Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between inspiration and desperation. Sometimes there is no difference.
Whatever the case, it is worth watching what goes on in Ottawa this weekend and in years to come. Canadian Christians have put a great deal of emphasis on the next few days–and, as they hate to be reminded, Canadians do bear more than a passing resemblance to their neighbors to the south.
Billy Graham, the world’s most widely known evangelist, will be preaching through Sunday at a sports arena outside the Canadian capital. Organizers hope he will bring in as many as 30,000 people each night, and they have provided for another 15,000 to watch the revival on television in the parking lot.
At 79, Graham is beginning to show his age. He was hospitalized for pneumonia in December, and he says that Parkinson’s disease is beginning to make it harder for him to focus his thoughts.
Christianity in Canada is not feeling all that well either. The Catholic church is divided between its English- and French-speaking churches, and neither is well attended. The United Church of Canada, the product of a mainline merger of Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, has reportedly lost 20 percent of its members in less than 20 years. Evangelicals are a tiny minority.
So, leaders of all these disparate strands, hoping to turn the tide, banded together to bring Graham to Ottawa. First, they sold Graham on the idea that Ottawa’s Christians were solidly behind his mission; then, they sold Ottawa on Graham, helping to raise more than $1.5 million to finance the event.
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Graham’s crusade has become the ecumenical rallying point for the region’s Christians, gathering the support of 470 congregations and 42 denominations.
The turning point came when Roman Catholic Archbishop Marcel Gervais threw his authority behind the crusade, delivering a pastoral letter in support of the event to area Catholics, who make up the majority of participants in organized religion there.
Gervais suggested that the Graham revival would fulfill both the call for ecumenism in Vatican II and Pope John Paul II’s exhortations that Catholics mark the end of Christianity’s second millennium with renewed outreach. The archbishop added that today’s Catholics share Graham’s devotion to the Bible.
Although it is hard to argue with those sentiments, the Graham mission can’t help but raise some questions for Catholics. Graham, a Baptist by training, invites people to his altar to be born again in Christ; Catholics usually approach their altar in a different context, to eat the body and blood of Christ. Graham stresses the importance of a personal relationship with Christ; Catholicism traditionally stresses the community of believers who were gathered by Christ.
Certainly there is plenty of overlap and enough faith in common to keep Graham and Catholics together for the four nights of the crusade. But what do the differences mean, and how should they be accounted? How does Graham’s idea of the Bible mesh with the beliefs of United Church members, whose presiding bishop last year publicly questioned the historical accuracy of the Resurrection?
Perhaps Graham’s mission provides Ottawa’s Christians a chance to get past some of those differences. Perhaps those differences pale next to a common struggle for survival among the churches.
But if, as church leaders have said, the important thing is to bring in new believers, where are they ultimately bringing them? And will they remain there after Billy Graham leaves town?
Guns, sex, violence: In this, the season of denominational meetings, headlines continue to go off like firecrackers.
Last week, representatives of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. denounced handguns and assault weapons, calling on the denomination’s 2.6 million members to remove them from their homes and their communities.
At the same time, Catholic bishops were calling for action against “pornography, excessive violence and other irresponsible uses of sex and violence in the media.”
Social issues are not trivial to these churches. And in trying to monitor religion’s place in the broader society, matters of morality make fascinating, understandable test cases.
But those headlines can also give a skewed impression, as if church bodies were strange shadow parliaments or poorly named political action committees. In fact, the Presbyterians passed more than 100 other overtures and resolutions, the vast majority of which dealt with matters of worship, church and spirit. And the bishops handled plenty of other matters, including the approval of new translations of Gospel readings.
When the smoke clears, those are the defining events.
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