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A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada
"As Canadian as the maple leaf" is how one observer summed up the United Church of Canada after its founding in 1925. But was this Canadian-made church flawed in its design, as critics have charged? A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores this question by weaving together the history of the United Church with a provocative analysis of religion and cultural change.
464 pages, Paperback
First published December 9, 2013
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May 25, 2022
The United Church of Canada’s (UCC) formation was both cause for celebration and chastisement. Proponents saw it as a “made in Canada” institution that would guide the nation and muster people to establish the Kingdom of God on earth while critics derided its modernist and vague theology (xvii-xix). Phyllis D. Airhart characterizes the leaders of the UCC as “pragmatic progressives whose liberal evangelical theology held that personal faith had social implications” (xix). A continuing characteristic of the UCC was the belief that true Christians expressed their faith through social reform and transformation.
The United Church was not the first church worldwide to seek union “but such a proposition had never actually been consummated elsewhere on such a large scale” (3-4). The UCC’s ambitions to become the national (but not state-controlled) church would provide Canada with a unifying institution that could claim members from coast-to-coast as Confederation itself had not evoked “national feeling” during Canada’s early days (5-7). Additionally, Canada was still strongly divided between provinces and regions; save for ardently Catholic Quebec, the UCC could inculcate an Anglo-Saxon imperial identity with North American uniqueness that drew in British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario and the Maritimes and hopefully counter Quebec’s influence (7). Thus, from its early days, the UCC sought to assimilate new immigrants, many of whom were from Eastern and Southern Europe, to Anglo-Saxon culture (11-12). The formation of the UCC was not without controversy as the new church was accused of downplaying doctrine while privileging efficiency (21). One key target for the UCC’s detractors was the Basis of Union (1925) which was a series of 20 short statements rather than thorough, systematized doctrinal positions. Although there were only 20 articles in the Basis of Union, this series of statements appears rather similar to the Anglican Church’s 39 Articles. Due to the articles’ brevity, leeway is given for interpretation; just as the Calvinist Puritans and Laudian Anglicans jointly held to the 39 Articles, so too were the Calvinist Presbyterians and Arminian Methodists (who formed the vast majority of the UCC, although Congregationalists were also included) able to find common adherence due to the Basis of Union’s vagueness.
The early years of the UCC were marked by conflict and a drawn-out public relations battle between those more conservative Presbyterians who had opted to maintain separate from church union and the UCC. The formation of the UCC itself had been delayed due to internal debate amongst the Presbyterians and the First World War (39-43). The conservative Presbyterians, who enjoyed the support of J. Gresham Machen and the fundamentalist Baptist T.T. Shields, accused the UCC of theological modernism and claimed that the Presbyterians and Methodists did not have enough in common to make union feasible (47-51). Machen himself would go so far as to send American Presbyterian clergy to Canada to minister to continuing Presbyterian congregations who had lost their ministers due to union (51). Strife was also internal as the Methodists and Presbyterians competed for spiritual leadership in the UCC; in general, the Presbyterians adopted a tone of superiority (48-49). The dispute between the UCC and the Presbyterians was eventually settled, with Canada’s West widely supportive of church union (61-63). This is understandable as one of the main aims of church union was to provide better pastoral care and share resources to minister to far-flung communities. Canada’s East had been settled far earlier than the West and Western settlers may have thought the UCC could provide them with better spiritual care than if the denominations remained separate.
The UCC developed an effective centralized bureaucracy, establishing various boards that served such functions as education, women’s ministry and missions (74). Although women far outnumbered men in the life of the church, the UCC eagerly poured resources into attracting men to clubs and organizations including As One That Serves which offered leadership training (76). The UCC participated in the 1928 Jerusalem missionary conference, which also allowed it to establish itself in international ecumenism (80-82). The conference encouraged participants not only to think of unevangelized lands but also to focus on “unevangelized areas of life” (82). This would tie into the UCC’s mission of “Christianizing the social order” and the church’s dedication to the social gospel in Canada (84). As Airhart explains, “social service thus had a dual purpose: ‘to enable others to discover the personal fulfillment of authentic human relationships and to enable oneself to find a personal center of meaning.’” (104).
Though the UCC’s quest to further the Kingdom of God through the social gospel is commendable, at the same time the Canadian state was starting to encroach upon those areas of life that the UCC had set out to minister to by expanding the social services it offered (87-88). This also caused tension between the UCC and the state; the UCC was stridently supportive of prohibition but the government used liquor sales to fund the services it provided (88). The UCC’s attempt to play a pivotal role in social life was met with ire by some, who thought the UCC was too close to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (this is understandable as many of the CCF’s leaders, such as J.S. Woodsworth and William Irvine served as ministers, 89-90).
Throughout its existence, the UCC struggled with its identity. It strove to be inclusive, evidenced by its desire to be embraced by all Canadians (though it wanted ethnic minorities to adopt Anglo-Saxon sensibilities), but at the same time there was internal debate within the UCC as to what theological factions should be accepted in the church. George C. Pidgeon, the UCC’s first Moderator and one of the more conservative leaders of the UCC hoped the UCC would be a “broad tent” that would be open even to conservative premillenialists (103-04). The UCC also had to contend with the transatlantic migration of neo-orthodox theology which sharply critiqued the optimistic liberal evangelical theology that had reigned in the UCC and theological fads such as process theology (111-12). The UCC would be affected by neo-orthodoxy, witnessed in the (controversial) Barthian influence in the 1940 Statement of Faith which also mitigated the concept of the Kingdom of God (121).
Although the UCC considered itself evangelical, it spurned traditional evangelical practices such as revival meetings, opting instead to encourage regular worship services (107). Worship became a unifier thanks in large part to a new hymn book but it further inculcated in the UCC a Presbyterian influence and the Methodist propensity towards emotional expression was discouraged (108-110). The emergence of scientific secularism and humanism confronted the UCC as external threats as these paradigms competed with religion to provide human beings with understandings of the world (113). Scientific discoveries shook Canadians’ confidence in religion as a source for truth (119). It seems that the UCC was thus constantly scrambling to provide a suitable framework for understanding both the Christian faith and God’s place in the world. The UCC rejected fundamentalism, disputing the notion that the Bible was inerrant and championing modernism while at the same time trying to incorporate the insights of new theological systems such as neo-orthodoxy into its vaguely liberal-evangelical theology. This, coupled with an old guard of Methodists and Presbyterians who may have still favoured their previous denominational tradition and Canada’s geographical vastness may have made it hard to instill uniform doctrine. The UCC’s Moderator and church bureaucracy may have wanted to implant a particular doctrinal position but at the same time the UCC prided itself on its openness; thus, it makes sense that there would be theological chaos amongst its ministers and laity because it was in the UCC’s nature to discourage strict conformity.
The UCC struggled in post-World War II Canada. During the war the UCC was divided on wartime involvement, though the conflict did allow the church to provide the social services it was eager to offer, such as chaplains for soldiers on the front and care for those at home, including for Japanese-Canadians who were interned (128-29, 143-44). After the war, Canada’s culture changed as women began entering the workforce and people gravitated towards psychology and therapy for self-understanding and self-actualization (129-30). Like the government taking over social services from the church, the more secularized therapeutic turn would also chip away at the services the churches could offer Canadians. No longer did Canadians need to seek out a priest or pastor to understand themselves; instead, they could lie on a couch in their psychiatrist’s office. A deluge of immigration after World War II radically altered Canada’s culture. The UCC would be unsuccessful in attracting the thousands of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants who arrived and they would also have to compete with more conservative denominations (139-141). As the fires of World War II faded to embers and the Cold War set in, liberal democracy, not Christianity, was viewed as the source of universal values (153).
Though the UCC could not fill its pews with new immigrants, overall Canada experienced a post-war resurgence in religion as 70% of Protestants and 80% of Roman Catholics attended church at least once a month, although these numbers are deceiving as only 1/5 claimed that church teachings affected how they lived (154). The UCC was increasingly concerned that it was becoming irrelevant and taking on the nature of a social club (155). This lament is understandable; the UCC did not aggressively evangelize and other institutions, namely the state, the clinic and the academy were taking roles that churches had previously wielded. An emerging and encroaching popular culture would also lure Canadians away from churches to recreational activities and jazz halls (158-59).
J.R. Mutchmor, UCC Moderator from 1962-64, was already guiding the UCC during the 1940s-50s. Unlike many of his colleagues, he strongly advocated for mass evangelistic meetings such as the Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, a two-year program which launched in 1945 and the evangelistic campaign of Charles Templeton, although the UCC was concerned about Billy Graham’s forays north into Canada (161-165). As Airhart writes, “The United Church’s identity as an ‘evangelical’ church was doomed once support for Billy Graham’s crusades became a theological litmus test for authenticity” (185). Mutchmor also disapproved of women entering the workforce, opining that they should remain in the domestic sphere and raise their children (161). The 1960s would also bear witness to the development and release of the “New Curriculum,” a comprehensive new education program that sought to apply the Bible to a contemporary context (171). The New Curriculum would have an enormous effect on the UCC but by the time it was released it was already outdated, having been soaked in the theological fads and issues of the 1940s and 1950s (171). Thus, this curriculum, while steering the UCC even more to the left, also seemed irrelevant to the social chaos of the 1960s.
This period would also drastically fracture the family. The UCC moved away from conceiving of the family as an institution towards family relationships. The previous understanding of children, rather than sexual satisfaction, as the end of marriage and its purpose gave way as new, effective methods of birth control allowed for an increase in sexual intercourse without the “risk” of pregnancy (180-81). The UCC did not view procreation as the sole purpose of marriage as it noted the value of companionship that marriage provided, but the growing affirmation of sexual satisfaction rather than children altered how the church understood marriage and sexuality (181). This shift helps explain the UCC’s liberalized views on homosexuality as well since companionship can be between two members of the same sex whereas (natural) procreation requires one man and one woman. If companionship and sexual fulfillment are the prime purposes of marriage, then children do not necessarily have to play a part in marriage or family life. As Airhart writes “By the 1970s the three-fold purpose of marriage (procreation, companionship, and the vocation of parenting)…was reduced to one: intimacy” (260). The UCC also relaxed its practices surrounding divorce, discovering “redemptive possibilities in the remarriage of divorced persons” (181).
During the Victorian era the state had not been as large and so care for the most vulnerable and downtrodden of the populace had been left to the churches and benevolent organizations but the expanding welfare state destroyed this social arrangement (204). Additionally, with the entrance of women into the workforce, the UCC faced a severe reduction in the number of volunteers it could count on to offer services (206). New ideas about the nature of Canadian culture discounted the role religion had to play in post-war Canada; the culture, not religion, would be “a sufficient source of national identity” (208). This was partly the result of an incipient pluralism that depended upon secular values (assumed to be open to all) for the common good and a shift from minority assimilation to the dominant culture accommodating minorities, upending the UCC’s mission to seamlessly absorb minorities into Anglo-Saxon Canada (221). As Airhart succinctly summarizes, “Canadian culture was the new ‘orthodoxy,’ with a ‘common faith’ in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets” (222). These changes in how Canada related to religion was not limited to the UCC but to all the other churches as well.
During the mid-1960s the UCC experienced a notable generational shift as its leadership was populated by those who had no memory of the challenge and quest for church union of the 1910s and 1920s (225). The UCC minimized its proclamation of Christianity and instead worked to spread a Christian presence through society (228). The UCC attempted to “listen to the world” (235). This attitude could be interpreted as sincere humility on the one hand to better understand the needs and perspectives of those outside the church, but it can also be viewed as a further sign of the UCC’s shaken confidence in itself. Those who advocated “listening to the world” created further distance between themselves and more traditionally-minded evangelicals who admired Billy Graham and proselytism. The left-wing of the UCC regarded Graham as an unwanted fundamentalist (235-37). Conservative evangelicals who remained in the UCC organized the United Church Renewal Fellowship in 1966 and they committed to speaking to the world in a new way as opposed to merely listening (239). Though the UCC had prided itself on its early ecumenical tone, ecumenical politics gradually changed as conservative Roman Catholics and Protestants allied themselves and within Protestantism, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada provided a platform for conservative Protestants to come together (244).
One of the major schisms within the UCC was the divide between its urban versus rural congregations. Rural churches made up 65% of the UCC but many Canadians were moving away from the country and into the city where there were more jobs and opportunities and new suburban communities (141, 248-49). The urban churches were viewed as too radical in their experiments and the variety of programs they offered to urban families to attract them to church was viewed as too impersonal (248-49, 252). While the urban United churches may have wanted to be hospitable to ethnic minorities and subcultures, these congregations’ openness to experimentation clashed with the more conservative temperament of rural UCC congregations. Airhart notes that the UCC’s machinery was originally designed for rural ecclesiology and it had trouble being relevant to an increasingly urban society (280).
The 1960s-onwards would be a time of tremendous upheaval for the UCC. A myriad of cultural developments and controversies continued to chip away at the church body, from an obsession with esoteric mysticism and personal experience in the 1960s to the displacement of pastoral care by therapy to the secularization of Sunday and wider efforts of secularization in general (259-262). Many in the UCC were no longer convinced that the church was even necessary anymore, imagining that society had changed too much and so the institutional church had to reshape itself so that it was more pertinent to the modern experience (260). As in the USA, many of the Baby Boomers were weary of traditional churches and their formality and many could not understand the New Curriculum (264-267). However, unlike pastors who pioneered the megachurch to attract disinterested Baby Boomers back to church, the UCC was not able to bring their Baby Boomers back. Some reasons why is that unlike megachurch pastors, the UCC continued to shun emotional expression and the New Curriculum was too suffused with casting doubts about the Bible’s veracity while megachurch pastors stressed the need for personal conversion, incorporated saccharine praise music into their services and provide basic but clear teachings from the Bible. Though the UCC allowed single women to be ordained in 1936 and married women to be ordained in 1964, there was a vacancy of leadership in the UCC as many potential ministers opted for more lucrative careers in the marketplace and discouraged ministers left the denomination or pastoral office entirely (271, 283-85). This allowed women leaders to gain greater influence within the UCC but this also led to tensions as the younger female leaders had thoroughly imbibed second-wave feminism whereas older women in the UCC still held to traditional understandings of gender roles and domesticity (286).
Airhart provides us with a comprehensive history of the UCC.
The United Church was not the first church worldwide to seek union “but such a proposition had never actually been consummated elsewhere on such a large scale” (3-4). The UCC’s ambitions to become the national (but not state-controlled) church would provide Canada with a unifying institution that could claim members from coast-to-coast as Confederation itself had not evoked “national feeling” during Canada’s early days (5-7). Additionally, Canada was still strongly divided between provinces and regions; save for ardently Catholic Quebec, the UCC could inculcate an Anglo-Saxon imperial identity with North American uniqueness that drew in British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario and the Maritimes and hopefully counter Quebec’s influence (7). Thus, from its early days, the UCC sought to assimilate new immigrants, many of whom were from Eastern and Southern Europe, to Anglo-Saxon culture (11-12). The formation of the UCC was not without controversy as the new church was accused of downplaying doctrine while privileging efficiency (21). One key target for the UCC’s detractors was the Basis of Union (1925) which was a series of 20 short statements rather than thorough, systematized doctrinal positions. Although there were only 20 articles in the Basis of Union, this series of statements appears rather similar to the Anglican Church’s 39 Articles. Due to the articles’ brevity, leeway is given for interpretation; just as the Calvinist Puritans and Laudian Anglicans jointly held to the 39 Articles, so too were the Calvinist Presbyterians and Arminian Methodists (who formed the vast majority of the UCC, although Congregationalists were also included) able to find common adherence due to the Basis of Union’s vagueness.
The early years of the UCC were marked by conflict and a drawn-out public relations battle between those more conservative Presbyterians who had opted to maintain separate from church union and the UCC. The formation of the UCC itself had been delayed due to internal debate amongst the Presbyterians and the First World War (39-43). The conservative Presbyterians, who enjoyed the support of J. Gresham Machen and the fundamentalist Baptist T.T. Shields, accused the UCC of theological modernism and claimed that the Presbyterians and Methodists did not have enough in common to make union feasible (47-51). Machen himself would go so far as to send American Presbyterian clergy to Canada to minister to continuing Presbyterian congregations who had lost their ministers due to union (51). Strife was also internal as the Methodists and Presbyterians competed for spiritual leadership in the UCC; in general, the Presbyterians adopted a tone of superiority (48-49). The dispute between the UCC and the Presbyterians was eventually settled, with Canada’s West widely supportive of church union (61-63). This is understandable as one of the main aims of church union was to provide better pastoral care and share resources to minister to far-flung communities. Canada’s East had been settled far earlier than the West and Western settlers may have thought the UCC could provide them with better spiritual care than if the denominations remained separate.
The UCC developed an effective centralized bureaucracy, establishing various boards that served such functions as education, women’s ministry and missions (74). Although women far outnumbered men in the life of the church, the UCC eagerly poured resources into attracting men to clubs and organizations including As One That Serves which offered leadership training (76). The UCC participated in the 1928 Jerusalem missionary conference, which also allowed it to establish itself in international ecumenism (80-82). The conference encouraged participants not only to think of unevangelized lands but also to focus on “unevangelized areas of life” (82). This would tie into the UCC’s mission of “Christianizing the social order” and the church’s dedication to the social gospel in Canada (84). As Airhart explains, “social service thus had a dual purpose: ‘to enable others to discover the personal fulfillment of authentic human relationships and to enable oneself to find a personal center of meaning.’” (104).
Though the UCC’s quest to further the Kingdom of God through the social gospel is commendable, at the same time the Canadian state was starting to encroach upon those areas of life that the UCC had set out to minister to by expanding the social services it offered (87-88). This also caused tension between the UCC and the state; the UCC was stridently supportive of prohibition but the government used liquor sales to fund the services it provided (88). The UCC’s attempt to play a pivotal role in social life was met with ire by some, who thought the UCC was too close to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (this is understandable as many of the CCF’s leaders, such as J.S. Woodsworth and William Irvine served as ministers, 89-90).
Throughout its existence, the UCC struggled with its identity. It strove to be inclusive, evidenced by its desire to be embraced by all Canadians (though it wanted ethnic minorities to adopt Anglo-Saxon sensibilities), but at the same time there was internal debate within the UCC as to what theological factions should be accepted in the church. George C. Pidgeon, the UCC’s first Moderator and one of the more conservative leaders of the UCC hoped the UCC would be a “broad tent” that would be open even to conservative premillenialists (103-04). The UCC also had to contend with the transatlantic migration of neo-orthodox theology which sharply critiqued the optimistic liberal evangelical theology that had reigned in the UCC and theological fads such as process theology (111-12). The UCC would be affected by neo-orthodoxy, witnessed in the (controversial) Barthian influence in the 1940 Statement of Faith which also mitigated the concept of the Kingdom of God (121).
Although the UCC considered itself evangelical, it spurned traditional evangelical practices such as revival meetings, opting instead to encourage regular worship services (107). Worship became a unifier thanks in large part to a new hymn book but it further inculcated in the UCC a Presbyterian influence and the Methodist propensity towards emotional expression was discouraged (108-110). The emergence of scientific secularism and humanism confronted the UCC as external threats as these paradigms competed with religion to provide human beings with understandings of the world (113). Scientific discoveries shook Canadians’ confidence in religion as a source for truth (119). It seems that the UCC was thus constantly scrambling to provide a suitable framework for understanding both the Christian faith and God’s place in the world. The UCC rejected fundamentalism, disputing the notion that the Bible was inerrant and championing modernism while at the same time trying to incorporate the insights of new theological systems such as neo-orthodoxy into its vaguely liberal-evangelical theology. This, coupled with an old guard of Methodists and Presbyterians who may have still favoured their previous denominational tradition and Canada’s geographical vastness may have made it hard to instill uniform doctrine. The UCC’s Moderator and church bureaucracy may have wanted to implant a particular doctrinal position but at the same time the UCC prided itself on its openness; thus, it makes sense that there would be theological chaos amongst its ministers and laity because it was in the UCC’s nature to discourage strict conformity.
The UCC struggled in post-World War II Canada. During the war the UCC was divided on wartime involvement, though the conflict did allow the church to provide the social services it was eager to offer, such as chaplains for soldiers on the front and care for those at home, including for Japanese-Canadians who were interned (128-29, 143-44). After the war, Canada’s culture changed as women began entering the workforce and people gravitated towards psychology and therapy for self-understanding and self-actualization (129-30). Like the government taking over social services from the church, the more secularized therapeutic turn would also chip away at the services the churches could offer Canadians. No longer did Canadians need to seek out a priest or pastor to understand themselves; instead, they could lie on a couch in their psychiatrist’s office. A deluge of immigration after World War II radically altered Canada’s culture. The UCC would be unsuccessful in attracting the thousands of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants who arrived and they would also have to compete with more conservative denominations (139-141). As the fires of World War II faded to embers and the Cold War set in, liberal democracy, not Christianity, was viewed as the source of universal values (153).
Though the UCC could not fill its pews with new immigrants, overall Canada experienced a post-war resurgence in religion as 70% of Protestants and 80% of Roman Catholics attended church at least once a month, although these numbers are deceiving as only 1/5 claimed that church teachings affected how they lived (154). The UCC was increasingly concerned that it was becoming irrelevant and taking on the nature of a social club (155). This lament is understandable; the UCC did not aggressively evangelize and other institutions, namely the state, the clinic and the academy were taking roles that churches had previously wielded. An emerging and encroaching popular culture would also lure Canadians away from churches to recreational activities and jazz halls (158-59).
J.R. Mutchmor, UCC Moderator from 1962-64, was already guiding the UCC during the 1940s-50s. Unlike many of his colleagues, he strongly advocated for mass evangelistic meetings such as the Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, a two-year program which launched in 1945 and the evangelistic campaign of Charles Templeton, although the UCC was concerned about Billy Graham’s forays north into Canada (161-165). As Airhart writes, “The United Church’s identity as an ‘evangelical’ church was doomed once support for Billy Graham’s crusades became a theological litmus test for authenticity” (185). Mutchmor also disapproved of women entering the workforce, opining that they should remain in the domestic sphere and raise their children (161). The 1960s would also bear witness to the development and release of the “New Curriculum,” a comprehensive new education program that sought to apply the Bible to a contemporary context (171). The New Curriculum would have an enormous effect on the UCC but by the time it was released it was already outdated, having been soaked in the theological fads and issues of the 1940s and 1950s (171). Thus, this curriculum, while steering the UCC even more to the left, also seemed irrelevant to the social chaos of the 1960s.
This period would also drastically fracture the family. The UCC moved away from conceiving of the family as an institution towards family relationships. The previous understanding of children, rather than sexual satisfaction, as the end of marriage and its purpose gave way as new, effective methods of birth control allowed for an increase in sexual intercourse without the “risk” of pregnancy (180-81). The UCC did not view procreation as the sole purpose of marriage as it noted the value of companionship that marriage provided, but the growing affirmation of sexual satisfaction rather than children altered how the church understood marriage and sexuality (181). This shift helps explain the UCC’s liberalized views on homosexuality as well since companionship can be between two members of the same sex whereas (natural) procreation requires one man and one woman. If companionship and sexual fulfillment are the prime purposes of marriage, then children do not necessarily have to play a part in marriage or family life. As Airhart writes “By the 1970s the three-fold purpose of marriage (procreation, companionship, and the vocation of parenting)…was reduced to one: intimacy” (260). The UCC also relaxed its practices surrounding divorce, discovering “redemptive possibilities in the remarriage of divorced persons” (181).
During the Victorian era the state had not been as large and so care for the most vulnerable and downtrodden of the populace had been left to the churches and benevolent organizations but the expanding welfare state destroyed this social arrangement (204). Additionally, with the entrance of women into the workforce, the UCC faced a severe reduction in the number of volunteers it could count on to offer services (206). New ideas about the nature of Canadian culture discounted the role religion had to play in post-war Canada; the culture, not religion, would be “a sufficient source of national identity” (208). This was partly the result of an incipient pluralism that depended upon secular values (assumed to be open to all) for the common good and a shift from minority assimilation to the dominant culture accommodating minorities, upending the UCC’s mission to seamlessly absorb minorities into Anglo-Saxon Canada (221). As Airhart succinctly summarizes, “Canadian culture was the new ‘orthodoxy,’ with a ‘common faith’ in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets” (222). These changes in how Canada related to religion was not limited to the UCC but to all the other churches as well.
During the mid-1960s the UCC experienced a notable generational shift as its leadership was populated by those who had no memory of the challenge and quest for church union of the 1910s and 1920s (225). The UCC minimized its proclamation of Christianity and instead worked to spread a Christian presence through society (228). The UCC attempted to “listen to the world” (235). This attitude could be interpreted as sincere humility on the one hand to better understand the needs and perspectives of those outside the church, but it can also be viewed as a further sign of the UCC’s shaken confidence in itself. Those who advocated “listening to the world” created further distance between themselves and more traditionally-minded evangelicals who admired Billy Graham and proselytism. The left-wing of the UCC regarded Graham as an unwanted fundamentalist (235-37). Conservative evangelicals who remained in the UCC organized the United Church Renewal Fellowship in 1966 and they committed to speaking to the world in a new way as opposed to merely listening (239). Though the UCC had prided itself on its early ecumenical tone, ecumenical politics gradually changed as conservative Roman Catholics and Protestants allied themselves and within Protestantism, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada provided a platform for conservative Protestants to come together (244).
One of the major schisms within the UCC was the divide between its urban versus rural congregations. Rural churches made up 65% of the UCC but many Canadians were moving away from the country and into the city where there were more jobs and opportunities and new suburban communities (141, 248-49). The urban churches were viewed as too radical in their experiments and the variety of programs they offered to urban families to attract them to church was viewed as too impersonal (248-49, 252). While the urban United churches may have wanted to be hospitable to ethnic minorities and subcultures, these congregations’ openness to experimentation clashed with the more conservative temperament of rural UCC congregations. Airhart notes that the UCC’s machinery was originally designed for rural ecclesiology and it had trouble being relevant to an increasingly urban society (280).
The 1960s-onwards would be a time of tremendous upheaval for the UCC. A myriad of cultural developments and controversies continued to chip away at the church body, from an obsession with esoteric mysticism and personal experience in the 1960s to the displacement of pastoral care by therapy to the secularization of Sunday and wider efforts of secularization in general (259-262). Many in the UCC were no longer convinced that the church was even necessary anymore, imagining that society had changed too much and so the institutional church had to reshape itself so that it was more pertinent to the modern experience (260). As in the USA, many of the Baby Boomers were weary of traditional churches and their formality and many could not understand the New Curriculum (264-267). However, unlike pastors who pioneered the megachurch to attract disinterested Baby Boomers back to church, the UCC was not able to bring their Baby Boomers back. Some reasons why is that unlike megachurch pastors, the UCC continued to shun emotional expression and the New Curriculum was too suffused with casting doubts about the Bible’s veracity while megachurch pastors stressed the need for personal conversion, incorporated saccharine praise music into their services and provide basic but clear teachings from the Bible. Though the UCC allowed single women to be ordained in 1936 and married women to be ordained in 1964, there was a vacancy of leadership in the UCC as many potential ministers opted for more lucrative careers in the marketplace and discouraged ministers left the denomination or pastoral office entirely (271, 283-85). This allowed women leaders to gain greater influence within the UCC but this also led to tensions as the younger female leaders had thoroughly imbibed second-wave feminism whereas older women in the UCC still held to traditional understandings of gender roles and domesticity (286).
Airhart provides us with a comprehensive history of the UCC.
May 26, 2021
I enjoyed Airhart's analysis of the United Church, particularly the internal politics of the Church from its early issues with Presbyterian churches to later divisions during the Second World War between anti-war pacifists and government and war supporting leaders. Clearly, the United Church is an interesting choice to study and read about due to it being an example of church unionization.
I have one critique, although possibly outside the scope of this study. Nonetheless, it would be nice to have included more discussion around the thoughts of individuals within the United Church, normal congregational members to have a more holistic view of the Church. In all, it is an important read to understanding the conditions which helped to form, influence, and "break" the United Church between 1925 and the 1960s.
I have one critique, although possibly outside the scope of this study. Nonetheless, it would be nice to have included more discussion around the thoughts of individuals within the United Church, normal congregational members to have a more holistic view of the Church. In all, it is an important read to understanding the conditions which helped to form, influence, and "break" the United Church between 1925 and the 1960s.
May 22, 2025
This is a well-written, sympathetic but critical account of the first half-century of the United Church of Canada.
June 26, 2025
Excellent study of the United Church in its relationship with Canadian society, with some profound insights about the complex process of secularization in Canada that has much wider implications.
April 29, 2014
So, this was a very slow read. But also very enjoyable. As a new member of (and pastor in) the United Church of Canada, I had already read a few histories. But this one was the best. It lays out the story of a church that wanted to be Canada's church, in an almost Constantinian way. The United Church almost made it there, too--in the late fifties and early sixties. But a number of factors, internal and external, led to a very different current reality for the UCC.
Airhart's account of how immigration to Canada, and especially the immigration of non-Protestant and rarely North-European anglo people galvanized fears that partly led to the UCC's founding is deeply disturbing, and perhaps an ironic harbinger of how the UCC has often read what was happening in the world in ways that were out of kilter both with its deepest convictions and with the way the world eventually went.
Airhart's book can be criticized for being a slow read--but only if you don't love careful scholarship properly referenced throughout. The book also does not take us to the present--though the trends described as current in the seventies still make waves today.
If you care about Canadian history get this! The truth is we read the current disfavour that churches struggle with into their past. And that is a mistake. The UCC did have the soul of a nation, was hugely influential, and helped propel Canada in the direction it is still headed today.
Airhart's account of how immigration to Canada, and especially the immigration of non-Protestant and rarely North-European anglo people galvanized fears that partly led to the UCC's founding is deeply disturbing, and perhaps an ironic harbinger of how the UCC has often read what was happening in the world in ways that were out of kilter both with its deepest convictions and with the way the world eventually went.
Airhart's book can be criticized for being a slow read--but only if you don't love careful scholarship properly referenced throughout. The book also does not take us to the present--though the trends described as current in the seventies still make waves today.
If you care about Canadian history get this! The truth is we read the current disfavour that churches struggle with into their past. And that is a mistake. The UCC did have the soul of a nation, was hugely influential, and helped propel Canada in the direction it is still headed today.
August 9, 2016
Read after reading a review of this book in Christian Courier.
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