Ten years after: a look
at United
Church renewal efforts
"We’re
here for the long haul. The need
for us won’t go away."
By Bob Bettson Special to ChristianWeek
HAMILTON–It’s been ten years since the United Church of Canada’s (UCC) general council decided at a landmark meeting in Victoria that being a practicing homosexual should not bar a candidate otherwise qualified from being ordained.
That decision was a lightning rod for protest from theologically conservative UCC members, ultimately spawning two new renewal groups.
Not many who attended the first gathering of Faithfulness Today in Hamilton in 1990 could have guessed that the protest movement, which drew more than 700 people fiercely committed to calling the church back to orthodoxy, would become a permanent part of the landscape.
But in early May in Hamilton, 200 United Church clergy and laity gathered again for a slimmed down but still timely meeting in the shadow of moderator Bill Phipps’s comments last fall questioning traditional Christian teaching on the resurrection and the divinity of Christ.
