This post was originally published in November 2018 just before I returned home from Kenya. The subject is still relevant, so I am republishing it today.
When I returned home to Kitchener (in Nov 2018) the city was not the same as I left it. The church pictured above, the former Trinity United Church, was gone. It has been demolished, and as I originally wrote these lines, I learned that a “suspicious fire” had added insult to injury as it were. I was inside the church only once, for a concert, but I have passed this church hundreds of times in my life since childhood. Known for many years as The Church on the Market Place because it was across from the former market of Kitchener, where the imposing brand new court building now is. It was for decades a fixture of the sky-line of Kitchener. So why is it being torn down – a church that was one of the largest in the city? 
Because the congregation that used to live there was unable to manage the staggering cost of maintaining the huge building. Built to seat about 1000 persons, the congregation now numbers about 200, but in the end saw only 50-60 people out on a Sunday morning. So the congregation sold the building, and moved several blocks up the road and now meets in rented facilities in the chapel of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church. The church, which started 177 years ago, stood at this location on Frederick St and Duke St in downtown Kitchener for the past 111 years. Church membership has declined from a high point of 2,000 members to about 200 today The new owner of the demolished church is planning to build a more than $100-million, 33-storey condominium tower, which would then be the tallest structure in Kitchener-Waterloo.
A few blocks from Trinity, sits another grand empty church on Weber Street where the former Zion United Church used to live and
worship. Zion dates back to 1893. It has two sanctuaries that can each seat 750 people, a chapel, a gym and various class and meeting rooms. In its heyday it saw about 1000 people in its pews. But when it closed in 2015, the number of Sunday worshippers had dwindled to 40. A former official of the church said that in a cold winter, it would cost $5000. to heat the building. This building will not be torn down. The new owner says that he doesn’t yet know what he will do with it. He had turned down offers from people who wanted to open a bar or a night-club, and so far there is only one tenant renting space in the building – Big Bliss Yoga.
A similar fate was experienced by the former Olivet United Church on Onward Avenue. It began as a Sunday School mission of the Evangelical Association in 1931, with the church being dedicated in 1936. In 1968 Olivet became a church in the United Church of Canada. It too, became a dwindling congregation that could no longer keep up with the expenses, and the church was closed in 2016 and sold to the Rockway Mennonite Church who worship there now.
But United churches are not the only ones who face this dilemma of what to do in oversized facilities that are too large for the dwindling number of members and worshippers. Three Lutheran churches in Kitchener recently faced the same issue: St. Mark’s Lutheran in downtown Kitchener “The church beside the hospital, St. John’s Lutheran in Waterloo, and Reformation Lutheran on Krug St. However, instead of disbanding, the three churches have merged into one new church called Trillium Lutheran Church which began worshipping together this fall in the former St. John Lutheran Church. A Pentecostal church also worships in that facility at a different time on Sunday morning.
And my home town in Kitchener isn’t the only one where this is happening. In nearby Hamilton, the city in which I was a pastor for 13 years, the same thing is taking place. In June of 2017, Olivet United closed its doors. There were 50 of the 150 members worshipping there in the end. Someone who used to attend there said that they can remember a time when the church was packed at Christmas. “When I joined 18 years ago, we had to bring out plastic chairs — it was packed”, says Sylvia Chitty (Hamilton Spectator).
In October 2017, St. Luke’s Anglican Church in the north end of Hamilton closed its doors. It was built to seat 300, but there were only 17 at the final service. The number of regular worshippers was 12.
Two formerly large United Churches in Hamilton: Centenary United and St. Giles United, have merged into New Vision United Church, and one of those two churches is or will be demolished. 
In a special article in the Hamilton Spectator called Test of Faith, Dr. Reginald Bibby, a sociologist at the University of Lethbridge, who has studied the religious culture of North America, speaks of a “handwriting on the wall”. The mainline groups — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans and the United Church — will says Bibby, “with a few individual exceptions, continue to shrink, and with their related declines in resources, will see most of their physical outlets sold off”, he said.
David Seljak, an associate professor and chair of the religious studies Department at St. Jeromes’ College in Waterloo goes a step further and maintains that this is not a local problem.“There is no place where the mainline Protestant churches are not in a steady state of decline,” he says. “It’s something that is happening across Canada and it has been happening for some time.”
But Why? How is it that churches come to that state in their development? There are some common denominators. In every case, the congregations had a long and varied history. In every case, the congregations had grown throughout their history to a point that warranted building edifices on a grand scale. If you have 1000 people attending worship, you need a place that can house that many people. But in every case, for whatever reason, the number of worshippers could not be sustained. Rather than grow, the congregations levelled off and then began to decline to a point where the support base – the people who donated the money – could no longer sustain facilities that needed to be maintained, and in some cases updated to meet accessibility and other building code issues.
The article that I referred to does not give satisfactory answers. It refers to demographic issues, such as people moving out of the city centre into the suburbs. It refers to sociological changes from the original members of the church to the millennial generation that has different needs, and according to Seljak “is spiritual but not religious.”
While some of these points may be valid, they don’t tell the whole picture, and neither will the ideas that I would add. And the first would be a shift in theology. The so-called “mainline” Protestant churches have shifted to a liberal theology that focuses on the rational, and downplays or denies the supernatural events of the Bible. The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 as the result of a union between Methodist, Congregational, and some Presbyterian congregations. Some of these denominations have a long history of a very evangelical past, which somehow disappeared in the smelting pot that became the United Church. And other mainline churches that did not join the union have also shifted to a more liberal theology. It is an unmistakable fact that evangelical churches have a far lower rate of “closures” although there have been some.
A second reason that I would suggest, is a failure to read the “handwriting on the wall” sooner. The churches that declined did not do so overnight. Attendance did not plummet from 1000 to 100 or 50 from one year to the next. In most cases the decline was gradual. Sometimes the wrong questions were asked too late, or not asked at all. Churches that have proudly stated that they were “not concerned with numbers”, and who tried to explain away their lack of growth, either theologically or otherwise, are now basing their decision to close on numbers. “We no longer have the resources that we need”.
A third reason, is that at some point, the main thing stopped being the main thing. Churches that focus on the main point of Christianity, which is following the Great Commandment to love one another and the Great Commission to make disciples (in other words spread the Gospel) are less likely to need to shut their doors as churches that are occupied mainly with lessor things. I remember being in the board meeting of a church years ago, where more time was spent discussing the financial health of the organ fund than the need of souls. They had some segregated funds invested for the purpose of financing the maintenance of the pipe organ. When the General Operating Fund began to dry up or go into the red, they would “borrow” from the organ fund. At issue in one particular Board meeting was the contentious question of how much should be borrowed, when it would be repaid, and “what interest rate will we charge ourselves!” On the agenda of the same meeting was a proposal for an outreach ministry which was never discussed because the above item took so much time. I went home crying (and I cried after many board meetings while I was in active ministry) followed by sleepless nights. The main thing stopped being the main thing.
Dr. Vance Havner first articulated a cycle known as the “Four M Cycle” Man – Movement – Machine – Monument. Someone’s idea grows bigger than the man (or woman) and becomes a movement that catches fire and spreads, as fires tend to do. Inevitably, a mechanism or structure – a machine if you will – is necessary in order to keep the movement and the vision of the founder alive. But sadly, soon the machine becomes an end in itself. Oiling and maintaining the machine becomes more important than the work which the machine was created to do. It becomes a monument – or worse, a mausoleum to house ideas and practices that are dead.
Havner’s image applies to both secular and religious institutions. In the case of the Christian Church, the God-Man Jesus began a movement that grew past His human lifespan and was carried on by his followers – the apostles, martyrs, church fathers, and their successors. By the third century at the latest, the movement became a machine – a hierarchy of an institution which was very powerful. The humans who had that power became so intoxicated by it that they worked hard at maintaining the machine. Taken as a whole, Christianity did not freeze into a monument. Why? Because in all ages, there have been people who bought into the original vision of Jesus: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it” (Matt. 16:18) and “go into the world and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19). The secret to prevent becoming a monument is to get back to the original vision. Reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldyrich Zwingli and others had that vision and created movements within the movement to keep going forward. But sadly, even within those movements there have been machines and monuments that have evolved over time.
Individual churches today, are always in danger of succumbing to that deadly cycle that ends in a monument. The signs are not hard to overlook, but sometimes they are overlooked:
- when the way something is done becomes more important than what is being done – in the end less and less gets done.
- when ministries within the church become perpetuated without understanding what they mean – we do things simply because this is what we have always done and we have always done it a certain way.
- when pining for the past glory days is more intense than the hope of the future.
- sacred cows such as styles of music, particular buildings, traditions and practices that were invented by humans, and many more.
The key to avoid the trap of the 4 M’s? Stay in the movement phase, or return to it. What that means practically for the modern church was articulated in a blog by an Anglican, whose name I can’t find, but I like these ideas: