By Gavin Taylor
Every Sunday morning, a quiet stretch of Bank Street comes alive.
The centre of activity is the Metropolitan Bible Church, a red-brick building at the corner of Gilmour Street that houses one of the fastest-growing congregations in the city.
Since a charismatic senior pastor was hired five years ago, attendance has more than doubled.
The church holds three services every Sunday, and its small parking lot can no longer accommodate the hundreds of people who come from as far as Orleans to hear Pastor Rick Reid preach.
“People are coming back to church again, because I think they sense an emptiness in their lives,” says Godfrey Thorogood, the youth pastor at the church.
A recent study suggests the growing popularity of churches like the Metropolitan may be reversing a long-term decline in church attendance in Canada.
The number of Canadians who regularly attend church has been falling steadily since the 1960s, but in a survey of 3,500 Canadians conducted in 2000, University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby found—to his surprise—that church attendance was increasing, particularly among teenagers.
Bibby has monitored religious trends in Canada every five years since the 1970s, and as recently as 1993 had predicted that the number of Canadians who attend mainline churches would drop by 50 per cent by 2015. He suggested at the time that organized religion was becoming increasingly irrelevant to Canadian society.
“Everyone, including myself, was buying into a secularized notion that we would be close to European levels of church attendance before long,” he says.
But the study showed that the percentage of teenagers who regularly attend church increased from 17 to 23 among mainline Protestants between 1984 and 2000, while 70 per cent of teenagers in evangelical families attend Sunday services every month.
“It looks like the pattern of decline has bottomed out,” Bibby says.
Others remain more skeptical, pointing to a Statistics Canada survey that suggests that the proportion of adult Canadians who attended church at least once a month fell from 41 per cent in 1988 to 34 per cent in 1998.
Christianity is also losing ground to other religions. The number of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus in Canada nearly doubled between 1981 and 1991, outstripping the growth of even the most successful Christian denominations.
Over two million immigrants have come to Canada since 1991, most of them from Asian and Middle Eastern countries where Christianity is a minority religion. University of Ottawa professor Peter Beyer, who studies patterns of religious activity among immigrants, says he expects 2001 census figures on religious affiliationwill show a considerable increase in the number of Canadians identifying with non-Christian religions. The data will be released this summer.
Immigrants tend to be more religious than native-born Canadians—the 1998 Statistics Canada survey showed that 43 per cent of immigrants attend religious services regularly.
“People become more religiously active as they migrate,” Beyer says.
“Religion gives them a sense of home.”
The tendency among native-born Canadians, on the other hand, has been one of increasing religious indifference. Many Christian mainline churches—established denominations such as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics, and the United Church—are still struggling to stay afloat.
St. Giles, a venerable Presbyterian church on Bank Street in the Glebe, is typical of many mainline congregations in Ottawa.In the 1950s and 1960s, services at St. Giles regularly drew over 500 people, but the number of church members has since declined to 177.
Most of the members of St. Giles are over the age of 65, and church leaders expect that the congregation will eventually be forced to merge with another Presbyterian church.
“We simply can’t afford the number of churches and the number of clergy we have right now with diminishing numbers of people attending services,” says Ian Victor, the minister at St. Giles.
National membership in the Presbyterian Church has fallen almost by half in the past generation, from 210,000 members in 1965 to the current total of 130,000.
The church suffered a net decline of 20,000 members in the 1990s alone.
Peter Coutts, a Presbyterian minister from Calgary who has studied the causes of the decline, says there has been a generational shift in religious attitudes over the past 40 years.
People have retained their religious beliefs. Recent polls show that more than 80 per cent of Canadians believe in God and more than two-thirds say they have spiritual needs — but Canadians born after the Second World War are less likely to express their belief through organized religion.
“Baby boomers have more of a consumer mentality toward religion,” Coutts says.
“Belonging doesn’t mean as much as it did for their parents. There’s a very high level of belief among Canadians that you don’t have to belong to a church to be a Christian.”
Religious leaders are struggling to find ways to reach out to Canadians who have strayed from the church. Some Presbyterian congregations are incorporating “contemporary” music — with electric guitars and synthesizers — into their services, following the lead of evangelical churches that have had greater success in attracting new members.
The Metropolitan Bible Church, like other evangelical denominations, owes much of its success to an enthusiastic, uplifting style of worship that appeals to people who didn’t necessarily grow up in the church.
The church band has a drum kit, electric guitars and a synthesizer. The pastor delivers his sermons with the aid of a Power Point presentation.
“He talks about things that people can use in their day-to-day lives,” Thorogood says.
To stem the tide of declining memberships, churches have become increasingly creative in serving new and neglected populations.
Virtually every church is trying to bolster membership by reaching out to teenagers and young adults.
This summer, the Roman Catholic Church — an ancient and conservative institution — drew hundreds of thousands of teens to Canada for World Youth Day, and has launched several programs to stay relevant to young people in Ottawa.
Meanwhile, the Protestant clergy is serving unlikely flocks, from bikers to prisoners.
Few Christians deny that their faith is at a crossroads, and many say they welcome the change.
“The most creative time in the history of the people of Israel was the time of exile,” says Victor.