The online lecture series marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa wrapped up on March 13 with a remarkable lecture from British public theologian the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells, Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. 

While all four of the free lectures, now posted on the Diocesan YouTube channel, have been gifts for all to enjoy and share broadly, this last one on “Re-Imagining Church” seemed to be particularly apt as the diocesan church reconsiders the Shape of Parish Ministry. Wells offered abundant inspiration.

Welcoming Wells, Bishop Shane Parker quoted American theologian Walter Brueggermann’s description of him as arguably having “the liveliest, most agile, best-informed, critically disciplined mind in the entire Christian community and he has a baptised heart of honesty, compassion and passion to match.”

All that was evident as Wells began by reflecting on questions as expansive as “What if we are the early church?” and “If there hadn’t been a fall, would Jesus still have come?” and “Why was there creation?”

That last question is one of the great questions, Wells said. “The answer I’m going to suggest to you is that That-which-lasts-forever, which you and I call God, chose to be in relationship with something beyond itself….

“And then astonishingly, and this is the great claim of the Christian faith, that relationship was constituted by God becoming one of us…. That is Christmas,” he said. Easter, Wells went on to say, demonstrates that “whatever we do we cannot push that relationship away, however much we might reject it,” and the Ascension shows “that the whole point of all things was that God would finally be with us in essence forever.

“What we’ve arrived at is the heart of what church and what heaven are fundamentally about and that is being with one another,” Wells said.

Our churches, however, are structured on a different model, Wells said. It is a model based more on a view of that Jesus came to fix our human problems, like a plumber coming to fix a broken pipe, rather than coming to be in relationship with us. Wells added that we see our problem as our limitations, and all the things we do not have enough of, but it is, actually, isolation. 

“If our human problem is isolation, what we need is one another, and that’s something we already have. We have everything we need. We just have to turn our alienation from one another into ‘being with’ with one another, and that’s what I see Jesus and the Holy Spirit doing….

“My thesis for you tonight, is that the church of the future that I’ve been asked with you to reimagine is a church that focuses on what our true calling is as human beings, as disciples, as the body of Christ, and isn’t preoccupied with a kind of personal escape from present reality, which is the way salvation has too often been conceived.”

He then turned to describing how St.-Martin-in-the-Fields church, where he has been the vicar since 2012, lives out these ideas. 

Wells traced beginning of the decline of the church in the U.K. back to the government’s creation of “the welfare state” and the National Health Service in 1948. The church celebrated the creation of these social services, he said, believing they would end poverty and inequality. And then, he said, the church disasterously “stopped doing interesting things,” in health care and education, for example. 

The reason why St. Martins “has such a high profile in the United Kingdom, is because it never stopped doing interesting things,” Wells said. “It is those interesting things that are our understandings of the kingdom of God.” The Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields is renowned for its music. Amnesty International began at St. Martins, and the church is known for its work with the homeless.

In 2017, St. Martin’s founded an organization called HeartEdge “because we wanted to recapture the imagination of a church that we saw as captivated by scarcity….the feeling that we don’t have enough” information, resources, numbers, money, or social influence.

Wells posited that “we actually have too much God, but to avoid feeling overwhelmed “we’ve developed strong resistances to receiving the too much that God has to give us.”

HeartEdge focuses on the four Cs: commerce, culture, compassion and congregation.

Churches “seem to have created this rather lame culture by which we are a one-trick pony. We do congregational stewardship and if that doesn’t produce enough money, then we close things down. What about all the other ways that you make money in this wonderful world, most of which come under the heading of commerce?,” Wells asked.

In 1987, St. Martin’s no longer had the income it needed for its mission, so it set up its own business. Pre-pandemic, its two cafes, events business, shop, and commercial concerts business employed about 120 people. “It increased by tenfold the number of people coming across our threshold. It obviously paid the bills, but more significantly, it modelled what healthy relationships between adult human beings could look like,” Wells explained. “We still have congregational stewardship, which pays maybe about a quarter of our bills, but we’ve increased fourfold our potential income, and it has hugely expanded our ambition for what we can be doing together as a church.”

The second C is culture, which Wells likened to an “estuary, a place where the saltwater of the sea mingles with the fresh water of a river. So an estuary of culture you can imagine as the place where the creative energy of the world meets the receptive energy of the church. It’s a wonderful place of intermingling,” A classic example would be an art exhibition in a church building, The art may is not necessarily be Christian, but it provokes conversation “which is where the dynamic energy of the Holy Spirit is most at work,” he said.

The third C is compassion, which Wells said, “may begin with pity, but it ends with the renewal of the church. To take in a Ukrainian right now is to enable your church to be renewed by the extraordinary resilience and faith of the person who comes to share your existence with you.”

The fourth C is congregation. “I would like the church to cease to think of congregation as something that can be considered out of relationship to the other three Cs. It’s been our experience at St. Martins that commerce, culture and compassion have redefined how church functions for us.”

A link to the full lecture and the previous three is on the diocesan website and YouTube channel.

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Good’s novel takes readers into the trauma her characters experience while attending Indian Residential School and its impacts in their lives. Welcoming Good and the more than 100 people listening via Zoom, Bishop Shane Parker acknowledged the Anglican Church of Canada’s involvement in operating residential schools and the harm done. He spoke of the church’s two heartfelt apologies and efforts in recent decades “to put itself on a path to be a reconciler” and to build a profoundly new relationship with Indigenous peoples. 

The bishop noted that it was important for the Diocese to mark its 125th anniversary not looking back with nostalgia but looking forward and listening “to things we need to hear now as a people who face the future, things that are important to our life as a church and to the world around us.” This first lecture in a series of four was offered in collaboration with the diocesan All My Relations Working Group.

Good, who is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation on Treaty Six Territory, began working with Indigenous organizations in her teens and worked for over 20 years before becoming a lawyer in her early 40s. Her practice focused on advocacy for residential school survivors.  She thanked organizers the invitation and the chance to continue the work she has chosen, which she described as “lighting a dialogue fire between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with an urge to really come to understand what reconciliation will entail with a full understanding of the truths.”

History

She began with a definition of colonialism: “’the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically.’ There in a nutshell is the story of colonial Canada,” she said. “The people who came to this land did so with a very specific economic agenda and that agenda is one that we continue to live with to this day in terms of the never-ending exploitation of natural resources.”

Then she offered some historical “snapshots.” Some were personal — photos of her mother, aunts, uncles at the Anglican St. Barnabas Residential School at Onion Lake and her Kokum (grandmother) at the Battleford Industrial School in North Battleford, Sask.

She read a powerful passage from her novel about a young girl finding out that her friend had died of tuberculosis in the night at the residential school, her body gone, the bed already empty in the morning. Good said the story was based on her mother’s experience of watching her friend, who had tuberculosis, hemorrhage to death on the playground at school. 

Other snapshots echoed the words of some key figures in the history of residential schools. 

In 1907, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the first medical officer for the department of Indian Affairs, was commissioned to do a study of living conditions in residential schools, looking at aspects such as nutrition and ventilation. “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies. Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards,” he wrote. “Dr. Bryce, one of my heroes, was summarily fired,” she said, noting that none of his recommendations to prevent the spread of tuberculosis were put into place.

Then came remarks made by Duncan Campbell Scott, superintendent of Indian Affairs, in 1918:

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness habituating so closely in residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages, but this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian problem.”

Good pointed out that the phrase “final solution” now associated with the Holocaust was used first by Scott. And in 1920, attendance at the schools was made mandatory.

“I used to think that it was only [a policy of] assimilation, but my thinking has evolved, and in fact in my view, this is genocide,” she said. 

Good noted that a definition of genocide developed after the Second World War included the removal of children from one group to another. “This was a systematic removal of children from Indigenous communities with the specific and articulated objective of dismembering families, communities and nations.”

Reconciliation

Turning to the present, Good said: “The concept of reconciliation, as I see it in non-Indigenous Canada, has its limits. Reconciliation is okay as long as it doesn’t interfere with the existing power relations and economic relations in Canada.” 

She mentioned the dispute over the pipeline on Wet’suwet’en land as an example. 

“There is a Supreme Court of Canada decision that says that land belongs to the Wet’suwe’en, but the power of the state is brought to fore because the meaningful acceptance of their ownership of that land interferes with the Canadian economy,” she said. 

“Until there can be a meaningful sharing of resources, so that we can have the necessary resources to implement healing, growth and meaningful self-governance and self-determination, real jurisdiction and real recognition that it, in fact, belongs to us, if we don’t have those things, the rest is just words.”

Allies, she said, must do as the Indigenous allies did when they supported the British and French in conflict. “They were allies to the death. They stood until they could not stand anymore. And that is what non-Indigneous people need to do. They need to stand until they cannot stand anymore. It is not enough for performative responses to our reality,” Good said. 

“We are now… in the final stage of colonialism … when nobody needs to do anything terrible to us anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. On one hand, we have that awful reality of being the highest in all terrible statistics — incarceration, addiction, suicide, being a murder victim, being a sexual assault victim, all of those statistics, we are number one. On the other hand, we have this phenomenal will to survive as we are….If only we could have the support, meaningful support, beyond words, we would be able to re-establish, self-governance, self-determination, and healing for our own communities.”

The whole lecture can be viewed on the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa’s YouTube channel.

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The first activity in a commemoration was the launch of the new diocesan brand at Synod.

The second is a series of anniversary lectures on four themes — Indigenous issues, affordable housing, the environment and reimaging church.

The first speaker will be Michelle Good, an Indigenous lawyer and author of Five Little Indians, which won the 2020 Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her lecture will take place online on Dec. 6 (See calendar on p. 16 for details) and is co-sponsored by the diocesan All My Relations working group.

In January, the series will feature the Rev. Dr. Jason McKinney, a Toronto priest whose lectures and workshops on the theology of land have been highly recommended by the Homelessness and Affordable Housing Working Group. 

In February, the series will have a lecture or panel on the environment.

In March, the series will conclude with a lecture on the theme of Reimaging Church by Sam Wells, the Vicar at St.-Martins-in-the-Fields in London, U.K. Theologian Walter Brueggermann describes Wells as “having the liveliest, most agile, best-informed, critically disciplined mind in the entire Christian community.

The lectures will be live-streamed and available on the Diocesan YouTube channel afterward.

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