![]() ![]() My experience of course is essentially a Canadian one, but the decline we have seen in Canada is not an isolated one as there have been similar issues for the church across the world. Link: COVID may have hastened Christianity's decline in Canada (National Post) Sociologists predict that by 2040 the Anglican Church in Canada will have already disappeared. The Anglican Church of Canada for example had about 1.3 million members in 1961 but by 2017, that number had dropped to 282,000 - the vast majority of them senior citizens. In 2019, it was reported that out of Canada’s 27,000 churches, more than a third of them would face closure within the next decade. Fortunately, my parents were pretty cool (non-believers themselves), and when I told them that I wasn’t interested in attending with my grandma, they didn’t force me. One of them was my sister, who continued attending with my grandma for the rest of her high school days. None of this really had any effect on my life, but for some young people it was good enough. Instead, the philosophy became one of “God is Love,” focusing more on the positive aspects of faith. ![]() Gone were the days of preacher man standing at his pulpit telling everyone they were going to hell. So, by the time I was a teenager, church services started changing to a ‘less threatening’ rock concert-like experience. When it came to young people though, a strategy change was necessary. Senior citizens were going to go to church every Sunday, no matter what was going on. The problem for most churches in North America is that the vast majority of congregations aged to a point that, from a business point of view, wasn’t very sustainable. The movie was so poorly made that it didn’t really have the desired effect. The shift wasn’t something that happened overnight, but I have vivid memories of being sat down in front of a TV during my pre-teen years at my grandma’s house with my younger sister and was forced to watch an ‘End of Days’ film. As most young people of my generation are likely to understand, the old ‘fire-and-brimstone’ style of scaring people into religion was something that had to change as young people, like myself, rejected the negativity presented by the church. I may have grown up in a predominately Christian community, with a grandmother who tried to frighten my younger sister and I into religion. The latter though, I’m assuming is because there are so many clean cut missionaries bicycling around the island evangelizing that people just started assuming we’re all followers. For most of us Canadians living here, it can be something that becomes relatively annoying, but after a few years, I came to the conclusion that there obviously weren’t any ill-intentions involved. Given Taiwan’s post-war history, its understandable that a lot of older people would just assume that you’re an American. One of them is that we’re all American, of course. Living in Taiwan, people tend to assume a few things about foreigners. I’m going to preface this one with a bit of a personal story. ![]()
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