Witnessing the Message

Rev. Dr. Rick Fee, general secretary of the Life and Mission Agency of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, spoke with the Record’s summer intern, Helen Pye, about the changing nature of the church in the city. This is an excerpt of the interview in Fee’s own words.

We’ve gone beyond the day where we build a building and people will come. Church buildings don’t necessarily attract and increasingly I find congregations are saying it’s when we go out of the building that we are church. You only have to go to a patio for lunch in Toronto to recognize there’s a whole new world out there in an urban setting in Canada. Go to a sports arena on Sunday morning at 11 o’clock, that’s where people are.

There is a minister here in Toronto who tried a Friday evening in a pub and called it Theology on Tap. The local pub owner offered an upstairs room and the minister invited anyone to come and bring their friends. They’d sit around and have a glass of beer but they also had topics they’d talk about. To me that is definitely where we start in today’s urban society. That’s where people are. You can have a little structure to start a discussion which also includes further conversations on social or personal issues.
Some of those people might come into the institutional church on a Sunday morning, and maybe they won’t, but it’s our witness to our message out in society that we are primarily about. To make people think theologically. Jesus met people in the temple and the synagogue on a few occasions, but most of the time he taught on hillsides or at weddings, out in society. So I think that’s a challenge to us today.
It’s going to be a challenge for us in the future. Many ministers are saying to us that they would like to have a ministry without walls, a ministry in the community, even house churches.

I think the Flemingdon Gateway Mission is a great example of a strong ministry—it’s Christian, it’s with the whole community, and it’s different. Increasingly, we see this is what we want to be doing with our resources and as a witness out there in our society.

Success may not be in increased numbers of people or even in increased revenue; and that’s the challenge because we’ve always thought a church has been successful if it balances the books at the end of the year. But now people are looking and saying, as Christians we should be taking our own resources and using them in society.

Like the Out of the Cold program. The resources of the church and individuals are used to cook food and make meals. But how do you rate the success of that? I guess the number of meals served or the people given a place to sleep; but does that increase the number of people coming to church? Doubtful. Does that relate to people’s life being changed? Possibly. Jesus never asked us to balance the books or to come up with the final annual report that says what great things have been done. The call to be faithful, I think, is very important. And if we judge ourselves to have been faithful in doing what we see as Christian ministry then I think it goes a long way to declaring the success of a Christian endeavour and a Christian community.

I think there are enough resources available. The Presbyterian Church has been around for many years. There are funds available and many of them have been designated. We have funds that are to be used for training a minister who will be working in such and such an area or working at a particular ministry. We have these funds and we are ensuring they are well known, we’re putting them on the website so people will know about them and they will know they can apply to use them. People left this money to be used for the Christian gospel; let’s get it out there and then who knows what the result may be.

I think many times in the past we felt we had to build up the institution and keep these funds close to us and be gatekeepers, but today we recognize no, our responsibility as gatekeepers is to make sure resources are available—financial and human. I think we should encourage younger people, anybody actually, to make themselves available and if someone says they have a gift or a talent, we should find the resources to get those people out there with proper endorsement and education and doing what we believe Christians should be doing.

In the Presbyterian Church, with our egalitarian system, we don’t have a top down hierarchy. So if we saw something had potential we would want to stimulate and encourage people to look at options. We could assist by having a speaker come to your presbytery to keep the discussion going. Rather than just relying on a maintenance mode of keeping the church going I think our role is to infuse ideas and to stimulate discussion at the presbytery level. We’re always prepared to offer our own comments to stimulate that but we don’t want to be seen as the national office coming in and declaring what you should do. That doesn’t work in our system but to foster a discussion, yes that is what we should be doing.