My time at Co-Creating Plausible Futures for the Canadian Church 2024
I attended the New Leaf Network’s Co-Creating Plausible Futures for The Canadian Church: Balancing the Past, Present, and Future on March 9th.
This was a national event featuring local hybrid hubs and online participation.
Here’s a few pearls I uncovered
(framed as questions to ponder):
What will the Church look like, sound like, and feel like in the year 2055? How does that question make you feel? Sometimes we talk about ‘a preferred future’ - who’s preferred future are we talking about?
Can the Church of the future be a safer church that will actually do no harm?
Will the Church be content in being separate/apart - or will it become open to being in community and dialogue with difference and diversity
How would a practice of ‘foraging for tension’ (mining for conflict) at the end of our meetings foster a proactive approach to surfacing conflict disrupting resentments and destructive behaviour?
I’d encourage you to read the papers at New Leaf Network’s website to see what pearls you might uncover.
Jay Mowchenko and Xenia Chan - Enacting Liberatory Tactics in Everyday Life: A Present-Rooted Response to Our Collective Past
The Canadian evangelical church persists on her path of decline. Needing a foundational re-evaluation of what it means to be the Church, the legacy of broken systems and the harm they have caused are at the forefront of our interest–particularly, the colonial legacies that still haunt the present today; from residential schools to the uncritical adoption of Western imperialist consumer models. In that vein, this paper suggests that for us to envision a plausible–even, dare we say, desirable–future, we must reckon with the past and re-engage differently with our present.
Jay Mowchenko is the Paul E Magnus Chair of Leadership and Management Studies at Briercrest Seminary. Married to Marilou since 1993, they live in Saskatoon. He is deeply interested in the interplay between personal transformation and systemic change. He is ordained in the Free Methodist Church in Canada and would really like to talk to you about the fantasy novels of Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont.
Xenia Chan Ling-Yee 陳靈兒 is a Ph.D. Candidate (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) at Regis-St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto. As a former pastor, her scholarly work is informed by the present condition of the Canadian evangelical church, particularly the churches within the Sinophone revivalist tradition in Canada. Her work at present deals with Jeremiah's Confessions.
Beth Carlson-Malena - A Deficit of Trust: Rebuilding Confidence in Canadian Church Communities
Trust in Canadian churches and denominations is at an all-time low. I will open by briefly positing reasons for this deficit, including religious scandals and spiritual trauma, as well as more general trends of declining confidence in institutional and hierarchical authorities, declines that are especially stark among younger and more marginalized Canadians. Even among church leaders, there is a decline in trust in denominational structures.
The bulk of the paper will discuss potential pathways toward rebuilding trust, with reference to experiments we’ve been trying at my church, Open Way. On the level of church leadership, the age of the cisgender straight white male solo/lead pastor is ending, opening the door for more creative approaches. I will advocate for the trust-building capacity of equitable and diverse teams of co-pastors who model healthy community leadership. Such teams allow more congregants to see their identities represented in leadership, giving them more confidence that their needs will be addressed. Multivocational ministry models make this approach viable even in small churches. I will discuss how a deficit of trust requires us to become trauma-informed ministers who are proactive around addressing conflict, vulnerable about imperfection, and quick to take accountability for mistakes. We must allow for permeable boundaries and variable rates and levels of engagement as people “test the waters” to see if it’s safe for them to belong. If word count allows, I will briefly suggest ideas for building trust through financial transparency, pay equity, and consensus-based decision-making. Finally, zooming out to a broader level, I will discuss the decline of denominations, which is lamentable on some levels, but will also create space for more values-based, grassroots, ecumenical networks that tend to foster more trust.
Beth Carlson-Malena lives with her wife Danice on unceded Coast Salish land, in what's currently known as Vancouver, BC, Canada. Beth co-pastors a non-denominational church called Open Way that she helped plant six and a half years ago. She has a great side gig as a wedding officiant and spends the rest of her time on amateur botany, birding, work for climate justice and Palestinian freedom, and enjoying science fiction books and films
Andrea Perrett - Re-imagining sustainability with the Canadian Church
It is not an understatement to say that congregations across Canada are in a sustainability crisis. From coast to coast to coast, and across the denominational spectrum, budgets are tight, buildings are burdensome liabilities, and an increasing number of congregations are deemed unsustainable and forced to close. Established about 200 years ago, the predominant sustainability model in North America is self-sustaining, self-funded, clergy-led congregations. Today, even with the shifting context established congregations, and new church plants alike, continue to be held to this standard. Much of the literature suggests this sustainability model can still be achieved if leaders work harder by increasing their efforts and maximize efficiency. Yet there are other voices which remind us that it is God’s Spirit which sustains the church, not human efforts. Where might God be leading the future of God’s church with regards to sustainability models? Do we continue with the 200-year experiment of self-sustaining, self-funded, clergy-led congregations? Or is there something new emerging? This paper will briefly review how the current sustainability standards were established and how the theologies related to sustainability (ecclesiology, theology of ministry, and theology of stewardship) are shifting in today’s context. The paper will conclude by highlighting congregations and church plants in Vancouver, British Columbia which are re-imagining sustainability models and providing a glimpse of the future of the church in Canada.
Andrea Perrett is an Associate in New Witnessing Communities with the Centre for Missional Leadership at St Andrew’s Hall in Vancouver, BC. She is the leader of Cultivate: Missional Church Planting Collective, which gathers and equips leaders to help them navigate the challenges of planting sustainable new witnessing communities.
As a multivocational leader, Andrea also works as a dietitian at a mental health care facility and is a church planter with Transform, an outdoor-based witnessing community. She has previously been the Director of Cyclical Vancouver, the leader of a dinner church, St. Andy’s Community Table, and served at West Point Grey Presbyterian Church in Vancouver.
Andrea is passionate about supporting leaders who are experimenting with new ways of gathering Christian communities. She also loves exploring the connection between physical health and spiritual health and currently leads an online bread baking circle, where the group of amateur bakers share about life and faith while mixing and kneading their dough. Andrea has a MDiv from Vancouver School of Theology, where she is working on a ThM in Missional Theology.
Andrea and her husband, Jordan are originally from the prairies, but have called the West Coast home for over a decade. They live on the North Shore where they enjoy exploring the mountains with their goofy black lab and toddler.