his earthy outspokenness. Numerous new United Churches across the country were named for him.
Gordon Lightfoot - The singer and writer of "If You Could My Mind," "For Lovin' Me," "Early Mornin' Rain," "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and other well known songs, is a high-profile member of the United Church of Canada. As a youth in Orillia, Ontario, he sang in a local United Church choir. A 2003 article in the Globe and Mail profiling Lightfoot and his recovery from a major illness noted that Lightfoot had for many years sung at Christmas services for a Toronto congregation of the United Church.

Alternate lifestyles

Homosexuality has been a particular bête noire for the United Church in the latter part of the 20th century. In keeping faith with its constituency, whose values may be somewhat more conservative than those of a central, sophisticated elite, while at the same time remaining true to its priorities as to educated and literate liberal Evangelical Protestantism, the United Church has trodden a rather difficult middle road. An increasingly inclusive stance has lost it many conservative congregations and members.

Statement in favour of equality of all sexual orientations, posted by a United Church in Montreal

The United Church is now generally very open to homosexual members. The church formally states that homosexuality "is not in itself a barrier" to becoming a minister. Some United Church ministers solemnize marriages for same-sex couples, and some United Church spokespersons advocate for gay rights in the greater community. Certain United Church delegates presented evidence in favour of same-sex marriage to the House of Commons Justice Committee during its cross-country hearings in 2003 and welcomed court decisions that legalized same-sex marriage in certain provinces. The 37th General Council, 2003, affirmed that "human sexual orientations, whether heterosexual or homosexual, are a gift from God and part of the marvelous diversity of creation." However, the process of coming to a church-wide decision on issues of human sexuality has been difficult, with some congregations electing to leave the church entirely during the 1988 controversy. Many of these congregations went into the Congregational Christian Churches of Canada. See Homosexuality and Christianity.

Family planning and women's rights

The United Church has historically taken a position of support for women's rights, moderated by an acute sense of awareness of the value of human life and a commensurate consciousness of the ethical and theological difficulties of its small-C catholic sister communions of Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy and of its more conservative Evangelical Protestant fellows. In summary, the United Church's recent positions have followed upon its historic championing of the rights of women and have been as follows:

(1980) Declared support for contraception and access to abortion: "We do not support 'abortion on demand.' We believe that abortion should be a personal matter between a woman and her doctor, who should earnestly consider their understanding of the particular situation permitting the woman to bring to bear her moral and religious insights into human life in reaching a decision through a free and responsive exercise of her conscience." [link]

(1989) Policy paper issued urging the Canadian government "not use the provisions in the Criminal Code to regulate abortion" [link]

(1990) Issued policy paper encouraging the Canadian government to improve rural access to abortion [link]