For over three decades Reginald Bibby has been monitoring the religious and spiritual pulse of Canadians as a demographer and statistician. He has always maintained a distance, befitting his profession as a social scientist, from his data. But his latest book, Restless Churches: How Canada's Churches Can Contribute to the Emerging Religious Renaissance is more personal. Bibby speaks directly to churches, arguing they can win back their lost members, if they want to.
The Record's managing editor Andrew Faiz met with Reg Bibby, along with Jim Czegledi, Associate Secretary of Worship and Evangelism, for the Presbyterian Church in Canada, last November.
Andrew Faiz: According to the numbers in your book, there are 409,000 Canadians who claim to be Presbyterians. But, our rolls say there are 147,000 active Presbyterians. Where do we get the names and addresses of the missing quarter-million?
Reg Bibby: All groups have to find their affiliates. Our data and Gallup data shows that those people may not be on your lists but they do show up now and then. So, churches have to start cataloguing those people when they do show up.
There is the demand for rites of passage, when those people want certain things done, be it marriage or baptism, funerals; they're going to surface as well for those types of things.
AF: The book struck me as a marketing primer, there's brand identification, there's a lot of people who identify with the brand.
RB: Remember this is your metaphor not mine –
AF: Yes, this is my metaphor not yours –
RB: Yeah, you're talking market segmentation and all that –
AF: But, at the heart of marketing is the product and there are suggestions throughout the book that people have not been buying the product or are interested in the product. Or the product is – the service, the ministry – out of touch.
RB: When people talk about spirituality they're just all over the map – they classify – one in two instances they're talking about God, they're talking about prayer, in the Christian tradition, they're talking about the person of Jesus. Another 50% are expressing spirituality in a way that is pretty foreign to some people.
They're talking about being at peace with themselves and the universe – they're just very subjective and pretty abstract things which are hard to get a handle on – very subjective.
When you think of Presbyterians and the way you look at spirituality and you think hey this is a great opportunity for us, well, you got to take another look at what 50% are saying because that is really different stuff. I think the point of commonality might only be the word – spirituality.
Jim Czegledi: What I appreciated in the book, and Reg I thank you for pointing this out, is the importance of worthwhile ministry. Congregations that really do have worthwhile ministry, if they are answering the questions and meeting the needs of people, then people will work through their affiliate groups, their spheres of influence, friends, relatives, neighbours and these auras develop about a church.
RB: I have a sister in Edmonton who was not involved in church for a long time. But she starts out because she wants her children to be involved, she wants something good for her boys, some good values, and it's a telling thing that not only have they started going, but they have become envelope users in a relatively short time. The church has conveyed to them, 'hey we want to minister to you and we would like you to share with us'. Now she does a rotation in the nursery. And as her kids have got older the church thinks she has a personal gift of good skills in respect to kids.
JC: And in our church – and I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here – we'd get her to join a committee, we'd get her to join a system as opposed to perhaps joining in the ministry, and that's what we have to overcome, because these people want to contribute to the mission of the church – and if the church doesn't have a clear mission, they figure it out.
RB: But I also think of the simple biblical summation, going back to the idea of ministry, which is 'feed my sheep'. You might find them but you better be able to feed them too. Can we with integrity as Presbyterians respond to the needs that people specifically have? A consistent finding when we ask people why they bother with things like church life they stress the fact that as they look at factors that contribute to their well being. Local congregational involvement is very important to them. People say, 'I want to get a little help in respect to personal, spiritual and relational areas.'
AF: Relational?
RB: Well the relationships and the support they're getting beyond the service – the spiritual dimension and general support from church life.
JC: When it comes to rites of passage – more or less our experience is that they go and they don't come back – that's our challenge. And if there's a word to the Presbyterian Church that needs to be said, it's that we really need to expand our idea of Christian hospitality beyond people who are just like us. We have to think beyond that otherwise this is just a homogenous principle of church growth. We need to expand beyond groups who are just like us.
RB: Churches have to start thinking ahead. I have a friend who has a large congregation in BC. The congregation is mostly elderly and so they have lots of programs for the elderly. I asked him why they didn't have any child or youth programs. He said, and this was almost like a soliloquy, 'well we had a youth minister once and, yeah, I guess we had about 17 kids. But we decided we couldn't afford her and we had to let her go. And, the kids disappeared as well.' Or, give you another example, according to Statscan there are about 50,000 people in Markham, Ont., who identify themselves as United. But, there is no United church in that town. So, those affiliates have no place to go. In each of these examples we see churches failing to reach out to their own.
JC: We find them through worthwhile ministry.
RB: And make sure the relational is there also.
JC: Yes, then people become naturally evangelical, back to what I call healthy Christian communities, healthy attractions, for example, having a positive youth ministry, if congregations can become like that then they become evangelizing agent in and of themselves, by the nature of their health and their Christian community.
AF: Is liturgy an issue? Catholicism or Anglicanism, people of liturgy versus people of the word, there seems to be a fairly easy level of transference for people of the word, but they won't go over to the liturgists and the liturgists will never go to word, because its too soft. Or, I should say, it is highly unlikely.
RB: I think that's a critical point. I grew up in conservative protestant circles – and the naivety there, they don't know liturgy and they don't know sacramental stuff and the only time they have what they call communion is once a month, and I can tell you from experience, being an un-ordained minister in those circles, you know how that's greeted, 'oh darn, forgot its communion, that's gonna be a long service'.
AF: Yeah, all the way to 55 minutes.
JC: Trust me, that's not so different with Presbyterians.
RB: How often do Presbyterians have communion?
AF: Once a month.
JC: Often only four or five times a year – and I'm wondering if the antecedent here is our emphasis on Calvinism where the emphasis was on preaching the word.
RB: So you even do it less than Baptists?
JC: It's contextual, once a month would be the most, I would guess, the most in a Presbyterian church and I'm guessing the same for United.
RB: Through my wife I've been going to a Catholic church – and I sometimes joke that the congregants there have come for their eucharist fix, you know, because I constantly find people who look like, literally, they've tumbled out from the party last night, there's young people there, looking a little bedraggled, and they're there for communion. Another example was two aboriginals one morning who were a little pie-eyed and the church didn't know what to do with them – get this, in that church in order to get to the bathroom you have to go through the nursery – so, where did they put those two guys that morning? They put them in the nursery.
One of the obvious question for Presbyterians, and I'm sure you're doing this yourself – is trying to figure out what makes you distinct – if we go back to the market notion, you know, what's unique about your company – what do you have to bring? Presbyterians are kind of in a funny zone, kind of Lutherans you know, Lutherans are probably more ethnically, socially, defined. But if I venture to poll people and say what do you think of Presbyterians, they wouldn't be mad at you, they'd say United, oh yeah, those are the people who champion the rights of homosexuals, and Catholics they'd see a sacramental thing, but Presbyterians, it'd be…
AF: We're everything to everybody and hence nothing to anybody…
JC: Yeah.
RB: What's the plus?
JC: Middle of the road orthodoxy – our unique voice is our biblical theological reformed orthodoxy – that's our voice – but I go on to push that a little further, Reg, given the milieu in Canadian culture right now, what's the unique Christian voice? And my point is that the church really needs to reclaim this and this is the salvation model for us and Christ. And the church really needs to identify what this really means to people and articulate this much more, because people really just aren't hearing the message. And they can't see the difference between churches and other organizations.
