Love and marriage

If you’re old enough to remember the 1955 hit lyric “Love and marriage go together like a . . .”² then you’re old enough to notice that walking down the aisle of a church to get married is going the way of the horse and carriage.

Canadians are still getting married. Federal government cutbacks forced Statistics Canada to stop keeping count in 2008,³ but in the last decade of record keeping there were about 150,000 marriages each year. However, the percentage of Canadians choosing to get married in a United Church has been in steady decline from over 25 percent in 1945 to six percent in 2008. And that trend could reach zero by 2019.⁴

The future will not unfold in a straight line, but there are already

over 700 United Church congregations that had no weddings in 2012.⁵ And the threshold to be among the top 10 percent of United Church wedding chapels is six ceremonies per year.

In my ministry, walking down a church aisle was a part of almost every couple’s dream wedding — even if they had nothing to do with the church. Those loose ties to religion in the wider culture helped us connect to the community without evangelizing. People came to us for weddings, baptisms and funerals. So we didn’t need to go to them to share our experience of what a difference trusting Jesus and being part of a community of faith makes in one’s life. But as the wider culture becomes “spiritual but not religious,” far fewer people are turning to the church to meet these ritual needs: baptisms may also cease, and funerals will be fewer.⁶

This cultural shift is creating a number of issues for the United Church. One is that the post-war church building boom has left us with an excess building capacity that is now a burden to many congregations. But perhaps the more difficult change is the need to figure out what it means to be the church in a culture that doesn’t need us. What on earth are we good for? And what is the most viable way to organize and pay for ourselves to live out those purposes?

Rev. David Ewart is a United Church minister in Vancouver.

Published in the June 2014 issue of The United Church Observer, page 41. The Observer now operates as Broadview magazine.

Reality Check Revisited.
In 2014 I wrote a series of articles for The United Church Observer magazine called "Reality Check." They were based on projecting what the United Church would look like in 2025, its 100th Anniversary. Given that we are now engaged in Toward 2035, I wondered if what I said then might have relevance for where we are now.

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Notes:

1. The graphic was copied from The United Church Observer. The Observer now operates as Broadview magazine.
      
2. Lyrics by Sammy Cahn. Music by Jimmy Van Heusen. Released by Frank Sinatra, Capital Records, August 1955.
      
3. In my not so humble opinion, it was Stephen Harper's Conservative government that stopped reporting data about marriages after 2008 when LGBTQIA2S+ marriage became legal in Canada. It was not a budgeting decision. Statistics Canada has resumed compiling this data.
      
4. The number of United Church marriages in 2019 was 2,594, a decline of 72% from 2008 when there were 9,255. In 2019 there were 146,121 marriages in Canada. Less than 2% of these were performed by the United Church.
      
5. 1,300 congregations had no weddings in 2024.
      
6. In 2024 there were 2,131 baptisms of adults and children. However, all of these baptisms were celebrated by only 220 pastoral charges out of a total of 1,928.