I am often asked by Christian colleagues in other denominations why I stay with the United Church of Canada (UCC), given its roll out of disturbing positions on Israel that descend into a theological miasma of antisemitism. The question comes from Christian leaders who know, as I do, how political ideology can become a form of idol worship. Although turning away might be an easier path, I’d like to offer some thoughts about staying in the fight as a form of stubborn theological conviction.
Certainly, I have ample reason to transfer to a new denominational family. In August and September, the national meeting of the United Church of Canada debated several radical, one-sided proposals on Israel and Palestine, full of propaganda and sometimes outright lies. The proposals label Israel a “genocidal settler-colonial project” committing “ethnic cleansing” and describe the October 7, 2023 pogrom as a “raid” driven by “resistance.” The proposals even have the audacity to tell Jews in Canada what definition of antisemitism the denomination will accept, recommending The Jerusalem Declaration above all others. Since 10/7, the UCC has issued, at best, morally ambiguous statements, and, at worst, statements that point the finger of blame for all this death and destruction solely at Israel. These statements minimize the severity of the evil at hand and demonstrate the inability to step into this complex issue with humility and a willingness to listen.
It is even more discouraging that the UCC is walking backwards and repudiating the work of previous church leaders to build a strong relationship with the Jewish community in Canada. There was a time when the UCC could credibly state that it believed that Jewish people have a right to exist and live in their historic lands in peace and security. The UCC affirmed this principle in 2003 as denomination policy in Bearing Faithful Witness.
However, the ink was not even dry on this interfaith effort before political activists in the denomination started to work against its theological insight. Every three years, the UCC hosts a national meeting of commissioners from across the regions. In each General Council meeting since 2003, there have been proposals calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, along with major criticism. The three “Ds” of modern antisemitism—double standards, demonization, and delegitimization—have all been well represented in these proposals. In each case, the national office staff have had to try to downplay, obfuscate, and delay further action in order to try to save some semblance of connection to the mainstream national Jewish organizations in Canada. But Christian antisemitism still keeps growing and sickening the body of the denomination.
In the midst of all this anti-Israel rhetoric, two important and salient truths have emerged about the relationship between denomination and those in the pews. First, very few people outside of the polity of the UCC care what it officially has to say about political issues. Second, the vast majority of people sitting in the pews do not share these views. The General Council does not speak for them.
The UCC is a curious enigma in the landscape of the Christian church in Canada. It was the closest thing Canada had to a state church because it was founded by an Act of Parliament in 1925. Over the decades, it wielded considerable influence in the public discourse on many social, cultural, and economic issues.
But all of that has collapsed. Membership has declined dramatically over the last sixty years. The UCC is now closing churches regularly and rapidly in all regions of the country. There is a dearth of new ordained ministers, and many local congregations now find that they cannot call a new minister, pay the operating expenses, or maintain their church buildings. In short, most congregations do not pay attention to what happens at the national church level, because they are just trying to survive or, unfortunately, do the work of closing down and selling the property.
In this maelstrom, I continue to provide ministry to a small aging congregation that sold its large, grandiose cathedral church to Carleton University back in 2019 and now rents back space for worship and community outreach to seniors and the homeless population in downtown Ottawa.
Ironically, my church represents a microcosm of the national denomination because it has few congregants left, but it was able to constitute a multimillion-dollar endowment following the sale of its building. All of that money is actually under the control and authority of the national church through its regional structures. The denomination is increasingly becoming cash rich and people poor. This, in part, explains why the UCC can still plan national meetings that spend significant budgets discussing things that seem so distant and irrelevant to the local congregations.
So, I press on doing the ministry that I believe God is calling me to do. That ministry is informed by my theological worldview that is deeply grounded in the timeless and eternal covenant God established with Abraham, the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the witness of the earliest churches that tried to navigate the turbulent waters of Jews and Gentiles coming together in shared conviction.
There are a number of situations in all four of the Gospels where Jesus told his first followers that they would be persecuted and excluded by the state power of Rome and the religious elite of his time. Jesus and his disciples were Jews. The first churches were early “Christ confessors” from the Jewish community. He counseled them to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). He told them that not a single letter of the Torah changes because of his teachings (Matthew 5:18). He held them to that standard as a minimum. And that is how I approach my ministry.
I believe strongly that the animus and hate being directed to Israel today from the “moderate” mainline Christian world is the contemporary morphing of historic Christian antisemitism that assumes Judaism is an inferior and replaced faith. I have said that publicly, written about it, and advocated against it. I have called it antisemitism because, as a practice of Christian theology, this steady drift away from the spirit of Bearing Faithful Witness means abandoning the existence of Israel as it is constituted today and replacing it with something totally antithetic to Judaism. To me, this sounds like the latest version of replacement theology.
For this effort, I have had some vitriol directed at me along with a measure of exclusion. I don’t fear the hate mail and phone calls I receive. While some of my colleagues have tried to ostracize me, I remain steadfast in my determination to not let them impact my ministry.
Nothing I have experienced comes even remotely close to the reality of life today for Jews in Canada. My Jewish friends and colleagues continue to tell me about disturbing and threatening things that they have had to endure. It is self-evident in what I see happening in the streets in Ottawa. Regularly, street protests pass my church in downtown Ottawa and I hear chants of “kill Zionists,” “Jewish genocide,” “from the river to the sea,” and “global intifada.” These words lead to more direct violence, as we saw in the recent hate-motivated stabbing of an older Jewish woman guilty of nothing more than shopping for groceries.
I am blessed to have strong support from the congregation that I serve. Under the terms and by-laws of our denomination, local churches have a lot of autonomy and cannot be forced to accept a certain theological orientation pushed by those able to control the process at the national level.
I have always had strong support from the congregations I serve. I wonder if Jews in Canada have this same sense of being supported and engaged? These days, I fear not. That fact drives my conviction that, as a Christian leader, I have a moral obligation to speak out against the growing toxin of antisemitism. We all have a moral obligation to speak out.
This is why I stay in the UCC: to bear witness to the special covenant between Christians and Jews.