The Canadian branch of the Worldwide Church of God family has shared the same turbulence as the rest of our brethren.
From Randal Dick
Superintendent of missions
Window on the World this time is a report about the church in Canada from Gary Moore, who serves as regional director with his wife, Tamara.
By Gary Moore
The Canadian branch of the Worldwide Church of God family has shared the same turbulence
as the rest of our brethren.
The experience can only be called bittersweet. The joy at seeing more clearly than ever before the core issues of Christianity has been mixed with the sadness of seeing friends leave the fellowship.
The joy, however, is growing, and our congregations are becoming much more happy and stable.
Our fellowship in Canada was built largely from media --as is true of our worldwide family. The penetration of the media efforts of the church in Canada was perhaps the greatest on a per capita basis of any country in the world.
By the late 1980s, however, we began to see a decline in response to our media work. We began to realize that people in this country needed more than just an exposure to media if they were going to make changes in their belief systems and in their lives.
The doctrinal changes heightened our awareness that it is Christ in us that makes us the lights of the world we are intended to be--living, walking, talking advertisements of the kingdom, as Mr. Tkach Sr. used to say.
Of course, the income drop we experienced during the period of doctrinal realignment drastically reduced our ability to support blanket national media coverage.
Frank Brown, the previous director of the church in Canada, decided to look at a reengineering of the operations of the church here.
With the assistance of staff from Coopers and Lybrand, a retreat was convened, involving personnel from the national office and representatives from the field ministry.
Participants developed a vision statement that reflected our doctrinal corrections and describing the kind of place we wanted our 77 congregations to be. We offered that vision to members and made revisions based on their input.
From that vision we decided on a downsized national office that would support ministers and congregations, as they in turn supported individual members in their Christian walk.
The point of contact for exposing society to the gospel would now be Christ living in the thousands of members organized in the coast to coast string of congregations.
To somewhat oversimplify the concept, the operational approach of the church was inverted. The pyramid was turned upside down.
Rather than members and congregations supporting a media effort, which would serve as the primary point of contact with society, members and congregations became that primary point of contact where the gospel would be represented and disseminated.
The challenge we face is to learn how to become more effective at personal and congregational service and evangelism. More of our members are learning to be more involved with those around them, and are learning when it is appropriate to say something about the gospel message.
Various congregations are trying new things and learning new ways of reaching out to their communities to help and serve, and to represent the wonderful good news of God's purpose for humanity.
The national office now has a national director and eight employees involved in the following four key functions.
1) Accounting--handles donation processing and receipting, accountability to Revenue Canada, and paying the necessary expenses of running the church.
2) Information systems administrator--supports computer and communication needs.
3) Human resource manager (also serves as office manager)--handles personnel issues and works with legal and corporate issues.
4) Communication--supports a state of the art Internet web site (http://www.wcg.ca/) and Northern Light, a monthly publication for members and co-workers.
Our field ministry consists of 34 salaried ministers, 84 nonsalaried ministers and two full-time regional pastors. Our brethren come from a diversity of backgrounds reflecting the mosaic of Canadian society.
We want to provide congregations that will nurture Christians and be effective tools in Christ's hands for extending the gospel.
We treasure the ties we have as a worldwide denomination that has walked the same path. God has mercifully performed a miracle in the Worldwide Church of God for which we can only thank him. Our greatest desire is to be useful instruments in his hands, as we learn to more fully yield to our Lord and Savior.
Churches 77
Church pastors 32
Full-time ministers 34
Elders 84
Baptized members 6,376
Office staff 9
Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 1998