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Our 2009 graduates of Knox College; The Presbyterian College, Montreal; Vancouver School of Theology.

They are found on nearly every winding back road in this country, nestled amid hay fields and headstones: the white clapboard country church. With historic downtown churches throwing open their doors and modern churches thriving in the suburbs, the small white country church could be a quaint footnote in the story about church survival – until you meet the members of St. Andrew's, Riverview, Nova Scotia.

Rev. Dr. DeCourcey H. Rayner was a legendary fellow. A minister, he was also editor of the Record, and moderator of the 103rd general assembly. It was in his capacity as editor I know him best: I occasionally pick up issues he produced, from the Sixties, and read them cover-to-cover. He had a strong balance between tradition and the modern, between being a general interest religion magazine and a denominational newsletter. Some of those stories are as fresh as this morning's headlines.

Church Shopping A journey to her Presbyterian self. by Jennifer Higgs Prezbitíeri:en In search of a definition. by Erin Woods

I was supposed to be at a conference in April — Call Sabbath a Delight: Solace, Sanctuary and Space for the Soul — but, it was cancelled for insufficient registrations. In following up, the planning committee heard one thing consistently: “We're just too busy”.

May 17, 2060: White lines snake from my head to the little portable device slipped into my pocket. I'm wearing the new technological device that inputs electromagnetic impulses into my brain, stimulating my temporal lobe. As the waves build in intensity, I feel a calm come over me. It's a spiritual experience, without the bother of praying for hours. I sense a presence beside me.

Graduates from Knox College, Presbyterian College, Vancouver School of Theology

I've done this before, so you'd think it would be easier this time around.

It is easy to blame author Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which has sold more than 61 million copies worldwide in 45 languages and is now the eighth-best-selling book of all time, for sparking a renewed interest in the Gnostic gospels and related texts. Instead, the novel's success can be seen as merely a symptom of a larger phenomenon, which seeks to find an alternative history of Christianity. Obscure academics and many populist authors have been pecking away at the authenticity of Christianity's roots for a very long time. Elaine Pagels has been writing about Gnostic texts for decades, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail laid out more than two decades ago much the same landscape that Dan Brown trod. (In fact, that book's authors sued Brown recently for fictionalizing their unsubstantiated facts.) Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ stated much of the same 55 years ago. The modern resurgence of Gnosticism and enduring questions about the identity of Jesus and the origins of Christianity all helped fuel the sales of Brown's novel.

The Year Of Sabbath Preparation

Tom Harpur's attempt in The Pagan Christ to disprove Jesus' earthly existence is as futile as that of his many predecessors. These go back to Docetism, a heresy hinted at in 1 John 4 and 2 John 7, developed by second-century Gnostics to the point where Christ's earthly appearance was an illusion, likewise his death, being replaced on the cross by Judas or Simon of Cyrene.

The Lord would not have said “My Father who is in Heaven” unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply “My […]

“Sabbath is a time of realizing that we do not run the world. It is a time to recover the rhythms of Grace, as we trust in God the Creator. It is a time to realize our responsibilities to the poor and the lost as we look around us. We recommend a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

Christian bookstores in the Montreal region report that while the sales of Da Vinci-related books geared to believers have been good, these have been dwarfed by the much brisker sales of the smaller booklets and evangelistic tracts that were obviously being distributed to the public at large. Rather than dealing with the background debates and the Gnostic controversies, both the books and the tracts tend to become academic listings of historical errors in a book that the world at large and the secular media have already understood to be intended as fiction. The church is responding to questions that nobody seems to be asking.