While Flin Flon area residents may attend church seeking answers, they may also find themselves leaving Sunday service with some tough questions.
Greying faces. Empty seats. Slower-to-fill collection baskets. All speak to an uncertain future for organized religion in a community that has traditionally held faith in high esteem.
“It is very concerning, especially for the churches that have a smaller congregation,” says Leslie Ruben, a lifelong churchgoer.
At 33, Ruben is among the youngest adult worshippers at First Baptist Church. Yet despite her relative youth, she has witnessed a precipitous drop in church attendance since her childhood.
As a little girl attending Northminster Memorial United Church, Ruben experienced a bustling environment full of adults and children. These days, she sees 35 to 40 people on a given Sunday at her new church.
Her experience is hardly unique. Across Flin Flon, Creighton and Denare Beach, churches have suffered a one-two punch as both population and interest in Sunday worship descend. Recent years have brought the inevitable casualties.
In 2011, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church shut its doors after averaging as few as 20 parishioners for at least a year.
This past June, St. Mary’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, down to just six members attending twice-monthly services, followed suit after its commuting pastor was transferred to Winnipeg.
The closures have not gone unnoticed to Alex McGilvery, the articulate pastor of Northminster Memorial United Church.
“Every time a church closes, we lose a part of the content of our community,” says McGilvery. “We lose some part of our culture, so it’s sad when congregations close.”
Even still, the Flin Flon area maintains 14 churches, though not all employ their own full-time pastor or hold services every week.
Combined attendance across those churches is difficult to calculate, but it’s safe to say that at least several hundred residents attend weekly services.
“If 20 per cent of the people of Flin Flon go to church, I’d be surprised,” says McGilvery.
By some estimates, that number was double a generation or two ago. For Ruben, the increasingly bare pews are indicative of a societal shift.
“I think for a lot of people, [church] is not as incorporated into family life as it used to be,” says Ruben. “When I was a kid, when my mom was a kid, that’s what people did – they went to church on Sunday. And now it’s not expected, it’s not a part of life anymore, unfortunately.”
Pastor Andrew McGregor of Flin Flon Alliance Church believes a multitude of factors are at play.
“Sometimes it’s the sheer busyness of life,” says McGregor. “There’s so many commitments and obligations for people to be a part of.”
In other cases, McGregor says, people may have been turned off by a bad experience or simply never had the chance to form a meaningful connection with a church.
Whatever the reason, McGilvery believes more local churches will feel a very real impact in the coming five to 10 years.
“I expect you’ll see churches amalgamating, cooperating together, perhaps closing buildings, getting rid of things that are costing a lot of money but aren’t effective in terms of their mission and goals as a congregation,” McGilvery says. “So certainly the shape and nature of the church in Flin Flon is going to change radically.”
McGilvery believes churches have to find fresh ways to engage people and meet broader goals outside of the conventional Sunday-morning setting.
The pastor points to the Salvation Army’s soup kitchen program, a partnership with the United Steelworkers Local 7106 union that provides warm meals to needy residents.
“We need to do more of that kind of partnership and outreach – recognizing a need in the community and acting to fill it,” McGilvery says. “People will come, not necessarily to be part of that church, but to be part of filling that need.”
Within his own church, McGilvery is working to ensure children participate in worship services rather than always being splintered off into Sunday school.
At least once a month, kids join everyone else in the sanctuary. For those services, McGilvery employs videos, shorter sermons and even lets youngsters play and make noise as long as a layperson is not reading from the Bible.
“The church is one of the very few places left where all the generations meet together,” McGilvery says. “So we’re trying to preserve that kind of cross-generational” experience.
It remains to be seen whether such novel approaches will pay dividends when those children grow up and decide for themselves whether to attend church.
Either way, McGregor, with the Alliance Church, has reason for cautious optimism. He perceives a “growing desire” for people to “understand spirituality in the context of community,” creating potential growth for the church community.
McGregor says on a global scale, people are actually becoming more religious, not less, and the church as a whole is strong.
But no one denies there will be ebbs and flows. Even Flin Flon area churches that fare well in head counts face ambiguous long-term prospects as their congregations age swiftly.
At Northminster Memorial, McGilvery says upwards of 80 per cent of his usual congregation of 70 to 80 people are aged 60 or older. He believes that’s the norm for local churches.
At the Alliance Church, where a little over 60 people attend each Sunday, McGregor says about 30 per cent of worshippers are under the age of 30.
Age is an even more pressing concern at St. George’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which holds five services a year for about a dozen members.
Bill Borschewski, the treasurer at St. George’s, says the youngest congregation members are likely in their early 60s while over half are in their 80s.
“We can’t get any new members now,” says Borschewski, who has been part of St. George’s for over 60 years. “Nobody seems to care anymore and the old-timers are slowly going away. We’ll see what happens as we progress.”
Ruben, the First Baptist Church member, worries the waning of church attendance will mean fewer people get their innermost needs met.
“Of course you worry that the kids aren’t getting the spiritual information that they need to live a happy life,” Ruben says. “A lot of people say that when they find God, it makes them feel fuller, more whole, that they were missing something their whole life.”
For Ruben, church has become an indispensable part of life.
“It’s just a fellowship, really, knowing that there are other people who believe the same thing as you, people who you can turn to if you have questions or concerns or just need someone to talk to about difficulties that you’re facing,” Ruben says. “It’s kind of like a second family, really.”
