As Goes the Caribou
As Goes the Caribou
For being en-coffined so, the spirit revolts at this slotted reality.
There is something deficient, almost alien, about daylight that refuses to en-color; a dog-eyed world, monotonous in its mono-chromism. And is there not something truncated, incomplete, inscrutable about steeply wooded slopes that refuse to display their rock en-crowned snowy heads, a world of colossal statues all shoulders and torso? There are days when we feel happily at home in the world, and then there are days when we wonder if we have lived too long. Without vision, full-colored vision, far-to-the-horizon vision, the people …well, they don’t fare so well.
Life in the mountains has much to say about concealment, blocked passages, obscured horizons, convoluted and shadowed trails. But so, too, does it speak of unparalleled opportunity for awesome vistas, vast panoramas, glimpses of glory much to be prized. Perched atop a pyramid of rock, welcomed into the courts of the sky, one finds it easy to sing along with Van Morrison, “Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder?” Indeed, for those with ears to hear, the whole landscape cries out, “Ascend!” But wherever Man is there is noise, distracting noise, and so the invitation and its accompanying instruction on who may ascend the hill of the Lord seem not to be heard.
In this national park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains is a small town, a resort town, a quaint center that attracts international visitors to the grandeur and spectacle of this great geographic upheaval. Not surprisingly it is located on the low and flat valley floor, with the highway and railroad, quick exits to lesser things. And in the lengthening day, amidst the hotels, restaurants, and the homes of the 5,000 residents, can be seen a handful of churches grazing in pastures once green: fellowships, parishes, congregations, herding into buildings-as-ecosystems dedicated to the glory of God on parcels of government land leased out for 99 years.
Here in this transient place, this recreational place, this hard-working, hard-playing place, in the shadow of a dozen peaks, it is the Winter of our local congregation’s discontent, nor is this season confined to us alone. We are small, we are dwindling, we are weary, we had hoped for better things. Every much as threatened with extinction as the indigenous Woodland Caribou, (yet without engendering nearly as much sympathetic public concern), these brick and stone and clapboard buildings corral small herds of folk wondering if, in this 98th year, their leases on life shall be renewed. And if not, then what? For like these lower latitude caribou, local churches are not migratory.
One of these gathering places of the faltering faithful was historically known as The Little White Church in the Rockies, before an addition during the unforgiving Sixties made it something else and less. Prior to the foyer being added it boasted a cornerstone laid by a visiting dignitary, none other than Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He, too, found the mountains to be an invigorating getaway. What happened to that cornerstone is now, well… a mystery!
But will what happens to its diminishing congregation be considered a mystery? If this house dedicated to the worship of the Mountain Maker, the Lord of the Rockies, one day becomes an antique store or a daycare or an arts center with yoga Tuesdays and Thursdays, will there ever be any nostalgia for what it once was and the faith it upheld, (with a team of sancto-zoologists explaining its eventual demise)? Will its place know it no more, or will something in our environment shift and sag, sputter and choke with the passing of an unappreciated organism that shall yet prove to have been an integral part of the mysterious balance of Life?
Oh, be assured: the paperwork for the leases will be approved, for our secular society is not any more overtly hostile to churches than it is to wetlands, to glaciers, to caribou, (and yet they are perishing) but will ‘the least of these, My brethren’ still be around to sign on the dotted line?
Churches everywhere in the West are losing ground, harried by wolves, failing to replicate, getting fenced out, wandering from their traditional place, pressurized to adapt and compromise in order to survive. But there are reasons why we don’t see caribou in the cities, why they don’t switch their diet to Tim Horton’s. All the great animals, the wild and exotic things, - all are environment specific, they are all dependent upon certain conditions in order to survive.
As a believer in the Risen and victorious Christ I have no ultimate anxiety about His Body, the Church. I know He will return. My longing for His kingdom fully come will be satisfied. I am content to see the Gospel fires spread to other quarters of the world, for the Church to become de-Westernized. But as a pastor of a tiny share of His flock, and as a citizen of a country I care for, I weary of these forces that are decimating the Church, depriving it of habitat.
This article, however, is not about campaigning against the sociological factors impacting North American Christianity, as if understanding the science behind glacial retreat gives one the leverage to keep that toe in place. Nor is it about six simple strategies to salvage the sanctuary, as if knowing the breeding habits of Bighorn Sheep involves one in herd production. If you have heard of the term “unsustainability”, then I would like to apply that concept to yet another victim of our commercialized/industrialized utopias: the Church of Jesus Christ.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about the term ‘sustainability’:
Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use.
It follows, then, that unsustainability is the incapacity to endure, a failure to maintain responsible stewardship, a neglect or abuse of resources. Concerning the environment, Yale and Columbia
This is a pressing problem on many fronts, and although my obvious focus is the social dimension I am employing the environmental dimension as a way of illustrating the extirpation, or at least endangerment, of biblical faith in many communities.
Here’s how it plays out with caribou:
Woodland caribou are like canaries in a coal mine: where they are plentiful,
our forests and wetlands are in good health, where they are threatened, in decline or extirpated (locally extinct), nature has been thrown out of balance…
Over the past century, Canada ’s woodland caribou have been extirpated from more than half of the range they occupied before European settlement in Canada
exploration and development.(1)
And as featured in the Winnipeg Free Press, with its evocative headline:
25-cent coin may be last preserve of woodland caribou threatened by development
In sight of nearby Mt Bonhomme, with its distinct face gazing heavenward, are seven churches. As the pastor of one of these dwarfine entities for over ten years, -leading more tourists than locals in “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and “Indescribable”, burying more people in the ground than baptizing them in lakes, -I want to make the caribou case for the church, the case that when a specie becomes endangered, a life-form threatened, a stock diminished, it need not be considered deficient, inadaptable, redundant, a failure, a Darwinian dead-end. Perhaps instead it’s a barometer for an ecosystem on the brink, a looming calamity, a sign that there is something grievously wrong with our management of the earth in having become incapable of support.
Without ignoring the need for sound stewardship within the house of God, does not a failing Christianity speak of a failing society, a harbinger of a civilization on the brink? Although largely unacknowledged, there is a symbiotic relationship between Church and Society, and as one goes so goes the other. Hence, even with the demise of the local church, in its passing two truths are told: 1) that worshipping the created over the Creator is ultimately unsustainable, and therefore a policy for disaster, both for our institutions and the Church; and, 2), Society’s need for the corrective message of the Church of the Creator and His Christ increases in proportion to the destruction of Gospel habitat, meaning that as people become more anti-authoritarian, a-historical, individualistic, consumeristic the Way of the Eternal Master becomes more pressing even as fewer people are in a position to recognize, value and enter that Narrow Way, with the resultant diminishment and strain upon floundering fellowships of increasingly marginalized believers.
No one faults frogs for their decline in not having a fondness for a vast assortment of pesticides. The Great Plains that once supported millions upon millions of bison didn’t opt for gun-toting white men over its native herds; it could only look upon the slaughter with an infinite sadness, made mute by the madness. Nor does anyone of my acquaintance make it a point to mock and ridicule the creatures on Canada
Scientists tell us of the disturbing present-day demise of song birds and specialty species due to loss of habitat, with the prospect of a surge on hardy human-cohabiting creatures like crows, rats, sparrows, and cockroaches. And though in most towns and cities there might be variations of the Church of the Crow, adapting to the culture in order to survive, scavenging for relevance (with a semi-annual rummage sale thrown in), something has to be acknowledged about the devastatingly toxic effects of individualism, relativism and Darwinism upon not only biblical Christianity, but upon the human soul!
Daily experience tells us of the disturbing demise of marriage and the family, of moral character, of purity, of simplicity, of life lived in vital connection with the land and in community. Certainly the Church is meant to overcome evil with good, to be a light in the darkness, salt on the rot, finding its impetus in the problems and its empowerment from on high, and this for the Creator’s glory. I do not mean to make a case for defeatism, for the New Testament makes clear that the local church is but a beachhead in enemy-occupied territory, yet a fortress of an eternal Sovereign. Nevertheless, do we not have a precedent for the diminishment of the faithful in Isaiah’s words? “The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from calamity.”
Here, where I serve, we are meant to be, among other things, an alternate Parks Interpretive Center (with its materialistic interpretations), testifying to the great Creator, to the earth-shattering judgment of Noah’s day, and to the mounts Transfiguration, Olivet, and Golgotha, to the Super-nature transcending Nature, and then entering into Nature, for the purpose of redeeming all Nature, making them one. Yet I can’t help but wonder if the splendid delicateness of some forms of life and the residual regret over their extinction is not also to God’s glory, like a quiet Messiah trudging to Calvary , a rose trampled on the ground? *
If you would argue for the power of the Spirit to convict, and the effectual call of God, who is not limited by Man’s impossibleness, and of a victorious Christ made Head over everything for the Church, I would respond “Yes and Amen!” God is not dead! Salvation is still receivable! Miracles of grace still happen! Yet where is the former influence of the churches of Peter and Paul’s day?
Pastor Carlos Madrigal of the Evangelical Protestant Foundation of Istanbul, Turkey has said that out of a population of 70,000,00 there are only 5,000 evangelical believers.(1) A 2000 report from the World Council of Churches stated generously that about 6% of Italy’s population would be considered “Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic” (including charismatic Catholics)(2). Yet the Joshua Project puts Europe as one of the least open places to evangelism in the world.(3) The 2010 edition of Operation World paints a far more grim picture of the Middle East and North Africa, the cradle of Christianity: almost every one of the 19 countries listed boasted less than 1% being evangelical, with the highest being Egypt, coming in at 3.9%.(4) Should distance in Time and Space from the wasteland of former Christendom keep us from being sobered by such Church History?
I like Alpha and Christianity Explored, I believe in “Seek and ye shall find”, but was it for no reason that the Master said, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find any faith on earth?” Do we forget how that wonderful passage on faith in Hebrews 11 ends? “They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them.” Has anything really altered in the world’s appreciation of the faithful? Maybe our passing, more than our preaching, will be the eloquence that will one day awaken those that never marked our place while it was occupied.
In the mean time, as we continue discipling the disappearing, dealing with the
irony of having to compete with the distracting glory of the Creation in seeking to draw attention to the glory of the Creator, we know His grace, we praise His name, we hope wildly, and proclaim the death of He who is the Resurrection and the Life, until He comes.
Pastor Richard W. Bowler
Jasper, Alberta
* I refer only to the Lord’s physical presence being removed from Earth.
Footnotes:
(1) Uncertain Future
Woodland Caribou and Canada
May 2006
Co-sponsored by the Sierra Club of Canada
(2) By Paul Clarke, The Canadian Press, posted: 02/21/2012
3) Turkey
By
Gary Lane
Gary Lane
CBN News International Correspondent
Monday, April 26, 2010
4) oikoumene.org
World Council of Churches
6) Operation World 2010, ed. Jason Mandryk, IVP
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