Where the gifts are bountiful

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/12/2010 (5563 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the clock struck midnight it was a perfect Christmas: a sprinkling of sugary snow, the twinkling of tiny stars. Not windy. Not too cold.

At that moment, inside All Saints Church at the corner of Osborne Street and Broadway, hands reached out across pews and aisles, clasping each other. Strangers shook hands with strangers and a minister, clad in the heavy embroidered cloak of the feast, ran his palm along a child’s shining hair. “Peace be with you,” they murmured. “The peace of Christ be with you.”

The Anglican midnight mass began with a procession, a white-robed choir marching behind a golden Jesus held high on a cross; but the service was serious, not sombre. Especially not when the choral director introduced a hymn, In Navitivatem Domini. “If we had done this next hymn in the traditional way, we would have done it outside on the church stairs,” choral director Dietrich Bartel announced to 200 of All Saints’ parishioners and visitors. “But it’s a little cold in Winnipeg to be doing this on the church stairs.”

The laughter rippled through the congregation, sitting upright in the prim old pews, seats so upright that All Saints minister Rev. Paul Johnson once quipped, “you can tell they were made for military men.” The church was too, built in 1926 to seat 650 people.

On Christmas Eve, silver-haired gents in suits and teens in jeans alike bowed their heads to pray underneath the faded banners of regiments. They prayed in sight of plaques cast by mourning parents after the First World War: a Dennistoun son, a Young boy, fallen soldiers immortalized on walls of the English Gothic-style sanctuary.

These days, churches tend history as much as they tend faith. Johnson knows this. But he also knows a church cannot live by history alone. And at the midnight mass, when the time for the sermon was at hand, he spoke of bringing history back to the present.

The word of God is everywhere, he called out, and the gathered faithful nodded their heads. “The word,” he added, “is even on Facebook.”

Johnson spent much of the last week preparing this sermon. “You want somebody to hear something they’ve never heard before, some word of hope,” Johnson explained, hours before the Christmas Eve service. “Somehow you have to relate that to the retired business executive, and the person who has nothing, maybe not even a place to stay.”

Maybe there is one thing that the prosperous retiree and the struggling single parent do share. Maybe the harmonies of the choir, the calls for peace, tremble against All Saints’ plaster ceiling and dust off visitors’ old memories.

“There may be some here tonight because once, you believed, and you would like to believe again,” Johnson preached. “You’re nostalgic for the good ol’ days when life was simple… Who wouldn’t want to recapture that?”

— — —

Exactly 24 hours before the All Saints choir launched into the Alleluia, on the road to some open-all-night megastore, a Free Press reporter mentioned to a friend that she would be attending Anglican holiday services. His brow furrowed.

“I would like to read that article,” he said. “I’ve never been to church on Christmas. But I’ve always been curious.”

The traditions of Canada’s past have come undone. Once a nation of believers, the culture no longer bears what Johnson calls “the true meaning of Christmas.”

At the last federal census, almost 350,000 more Canadians called themselves Christian in 2001 than 1991, but their percentage of the nation had dropped to 77 per cent, from 81 per cent. This sounds like a large figure, but most families from nominally Christian families don’t go to church much; across Canada, churches have spent much of the last two decades facing the uncomfortable reality of a greying congregation.

Mainline Protestant denominations have been hit especially hard. In 2005, a report showed that the Anglican Church had lost 53 per cent of its membership in only 40 years, and parishioner lists continued to shrink by almost 13,000 a year. If this rate continues apace, the church will be extinct in Canada by the middle of the century.

Nor are the Anglicans alone: according to the last census, the United Church lost 39 per cent of its members between 1961 and 2001; Lutherans, Baptists and Presbyterians also saw their flocks dwindle, as did many smaller churches.

But Christmas, as a holiday, didn’t shrink with them. Instead, in the last 40 years it surged to become a linchpin economic engine in much of the developed world, fuelling the survival of the retail sector.

So sweeping is the rise of Consumer Christmas that many Canadians think Christmas is the most important Christian holiday. (Easter is.)

Once, the faithful celebrated Christmas in an age of faith. So how does one now hold onto faith in an age of Christmas?

“It boggles my mind that people use the day as a celebration of just to get gifts and get together, but they’ve lost the reason why you get together,” John Van Benthem said before donning white-and-red robes to sing out from the top row of the church choir.

At 33, Van Benthem is the face that churches across Canada are searching for. He’s a fourth-generation worshipper at All Saints. His grandfather sang hymns in the All Saints choir for 76 years. After straying from the church briefly, Van Benthem came back 13 years ago, longing to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Since then, he sang on Canadian Idol, sang in England, sang in choirs and operas across the world.

But his voice, much of the time, belongs to this church — especially on the day commemorating the birth of the Christian Messiah. “People say ‘what do you want for Christmas?’ ” Van Benthem grinned. “And I say, only half-jokingly, ‘I just want you guys at church.'”

— — —

On Christmas Eve, Van Benthem’s voice was hard to miss, a full-bodied vibrato swelling between the pews as he and the choir followed the cross out of the service, singing the whole way. “Hark, the herald angels sing…”

Maybe the music was the heart of the night. Maybe it is the heart of this All Saints. This old choral music — delicate, but sturdy as steel — draws many parishioners back, about 100 each Sunday.

Margaret Morse has been coming here for more than 70 years. She was born down the street, in the house that’s now the Wasabi restaurant. Her father, a pediatrician from the Chown family, used to have his offices there.

“There’s a stability in this church, just because of its beauty,” Morse says, listing off the royalty — Princess Margaret, Prince Philip — who visited All Saints over the years. “And a lot of people are attracted to it because of the music.”

And also, attracted because of what the church is becoming.

On Christmas Day, recovered from the hustle and bustle of the night before, Johnson is back in plain white vestments. For this sermon, he is more a laid-back teacher.

When the service ends, the group clears out quickly. They have to, Johnson explains, to make way for the congregation of Sudanese Anglicans that shares the sanctuary; it is one of many ministries that All Saints has forged bonds with, to keep the building full of life and faith and hope.

There is another reason to hold out hope for the future, too.

During the Christmas Eve service, while the congregation exchanged hearty handshakes, Barb Hicks stood up and marched back across six rows of pews, straight to where a Free Press reporter was sitting alone, unnoticed. The church warden stretched out her hand. “You can’t get away that easy,” she winked. “Peace be with you.”

And also, with you.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca