55 Years Ago!

It was 55 years ago when the 'church' first made me say 'You've got to be kidding!'. Not out loud of course, after all it was the early 60's and the church had been part of my formative years.

My fiancé (now my husband) and I were meeting with the minister making arrangements for our upcoming wedding. The minister asked if we had a date in mind. We did. We wanted to be married on the same day that my parents had been. Straight forward. Definite. Only it wasn't. According to that minister, that happened to be a Sunday, and weddings were never on Sunday. No reasons were given. We agreed that the day before would be just as good ~only of course it wasn't! And that is my first memory of the church assuming the it knew best and that one size fits all. Of course, although I didn't know it then, that wasn't to be the last time.

Then there were the issues of 'allowing' women to become priests and marrying divorced people. It took the church an unconscionable length of time before they agreed that women were people too. Canada's parliament had come to that conclusion some 40 years earlier. Because the church had restrictions about divorced people remarrying, my daughter was unable to marry her fiancé here depriving our extended family and friends of being part of that event. Really???? (My husband & I were the only ones able to travel to Cape Town, South Africa, to attend the ceremony.)

One Holy Week, a long-standing member of our church died. His family wanted the service in the church on Holy Saturday. It made sense to them. Family was already coming from a distance for Easter. No way, said the priest. The best she could suggest (and then as a favour) was Easter Monday. I had now been part of the church for 50 years and had observed many Easters, and somehow again I thought ‘Really???’ I had thought either Good Friday or Easter Saturday would be the time for a funeral, fitting in so well with the somber mood of the services at that time.

And just as recently as last summer, I was shaking my head again, as once more the Anglican Church proved itself to be dragging its feet over a topic that society as a whole as moved on from: same-sex marriage.

Yet somehow despite all this, I still see something within the church, and that something is why I see myself a a Christian today. Certainly the three years I have sent learning about not only the background of the biblical texts, but more importantly looking at the last 3000 years of Christianity, and how the Christian church got from then to today, has played large part in this. As I learned how Christianity has changed over those years, why the decisions that were made come about, and who drove those decisions, I have come to realize that what see today is our churches today is the result of all the good and not-so-good decisions that have been made over the years. But the one thing it does prove is the the church can change, and can become more relevant depending on the voices it listens to.

Let’s hope the institutional church listens to the voice of Karl Barth, who said: “Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.”

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