By: Jim Taylor

Taking risks: a cure for apathy

“Canadians are not angry at the church,” writes Gary Nelson, General Secretary of Canadian Baptist Ministries. “They simply don’t care about it.”

        I think he’s right.

        I first met Gary when he was a pastor in Edmonton, co-writing a book with Don Posterski of World Vision. He struck me as someone confident in his faith, capable of expressing it without jargon or pomposity.

        He’s still doing it, but in a larger context.

        In a recent issue of the Canadian Baptist magazine Mosaic, Gary mused about the latest Canadian census statistics: “16% of all Canadians ticked the little box next to ‘no religion.’ Even more sobering is that 40% of those people were under the age of 24.”

        But he noted an apparent contradiction – 80% of Canadians still say they believe in God.

        “We are a country of genuine spiritual inquiry and religious rejection all wrapped into one,” he concluded. “Canadians [feel] that their search will not be respected, or even understood, by loyal well-meaning church goers.”

        “On Sunday morning,” he continues, “the average Canadian does not wake up and wonder which church they should attend. They have more intriguing and urgent things to do with their time.”



Other interests

 On Sunday mornings, the soccer fields I pass on my way to church are crowded with young people and their families.

        A couple, friends for decades, prefer going for Sunday brunch with neighbours, to going to church.

        Kids up the street sell chocolates door to door, to fund the school band’s trip to a music festival. Held on a weekend, naturally.

        In a letter to the Mosaic’s editor, Joe Foster, a member of Bromley Road Baptist Church in Toronto, asks, “I wonder if we… have hunkered down in our churches, praying for someone else to take action… My generation has stood by and wrung our hands while poverty, genocide, and the ravaging of God’s creation have run rampant.”



Inconveniencing ourselves

 Gary Nelson proposes what he calls “a ministry of inconvenience.” Instead of keeping ourselves comfortable, we need to risk being inconvenienced – to serve the needs of the community and the world.

        In the same issue of Mosaic, Mark Buchanan told of going to a small lakeside community as a guest preacher.

        “I arrived half an hour before the service,” he wrote. “The building was still locked.”

        But on Main Street, thousands of people had gathered for a charity marathon. “A local band was playing on a flatbed. Coffee kiosks were doing a booming business. Runners were limbering up. It was a festival.”

        When the church finally opened, a local deacon complained that someone in an RV coming for the marathon had damaged their freshly paved parking lot.

        Their solution – sling a chain across the entrance to restrict entrance and protect their property.

        Churches are dying wherever they concentrate on keeping their coffins comfortably well-upholstered.

        Thriving churches are willing to take risks, Gary Nelson argues, driven by a conviction that they can make a difference, to their communities and to the world.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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