Let us pray: O God we sing “Behold, behold, I make all things new”. Help us to be so open to the workings of your Spirit in our lives that we are able to recognize the newness you call us to. Amen.

Last week I shared with you a bit of the struggles that are being faced by the United Church Women organization in Alberta and Northwest Conference at their recent annual meeting. Their situation is representative of struggles that are taking place all across the church. Never has there been a time in my twenty years of ministry or my more than thirty years as an adult participant in church congregations where so much concern has been expressed about the future of the church. The statistics are quite stark, with attendance dwindling in congregations all across our denomination, and with presbytery business sessions having to deal with the amalgamation or closing of church buildings all across the country. Church boards have seemingly always had to deal with the important task of working within tight budgets and making good use of limited resources, and there is a constant search for new and exciting ways to develop stewardship in the membership of a congregation, but in many cases this situation has taken on a new urgency if not having taken a dive into a situation that presents aspects of a crisis. The Executive of the General Council of The United Church of Canada is meeting this weekend and on their agenda are some very difficult decisions with regard to the future of the national General Council offices in light of the fact that there is an expectation of a significant deficit in funding for staff and programmes because givings to the Mission and Service Fund – which provides resources not only for many important mission partnerships across the country and around the world, but also provides funding for the people who do critical work for the church – have flat lined over the past decade. The good news is that people who give to the Mission and Service fund have increased their contributions significantly, but the bad news is that fewer and fewer people are giving to the fund. Of course, this is not just a situation faced by the national church. The very reason that congregations are having to close or amalgamate is because the same thing is happening to local givings. People are more generous now than they've ever been, that is if they continue to be donors to the work at all. In other words, fewer people are contributing more, but the increase in offerings is not keeping up with the decrease in givers.

I was recently talking to my colleague Sally Boyle, the person who will succeed me as president of Alberta and Northwest Conference. You may recall that a little over a year ago I attended a gathering of presidents-elect in Toronto in anticipation of my taking on the role of president. Sally did the same this year and in reporting back from that gathering she expressed the concern that there is a great deal of distress in many places across the church. I suspect, in fact I know that our situation is not much different than it is for our sisters and brothers in other congregations and denominations across our country and continent.

This week I was at a different gathering of the church. It was the annual meeting of the Ethnic Ministries committee of our conference. This is a group of people who represent congregations that serve specific ministry needs with ethnic communities in our church. There were representatives there from Korean speaking and Chinese speaking communities. In addition there were people of Japanese and Filipino background in attendance. That's the makeup of ethnic ministry in our conference, but across the church there are other such congregations representing other cultures – Hungarian, Welsh and Armenian to name a few, but there are also congregations who are part of our denomination serving smaller populations. For example a Ghanaian congregation in the Toronto area and deaf congregations in a few places. While the ethnic ministry committee of the conference has some specific interests and representation to deal with, this gathering was also an opportunity to spend some time thinking about the work that was intentionally begun at a General Council of our church in 2006 in Thunder Bay and continued and expanded at the most recent General Council in Kelowna. As a General Council we (and I say we for two reasons – one because the General Council is the denominational decision making body, and because we had two people from this congregation at General Council – namely Lloyd Henderson and myself, as well as a number of former congregation members – recalling the present and alumni photo that was taken during the meeting) made a commitment to continue the work of becoming an intercultural church.

Our guest speaker was Steve Willey who works in the Communities in Mission Unit of General Council, the group that has specific responsibility for intercultural work. It was distressing to me to hear Steve talk about the fact that the United Church in Toronto is in crisis. In part this is because the church has not kept pace with the incredible ethnic diversity that exists in the Greater Toronto area. It is well known that Toronto is the most culturally diverse city in the world, but a survey of congregations of the United Church in Toronto would not reveal that fact. Before we get too smug, we know ourselves that Yellowknife is very culturally diverse as well, and yet our congregation does not represent that situation very well either.

I'm sorry if this is all sounding too depressing. I admit that my view lately seems to have been drawn to all the concerns being expressed across our church in these areas – dwindling resources, shrinking congregations, the Women's Organizations not seeing a future, staffing cuts in the offing at both the national and conference level. It's hard not to be drawn into a spiralling circle of concern and anxiety.

Into this mix, however we have certain elements that point to a hopeful future. The people at Emerging Spirit continually point to the searching nature of a significant portion of a younger generation and how the United Church is at a place which would be most attractive to this younger generation in terms of the issues that they and we find important, in terms of the way in which this generation sees God at work in the world and in society. Steve Willey in telling the Intercultural story sees not only the potential for having the church become more representative of the population, but also for the transformative nature of becoming a church which engages in mutually reciprocal relationships among people of many different cultures. For me, I see this in the most wide open way possible, with recognition of cultures represented by people who speak different languages as their first language, by people of colour and people of different ethnic background, but also cultures defined by other differences – youth culture, aboriginal culture, northern culture. The call to be in community is one which invites us to be in relationship with each other, to learn from each other and to build groups which reflect the diversity of race and culture which is part of God's gift to us as beings of the world and universe.

This, of course, is what Peter's vision is all about – a game changing vision. One could say that this is the crucial moment in the Christian church – as significant as Pentecost. Paul lived this vision out in his travels to tell the message of Jesus to many different groups around the Mediterranean, but this is the vision that guided him.

I received many significant insights over the past couple of weeks in my visits with both the conference United Church Women and the Ethnic Ministries committee of our conference, and I can't hope to outline all of them in the course of reflections in just two weeks. So I expect that these insights will continue to come out in following weeks. I also want to be clear that my concern for the church does not extend to our local situation to any great degree. I think in some ways we in Yellowknife are not representative of the trend, although there are inklings of it. However, it is our local situation which serves to temper some of the distressing signs I've seen and the concerns that have bubbled to the surface for me. Ultimately it will be congregations that change the trend. It will be congregations that find new ways of being, new ways of serving God that will create the change we hope for. But we must all be ready to change. That has always been the case and it has never been more true than it is now.

In his final conversation with us on Thursday morning, Steve Willey left us with this quote. I think it says a whole lot about the new way we are called to be and the new way we are to envision the mission of the church. It is both a freeing and an inviting description of what we are to be, and also challenging, and it is what I want to leave you with today. The church of God does not have a mission, the mission of God has a church. Amen.