Serious Post on the UCCAN Church showing it Dropped the true Christ--ian thinking and Preaching in to bring in a New way of thinking and Preaching to please the New Age coming up--So Ditched Christ theology which is God centered ------and went to Pleasing People and entertaining the world's Society -----Worldly Centered
Read all this for yourselves ---just posted some of it ------
Arts & Culture
The United Church of Canada: What You Need to Know
April 23, 2018 |
Kevin Flatt
Fred C. Würtele [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
What kind of a church has an atheist pastor?
In today’s United Church, requiring ministers to believe in God is a controversial idea.
Formation
The United Church was formed in 1925 by the merger of two large Canadian denominations, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, as well as the much smaller Congregationalists. Although only two-thirds of the Presbyterians joined the union (the rest carried on as the Presbyterian Church in Canada), the United Church still began its life as the largest Protestant church in Canada.
The Early Decades
Nevertheless, in its early decades the United Church still presented a broadly evangelical face to the world. From the 1930s through the 1950s, it carried forward evangelical causes of the nineteenth century, such as mass revivalism campaigns.
A spirituality centred on “decisions for Christ” continued to be important to many church leaders, even those who no longer believed in the doctrines that had previously underpinned such phrases. As late as the 1950s, for instance, many official bodies and leaders endorsed Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns in Canada.
The Turbulent Sixties
Clearly, something had to give. Practices like mass evangelism made sense because they assumed a certain kind of theology—theology
United Church leaders had left behind. The events of the 1960s resolved that tension, decisively,
in favour of liberalism.
The Long Decline
From the standpoint of the Sixties, this all seemed like a plausible strategy: get rid of old thinking, embrace the world’s progressive causes, and you’ll remain relevant.
Stay stuck in your ways, and you’ll be left behind by a rapidly changing society.
Plausible, but wrong. In one of the great ironies of Christian history, churches that followed this strategy lost both members and influence, while churches that took the opposite tack gained both.
The strategy adopted by the United Church made that road much more difficult.
On one side, it drove out many members and their families with evangelical convictions—people who were often highly committed churchgoers, givers, and volunteers, the backbone of local congregations. They left for Baptist and Pentecostal and other evangelical churches, many of which are today peppered with ex-United Church members.
On the other side, in speaking to lukewarm or skeptical members, the church was left without a compelling answer to the question—increasingly pressing after 1960
—“why should I get my family out of bed to attend church every Sunday?” If the traditional core beliefs of Christianity were psychological metaphors at best and outright lies at worst, and if “the world” had the real answers, why go to church at all? The trickle of escaping evangelicals was thus joined by a large exodus of people who left church altogether.
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