In June 2015, Broadview’s predecessor publication, The United Church Observer, published an essay titled, “Do We Still Believe That Something Vital Is in the Making?” The occasion was the United Church’s 90th anniversary, and the writer was Phyllis Airhart, author of A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (2014). Today, Airhart is professor emerita of the history of Christianity at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto. To mark the United Church’s centennial this month, she collaborated with Broadview to reformat and update her original piece. We begin with her provocative opening salvo.

The United Church of Canada’s ‘death wish’

Does The United Church of Canada have a death wish? Has that question ever crossed your mind as you stewed over unflattering comments about one of its controversial positions? Is this a church that is willing and even wanting to die for its convictions?

If a reporter had put that question to some of the thousands leaving the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto on June 10, 1925, they might well have answered yes. Much of the publicity for the event had billed it as the birth of The United Church of Canada. The sermon they heard that day, however, was a sombre reminder that discipleship demands sacrifice and sometimes even death.

The elegant 37-page order of service gave few hints about the sermon. Scheduled after the formal declaration of church union, it was tersely listed as “Communion sermon (by Minister appointed).” As Methodist Rev. S.P. Rose from the Wesleyan Theological College in Montreal strode to the pulpit, the audience perhaps expected to hear him preach on the scripture passage read earlier, John 17, with Jesus’ prayer “that they all may be one” so often quoted by proponents of church union.

Instead, Rose read John 12:24-32, and delivered a sermon focused on one verse in particular: “except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Challenging his listeners to embrace a willingness to die in order to “enter into a larger life,” Rose pressed the point that the grain of wheat that does not die will perish.

The dying wheat image must have been a poignant one for those who moments before had ceremonially relinquished their old institutional names and symbolically bequeathed a prized feature of each tradition to the United Church as an “inheritance.” The ritual captured the paradox that had brought them together: they intended to be a life-giving presence in communities across Canada in the future — and were willing to let their separate denominational identities die to make it happen.

The United Church’s founding vision

The United Church has never shied away from putting its identity on the line. When Methodists, Congregationalists, most Presbyterians and congregations already operating as union churches launched the denomination, the founders let go of some of their distinctiveness — their “peculiarities,” as they put it — to build a church united by what they held in common. They believed their venture would not only improve operational efficiency, but also create better persons, better communities and a better nation. That conviction provided a positive rationale for the difficult decisions that followed, such as closing or amalgamating congregations in some places to open new ones in others.

In a sense, the founders succeeded beyond........

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