I started duck hunting when I was about 14 years old. I hunted ducks and geese every spare moment I had, and some moments that I didn’t have, until to everyone’s surprise I finished high school and went to college.

Last autumn found Davin and me leaving home before daylight to travel up to the headwaters of Knife Creek on day three of our annual father-son deer hunt.

It was an easy afternoon’s trip on a river that Gerald and I had known virtually all of our lives.

The New Testament church existed on the margins of society, often functioning underground. It was a counterculture community. In that sense, it was a prophetic community.

Some would say that the Church is dying out and failing in the 21st century, at least in the Canadian context. But is something else happening besides failure?

Some question if the Christian church in the West is dying out in this century. In the Canadian context, across denominations, the church appears to be shrinking in almost every way—in our small Presbytery of Kamloops alone, two out of 10 congregations closed in 2015.

I get it; and I get it most profoundly on my knees in a canoe with a paddle in my hands, there being little room for much else that works in a canoe on a wilderness river or lake.

What makes the statue of David Thompson even more unique is that standing beside him is a statue of his wife, Charlotte Small. Of all the statuary of the famous early indigenous chiefs, white explorers and other founders of Canada, apparently there is only one that includes the spouse.

“So why do you suppose we don’t see the northern lights like we used to?”
Linda was gazing out the large window from our darkened bedroom as she spoke.

A wandering Arminian was my grandfather (with apologies to Deuteronomy 26:5). He was a devout Methodist and was well on his way to becoming an […]

“I wonder why we don’t see that little hawk feeding at our birdfeeders anymore?” Linda was standing at the kitchen window and pondering out loud.

“Shhhhh. Don’t wake up Addy, but come and see. The Otter People are on our dock.”

The blur going past us to the boatshed down by the lake was our grandson, Jacob. In about 30 seconds Jacob was on the end of the dock.

The ice is out and the ospreys are in. They are my favourite birds, fishermen like me.

It appears as though many people in countries like Canada have deemed the church, with its continuing Christendom focus on all things religious and institutional, to be irrelevant while at the same time expressing more interest in the very things the New Testament declares the church ought to be about: faith, spirituality and participating in a unique egalitarian community.

Walking on ice has always freaked me out just a little. Every year at freeze-up in November I look out at the new ice on Lac La Hache and feel torn between the temptation to venture out on it and the terror of what could happen if I did.