"Minister's Message"
written by
Rev. Heather Davies
May 5th, 2024
The Church is Almost 99 Years Old
I am proud to be United, I am a 3rd generation United Church of Canada member and was raised in this church. We have come a long way in the 99 years that the church has been in existence. According to the United Church of Canada’s website this is how we came into being:
“The United Church of Canada is the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. We minister to over a million people in about 2,500 congregations. The history of the United Church is closely entwined with the history of Canada itself.
The United Church was inaugurated on June 10, 1925 in Toronto, Ontario, when the Methodist Church, Canada, the Congregational Union of Canada, and 70 percent of The Presbyterian Church in Canada entered into a union. Also joining was the small General Council of Union Churches, centred largely in Western Canada. It was the first union of churches in the world to cross historical denominational lines and received international acclaim. Each of the founding churches had a long history in Canada prior to 1925. The movement for church union began with the desire to coordinate ministry in the vast Canadian northwest and for collaboration in overseas missions. Congregations in Indigenous communities from each of the original denominations were an important factor in the effort toward church union.
The United Church continues to be a "uniting" church, and has been enriched by several additional unions since 1925. In 1930, the Synod of The Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda became part of The United Church of Canada’s Maritime Conference. The Evangelical United Brethren Church became part of The United Church of Canada in 1968. In addition, various individual congregations from other Christian communions have became part of the United Church over the years.”[1]
Over the years, the United Church has taken controversial stands on issues that have placed it on the smack dab in middle of polarizing topics – in 1988 long before many other churches dared, we agreed to a motion at General Council that anyone regardless of gender or sexual orientation could become a member of the United Church of Canada and any member of the United Church of Canada could seek Ordination for ministry within the church. This was very controversial within and without of the church. And in the year 2000 as the nation began to recognize the right of Gays and Lesbians to be able to be married the United Church General Council passed a motion to honour and walked in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ population by offering ceremonies of covenant relationship within our churches by our ministers and then in 2005, when a motion was passed in parliament we began preforming same gender marriages. We are one of the first denominations to walk with transgendered ministers as they transitioned.
The United Church has also been in the midst of conversations of right relations and in 1986 years long before the government of Canada apologized to the First Nations, the then moderator of the United Church of Canada, The Very Reverend Bob Smith at General Council in Sudbury, apologized to the Native People for our role in Residential Schools and cultural genocide that the Truth and Reconciliation Report recognizes.
We continue to live in interesting times of transition and transformation. The church is not the same as it was back in 1925, yet the past can teach us anything is that right in the midst of these time, there is God, in the struggle and in the challenge, there is God – in the confusion and the unknowing, there is God – in beginnings and in endings – there is God…getting in and walking with us on this journey of church, journey of faith. So as we move into what is newly forming – the collaboration between Southampton and Central Westside, let us be open to God in our midst helping us to build a church were love can dwell and all can safely live, built of hopes and dreams and vision and where the love of Christ will end divisions (from More Voice #1) – and all are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.
~blessings, Heather ~
[1] https://united-church.ca/community-and-faith/welcome-united-church-canada/history-united-church-canada
April 28, 2024
The Power of Habits
Have you ever wondered about the rituals we have in this church, why we do what we do? When are we to stand or sit. What to sing and when to be quiet. What to wear, where to sit? How are decisions made, who chooses the hymns, or the prayers? Do you ever wonder what someone who has never come before experiences when they walk in the door for the first time Sunday Morning?
It is easy to forget in that not everyone knows why we do what we do and why worship works the way it does. We do things in our church that we have always done and sometimes the rituals get so embedded in our system that we no longer remember why we do things a certain way.
There is a wonderful story of a church that I heard about from a college of mine who was once asked to be a guest preacher there. He arrived at the small country church and noticed that the entire congregation was sitting on the right-hand side of the sanctuary and that there was no one sitting on the left-hand side. Wondering if this was because the pulpit was on the right he proceeded to lead worship. When he got to the hymn before the sermon, he watched in amazement as the entire congregation just before they sat down after the hymn all filed in an orderly fashion across the aisle and sat on the left-hand side of the church. After the service was over, after he had shaken hands with all the congregation and while he was gathering up his papers to head home, the man who was waiting to lock up the church was chatting and so he had to ask, what that was all about – it took the congregant a couple of moments to figure out what the minister was so curious about, because for him, there was nothing unusual about what had happened in worship that morning – but when he realized what the minister was referring to when asking about the strange practice, he remember a minister of long ago who when had taught the congregation this pre-sermon ritual. Seems the little country church used to be heated with a wood stove, which was on the right-hand side of the church. When the congregation gathered in the winter it was cold at the beginning of worship, so people would huddle on the right, but by the time the sermon occurred that side of the church was too hot so people would move over, and because the minister of long ago did not like the constant disruption of people moving across the aisle randomly he created a moment when the congregation moved en masse. The congregation was so used to doing this that when they got a furnace in the basement that heated the whole church evenly, they continued this practice, even when it made no sense anymore.
Are there things that are done here that come from a tradition in the past that may have lost its meaning? It is an interesting question and if you have an answer I would love to hear from you.
~Blessings, Heather~
April 21, 2024
I am away today in Perth officiating a funeral service for my niece. She was only 38, it is a hard moment in my husband’s family. Often in funerals I use the words of Mary Oliver wonderful American poet to express thoughts that are hard to understand especially in grief. This is the poem I will use today. I hope it touches your heart as well. ~Heather
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
April 14, 2024
Holy Humour – it is good to laugh
(even in church)
In some churches Holy Humour Sunday is celebrated the first Sunday after Easter. It comes from traditions in the early Greek church when the week after Easter Sunday, people would get together for picnics and parties and practical jokes leading up to “Bright” Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) to celebrate their joy that Jesus lived, that death had no power over life. Early Christian writers mused that God had played a joke on Satan. Although we did not celebrate ‘bright Sunday’ in worship this year it is good to remember in this Easter season that God gets the last laugh and death was defeated.
Here is a call to worship that helps us remember that:
Joy is loose,
In the wiggles of the children,
The whispers of the youth,
The smiles of the adults.
We praise God for this glorious day,
Let the praise break forth
in the most unlikely places and in silly ways.
Joy and praise fills our hearts and in our songs
Let the laughter be deep,
for we are God's people.
(~ posted on Trinity United Parish. http://www.trinityunitedparish.org/lukeswordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/April-10.pdf)
May there be joy in your days.
~Heather~