50 years ago: Churches' call to keep up with the modern world sound suspiciously like what you hear from the Church Growth Movement today

In 1967 Canada was still an ostensibly "Christian" nation, as least as far as the culture was concerned. The biggest mainline Protestant denominations--the United Church of Canada, and the Anglican Church of Canada--were just a couple of years past their peaks in membership, and although already on the road to apostasy, were still influential in Canadian society. National mainline church assemblies still received national media coverage.

The following articles--two concerning the national synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, and two on a Roman Catholic congress on theological renewal--are notable for reporting urgings from speakers and church leaders to keep up with the times. This is the same sort of message that "evangelical" churches have been hearing from the Church Growth Movement for the last 25-30 years or so: things have changed so much that the old ways must be done away with, and we must keep in step with the modern world. The mainline churches' attempts to be relevant and in step with the times have had the ironic and unintended result of continuing declines in membership and continuing irrelevance. As the old saying goes, I'd rather be part of a church that's 500 years behind the times and doesn't care than one that's 5 minutes behind the times and is constantly scrambling to catch up.

The following Canadian Press report was published in The Edmonton Journal, August 22, 1967:

Ottawa (CP) - The world is increasingly more skeptical about the Christian Church but the church is trying hard to adjust to the demands of modern times.

This was the view expressed Monday at a news conference on the eve of the 10-day general synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, in effect the national church's parliament.

The church's proposed union with the United Church of Canada is to be a major topic at the synod. The proposed union could drive some Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church, it was suggested Monday.

"Every church feels we're all shook up," said Most Rev. Howard H. Clark, Archbishop of Rupert's Land and Primate of All Canada.

The church had fallen behind the rapid developments in the world because it "hasn't been concerned with first things." It had had a "pretty facade over life."

But despite its apparent slowness to deal with modern problems the church is "making a tremendous effort to adjust to the 20th century," said Rt. Rev. G.P. Gower, Bishop of New Westminster, who with Bishop H.R. Hunt of Toronto, joined the primate at the conference.

Young people, the primate said, have "never been so serious" and were "much more interested in the basic questions of life" than were his generation.

"The world is increasingly skeptical of churches," Archbishop Clark said. "But I have never seen so many young people concerned for...the value of life."

Bishop Gower said he thinks the Christian religion has been a "whipping boy" but "I think the tide is turning." Even in university circles there was a growing understanding of the church.

The primate said he expects it will be at least 10 years before union of Anglicans with the United Church of Canada becomes a reality.

He said there have been misgivings in his church about union and that there is the possibility that some Anglicans will want to join the Roman Catholic Church rather than worship under a union church.

The union question is expected to be the subject of lively debate at the synod sessions starting formally today at Saint Paul University, a Roman Catholic institution formed in 1965 that houses the theology and canon law faculties that formally were under the University of Ottawa.

As reported by Canadian Press and published in The Edmonton Journal, August 25, 1967:

Ottawa (CP) - Christian missionaries are still operating as in the heyday of the British Empire, the general synod of the Anglican Church of Canada was told Thursday.

Rt. Rev. R.S. Dean, executive officer of the Anglican communion on leave from the Canadian diocese of Cariboo, said the church must face the challenge of the modern world.

"The whole world and the whole church are in the grip of revolution and there is nothing that can hold it back," Bishop Dean said as the synod began an assessment of its missionary work.

He called for a complete reassessment of the church's missionary function and a greater attempt to meet the "fluid situation" in the world today.

The 10-day synod, which Wednesday adopted a new canon permitting re-marriage in the church of divorced persons, was warned not to preoccupy itself with "canons which box us in when God is unboxed."

The church should stress its worship because that is "what really holds the church together."

Bishop Dean was named executive officer two years ago for a five-year term. His headquarters are in London, England...

...Bishop Dean later called for abolition of the synod's upper house and criticized procedures he said were unrealistic.

"Let's live in the real world and not the Alice in Wonderland world," he urged the more than 250 synod delegates.

The synod has two houses. The upper house comprises the bishops and archbishops of the churches of 28 dioceses as well as retired bishops who are not engaged in secular work.

The sessions of the lower house--members are clergy and lay delegates--are open, but when the bishops meet alone, their deliberations are closed.

The union between the Anglican and United churches never did come about, despite a serious effort to accomplish it in the late 1960s-early '70s. It hardly matters; the vestments and titles may be slightly different, but the apostasy is about the same.

The young people whom Archbishop Clark praises for their seriousness are now the aging Baby Boomers. As boomer Michael Medved said, it was the first generation that had to find a reason to go to work. The things that Archbishop Clark said about the Baby Boomers are the same things that are being said in "evangelical" churches about the Millennials today.

It's an indication of how times have changed that one of the steps the Anglican Church of Canada took in 1967 to keep up with the times was to allow divorced people to get remarried in the church. Since then, the Anglican and other mainline churches have gone in a continuous downward direction: allowing divorced and remarried men to become leaders; putting women in positions of leadership; opening fellowship to non-practicing, and then practicing sodomites and lesbians, and those of the latest alphabet perversion; putting such perverts in positions of leadership; and recognizing and then performing "marriages" of such perverts. Thus do the mainline "Protestant" churches keep up with the modern world.

"Evangelical" denominations such as the Christian & Missionary Alliance are a few decades behind the mainline churches, but they're heading in the same direction, and if they're heading in the same direction, they're going to end up in the same place.

At the same time the Anglican Church of Canada general synod was taking place in Ottawa, a Roman Catholic congress on theological renewal was being held in Toronto . As reported by Canadian Press and published in The Edmonton Journal, August 22, 1967:

Toronto (CP) - As societies and civilizations change and develop, problems of living as Christians also change and develop, a Roman Catholic expert on moral theology said Monday.

He was speaking to delegates to an international conference on renewal of the church.

Enda McDonagh, 37, professor of moral theology at St. Patrick's College in Maynooth, Ireland said:

"Today the problems and possibilities of common worship with other Christians, of mixed marriage, of living in various pluralist societies, of the bomb, of population and segregation and so on have replaced earlier and different problems. They pose new questions...and demand new answers in which the basic God-man and man-man relationship revealed in Christ is maintained."

The right answers must be based on the inherited wisdom of previous generations, yet be "new answers for new people with new problems."

"This is the task of the whole Christian community, to provide these answers by using all the resources of the community. Every member of the community has an obligation to contribute to arriving at these answers."

It is the task of the church, he suggested, "to provide a unifying service in the community, to articulate authoritatively and in some instances definitely the community understanding and pronounce it in genuine continuity with the historic."

Rev. Etienne Gilson, 83-year-old founder of the Pontifical Institute on Medieval Studies, told a congress conference that new proofs of the existence of God will continue to be discovered "as long as human understandings will spontaneously form in themselves, and realize as meaningful, that notion of a supreme being."

More than 2,000 invited delegates are participating in the congress, the centennial project of Canadain bishops. Another 3,000 persons are watching some of the proceedings on closed-circuit television in two halls.

Renewal of the Christian church--if renewal means "bringing things up to date"--can only be accomplished after a renewal in theology, Rev. Bernard Lonergan told the congress.

The 63-year-old Jesuit teacher from Toronto's Regis College said theology began to lose its touch in the 17th century when dogmatic theology emerged. It was a theology which emphasized the certainties of faith, and in which the search for an intelligent understanding of faith was minimized.

As reported by Canadian Press and published in The Edmonton Journal, August 25, 1967:

Toronto - A Canadian minister and a priest challenged a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church Thursday to open the church to public scrutiny.

The challenge came near the end of a congress on the theology of church renewal, which brought 44 of the world's leading theologians to Toronto for five days.

Earlier a woman philosopher from England, told the Congress that Roman Catholic Church handling of sexuality amounts to a set of rules and "a lot of slush about love and family life."

Franz Cardinal Koenig, 62-year-old Archbishop of Vienna and a church liberal, had said in the last speech heard by 2,000 invited delegates that the church must become "more transparent," that it must open itself to communication with its people and with the world.

Rev. A.C. Forrest, editor of the United Church Observer and member of a five-man panel which commented on the cardinal's address, said he was troubled by a reference to "transparency and partial transparency" and would like it explained.

Rev. Raymond Durocher of the Canadian Register, a Catholic newspaper, said: " The message of God was transparent on the cross at Calvary."

He asked why the church is not as fully transparent.

"That is not alone the task of the church," the cardinal replied. "It is the task of the journalist to probe and to make transparent."

It was on that note of questioning that the congress on the theology of renewal of the church ended after speakers from 15 countries had tried to fulfill its purpose of coping "with some of the serious problems of contemporary religious thinking" and to create in North Americans a greater interest in theology.

The congress, organized by the Institute for Medieval Studies, a Roman Catholic research organization at the University of Toronto, was the centennial project of the conference of Canadian bishops.

Earlier Thursday the discussion on the church's attitude to sex was led by Elizabeth Anscombe, a married Catholic laywoman and a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, England.

The church, when it talks of sexuality, says: "Outside marriage, sexual acts are excluded; within marriage, spouses may always uses their rights...over one another's bodies."

To make such a teaching "less negative, even heartless," the church talks of marriage as a sacrament and a vocation.

"We enter upon marriage to please ourselves, not as people entering upon a vocation."

It is possible that the church's teaching on contraception will remain unrevoked and unamended, said Miss Anscombe, wife of English philosopher Peter Geach.

"It would then become a dead letter like the teaching...on usury."

Rev. Bernard Haring, a German theologian based in Rome, said in a separate paper on the family that the fundamental problems of marriage change as the world situation changes.

"The canonically legal approach to the question of marital rights must be reconsidered in the light of the contemporary social background," he said.

There is a conviction in all structures of modern life that "life does not regulate itself; man has to do it, using all his insights, energies and skills." This is a consideration that must be made toward birth control, he said.