Twenty-seven per cent of Canadians live in communities of less than 10,000 people. Yet 54 per cent of Presbyterian congregations are found in such places, housing 34 per cent of professing Presbyterians. With nearly 520 churches in small towns and isolated communities, rural churches with low worship attendance are struggling to keep their doors open.
The Record‘s staff reporter Connie Purvis grew up in small Ontario towns. She presents three profiles of the typical Presbyterian Church and how they are dealing with the challenges of being and doing church.
Clustering — Ministers and Laity Working Together
“St. Paul’s Church has for almost half a century occupied a prominent place in the religious life of not only Winchester and immediate vicinity, but throughout the whole surrounding district. In fact many charges, healthy and strong today, owe their birth to the zeal and missionary spirit of the men who occupied the pulpit of this church.” — Historian J. Smyth Carter, 1905
A century later, St. Paul’s, Winchester, Ont., draws about 25 people each Sunday. It is one of three charges served by a retired minister acting as interim moderator; each is less than 15 kilometres apart. The pews are dotted with empty seats and crowned with grey hair. After a traumatic experience with a former minister, which fractured the congregation, Winchester began to think of a new sort of ministry.
The idea was clustering — an idea reminiscent of pioneer days when local lay people were the driving force behind regular worship, and itinerant preachers might ride into town every few weeks. In a modern cluster ministry, a team of ministers serves several churches, with many of the pastoral duties left to lay members of each congregation.
The idea sprouted among the sessions of five churches in the area, and eventually spread to eight. Representatives from all sessions met together, hashing out a rough plan that each took back to present to their own congregations.
But in most churches, the idea was voted down.
“I’m not convinced we’re ready to move forward,” says Rev. Geoffrey Howard, minister at Knox, Iroquois and St. Andrew’s and St. James, Cardinal. “The motivating factor is financial necessity not ministry, and I think it’s doomed to fail because of that. But it might be a step in the process. I think church with lay leadership is a fantastic model, but it needs people to share the vision.”
“Realistically, this isn’t going to happen in my lifetime,” says elder Jan Clapp a little wistfully. She was instrumental in St. Paul’s charge for clustering. “If you’re really honest, the people in these churches are happy with the way things are. They’re not worried about 10 years down the road. And sometimes I wonder — why do I care about 10 years down the road? Why should I rock the boat? But I know that if we don’t, in 10 years there won’t be a boat.”
After 38 years in Winchester (population 2,500) Clapp and her husband, Tom are still the new folks, who bought the Monroe farm and now live in the Dixon house. The town is surrounded by patchwork fields and farming history. “We have caring, good, generous people in the community. I just don’t think we’re seeing the right thing with our church. It needs to be upbeat and relevant. I think our times are very different right now and I maintain that we’d bring more people to Christ and through our doors if we talk about the God stuff that happens in our daily lives. And as Presbyterians we don’t talk enough about the God stuff.”
The trio has considered forming a three-point charge, another common solution when a church struggles to support a full-time minister. But Clapp says St. Paul’s wants to keep its independence.
Lay Minister — Taking Care of Our Own
In her northern Ontario home, Deb Stenabaugh waits for God to speak. The 53-year-old elder, artist, mother, and former educator lives in Kapuskasing, about three hours north of Timmins.
She rose this morning at five a.m. to spend time with God. By nine, she will have donned her coat and headed to the office at St. John’s. After lunch she may visit with residents of the local nursing home, or begin the arduous task of preparing her sermon for the coming Sunday. Although her position is officially one-third time, she admits she usually works more than 20 hours each week.
St. John’s is one of about a dozen churches in town, drawing 15 or so people each Sunday. With total yearly revenue of just over $35,000, the congregation can’t afford a full-time minister and struggles with the expenses required to keep up their sanctuary. The story is the same for most of the churches in town.
Although pained at the thought of giving up their building, Stenabaugh says the majority of them don’t want to keep putting money into it. With plenty of other churches around, shared buildings may be a viable plan for the future, replacing the cost of heating bills and repair work with a more modest rental fee.
“It’s a real process of dying for new life to come,” she says. “And it’s waiting for guidance from our leaders and from God.”
That leadership includes Stenabaugh. Three years ago, amidst a lot of prayer, she “stepped out in faith” and became her church’s lay minister. The mother of two was familiar with her church’s context. She had watched local industries deteriorate or close, and bore witness to the gradual exodus of young people from the town. She helped her own children move to university, reconciled to the fact that they would find jobs elsewhere and never move back again. And then she was downsized out of her own job teaching literacy to mentally and physically challenged children. It was a difficult time for her, but she persevered.
She has no formal theological education beyond a lay missionary course provided by the national church and a handful of workshops run by synod staff. When she began, an ordained regional minister served four of the tiny presbytery’s six charges, presiding at one service each month and dealing with meetings, weddings, baptisms and communion services. But that position has been vacant for two years, and Stenabaugh has taken over most of those pastoral duties for her congregation.
“I’m finding it a real challenge to come to the point of saying, ‘okay, how are we going to still grow in lay ministry?'” she says. “We’re still caught in the cycle of thinking, if we don’t grow we’ll never be able to attract a minister, and if we don’t have a minister we won’t grow.
“We still all believe the minister is a leader; a called person of God to lead the people, and needed to fall back on their knowledge and community work and interconnectedness with the community. People still look for a minister. Some people’s ideas have been changing in these past three years. But we still need to learn to evangelize and reach out. Lay ministry [currently] means taking care of our own; not reaching out.”
Although the largest of the churches recently called an ordained minister, the others in the four-point regional ministry are still looking for another minister to lead them into the future — perhaps toward shared ministries or through the painful process of closing their churches.
“We’re waiting for God to open a door and praying we’ll be ready to walk through it,” she says. “And then I guess we’ll see what things look like on the other side.”
Amalgamation — Paying the Price for the Future
It began with three churches, all about four kilometres apart — a modest walk for the Scottish settlers who founded them. St. Paul’s was built in the hamlet of Duntroon. West Nottawasaga was nestled among country fields. And Nottawa stood in its namesake village. They were just three of the Presbyterian churches that peppered the landscape south of Nottawasaga Bay, Ont.
But as time wore on, the congregations shrank, financial support dwindled, and they looked to each other for help. In 1894, the three joined together to create a single pastoral charge served by one minister. In 1972 they began worshipping together each Sunday, rotating the services between the three buildings. Within a few years the choir was run jointly, as were most new ministries. But the congregations remained separate, with their own sessions and boards.
Rev. Neil Mathers was called to the Duntroon Pastoral Charge in the summer of 1985, and soon found himself caught between members crying for change and others preparing to vote against it. By the next year, the congregations had begun a three-year process that would lead them through seemingly endless prayer, arguments and discussions, to a decision to close all three buildings and build a new church: Emmanuel.
“In the three congregations, 100 per cent, 93 per cent and 84 per cent voted yes to amalgamation,” Mathers says. “That’s about as unanimous as Presbyterians get.” He notes the churches lost about 10 or 15 per cent of their members in the process.
“I don’t think you can go into a process of major change like this and not lose people. But the question is, would all three congregations still be around if we hadn’t? We have to be willing to pay the price, but pay it for the future, not for the past.”
A central location was chosen in the town of Nottawa, just south of Collingwood. The new building opened in 1989, drawing attention from the local press and community. The sanctuary includes movable seats to make the space flexible — an aspect that was important, Mathers notes, “because buildings control you once they’re built.”
Two decades later, Mathers still ministers at Emmanuel and a modest congregation fills the pews each week. Mathers says people are increasingly aware of the need to reach younger families. But that is a difficult task, he says. “They come when they have a need and when that need is met, they’re gone.” As finances tightened, the congregation decided not to renew its contract with a full-time youth pastor.
But Mathers believes the church is up to the challenges ahead. “It’s about constantly renewing. And because we’ve come from a period of change, that’s almost embedded in the face of the congregation.”
