As you might expect, the outlandish idea of an atheist minister has captured the imagination of journalists and the praise of many inside and outside the church. It has also provoked substantial criticism, but so far the church has not followed through on calls to remove her from ordained ministry.

What kind of a church has an atheist pastor?

As you might expect, the outlandish idea of an atheist minister has captured the imagination of journalists and the praise of many inside and outside the church. It has also provoked substantial criticism, but so far the church has not followed through on calls to remove her from ordained ministry.

In today’s United Church, requiring ministers to believe in God is a controversial idea. So what’s the story behind the United Church of Canada?

Formation

The United Church was formed in 1925 by the merger of two large Canadian denominations, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, as well as the much smaller Congregationalists. Although only two-thirds of the Presbyterians joined the union (the rest carried on as the Presbyterian Church in Canada), the United Church still began its life as the largest Protestant church in Canada.

The architects of the union hoped that their new church would eventually encompass all Protestant churches in Canada. They thought cooperation would enable its members to decisively shape the spiritual life of the young Dominion—and to carry on social service, especially to the poor, on a much larger scale. And although those dreams never fully came to pass, the United Church has always commanded at least the nominal allegiance of more Canadians than any other Protestant church. In most parts of the country, nearly every small town has a United Church, often with names like “Knox” and “Wesley” that reflect their Presbyterian or Methodist origins.

Interestingly, in the nineteenth century, Canada’s Methodists and Presbyterians had been deeply evangelical in their beliefs and spirituality. As with many mainline Protestant denominations, however, they were infiltrated by theological liberalism at the end of the century, as ideas from Germany and Britain found a foothold first in the Canadian theological colleges and then in the pulpits. By the First World War the theology of Schleiermacher, not Wesley or Knox, was running the show.

The Early Decades

Nevertheless, in its early decades the United Church still presented a broadly evangelical face to the world. From the 1930s through the 1950s, it carried forward evangelical causes of the nineteenth century, such as mass revivalism campaigns. A spirituality centred on “decisions for Christ” continued to be important to many church leaders, even those who no longer believed in the doctrines that had previously underpinned such phrases. As late as the 1950s, for instance, many official bodies and leaders endorsed Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns in Canada.

Behind-the-scenes research in the archives shows, however, that many of these same leaders were deeply critical of basic evangelical orthodoxy. The principal of the church’s theological college in Edmonton, A.S. Tuttle, for example, proposed replacing the doctrine of the Trinity with the idea that God was a life force driving the process of “emergent evolution,” and Jesus was simply evolution’s greatest achievement.

While such sentiments were rarely aired in public, they did make an impact. In 1940 the church’s theological elite issued a new statement of faith that left out the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection of Christ, and eternal punishment.

The Turbulent Sixties

Clearly, something had to give. Practices like mass evangelism made sense because they assumed a certain kind of theology—theology United Church leaders had left behind. The events of the 1960s resolved that tension, decisively, in favour of liberalism.

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