Keepers of the Faith

The Reverend Elizabeth Lemon
and a few of Trinity's parishioners:
Roxanne Kellet-Stephen and her daughters
Shiloh and Kayla; Ken and Vera Brown;
and, at the back, Jennifer Bennett.

"As a baptised and baptising church, do you commit yourselves to support and nurture these persons within a community which worships God, resists evil and seeks justice?"

"We do, God being our helper," the congregation answers. This is Trinity United church in Verona, Ontario, a small red-brick building so close to the highway that runs through town, we can sometimes hear the traffic just beyond the front door. We are reading from a photocopy: An Order for Celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism. There are 10 of us, including myself, in the tin-walled choir loft at the front of the church and another 50 or so scattered on enough pews to hold 150. We choir members have an ideal vantage point for scanning the congregation. Mostly, we see familiar faces. Jean Reynolds sits at the back smiling. Near the front is Roxanne Kellett-Stephen. Her two daughers, Kayla and Shiloh, are perched on the edge of the pew so that they can watch Kalandra Paulette, the baby being baptized today. There are also people I don't know, probably relatives and friends of Wendy Brown and Stephen Paulette, Kalandra's parents.

Her maternal grandparents, Ken and Vera Brown, have visibly relaxed since the service began 15 minutes ago. Vera had wondered whether Kalandra might fuss during her baptism, but the baby has been perfect so far. There she is in Wendy's arms, at the front of the church, looking like a Renaissance painting of an angel. In fact, with her milky skin, blue eyes and thatch of golden hair, not to mention her attitude of saintly calm, Kalandra looks remarkably like the distinctly Western image of the adult Jesus on the back wall. She could be his baby sister.

The minister, The Reverend Elizabeth Lemon, asks the congregation to join her again in reading from the typed sheet. We begin the United Church creed: "We are not alone, we live in God's world."

Today's congregation is relatively large for this church. Baptisms are important occasions. They are important for the babies and their families, signs of a continued faith and its expression in reassuring ritual. Baptisms are important for the church too. Rural churches especially welcome the promise of new life in a dwindling, ageing membership. A smaller percentage of Canadians than ever is attending church, and in the countryside, where congregations were small to begin with, this drop is reflected in churches that are struggling to stay open, even as the community looks to them as symbols of strength and continuity.

Cherubic Kalandra obligingly faces the choir behind the minister as her hair is dampened with holy water, then turns to the adoring family -- her older sister Athina, grandparents and great-grandmother, aunts,uncles and cousins -- in the pews as Elizabeth Lemon says, "I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Vera and Ken Brown have attended Trinity for about 25 years and have sent all four of their children to Sunday school here. Their front door bears a small plaque, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord Joshua 24:15." A few generations ago, Verona was a farming area, a place for dairying and cheese making, for six days of hard work followed by a day of well-earned rest after the cows were milked, when going to church was simply the done thing. "When I was a girl, the church used to be the highlight of the week, because you didn't have anything else," Vera told me when I visited her and Ken in their Verona bungalow. Vera grew up in Arden, a town 45 minutes north that has since lost its school and railway station (and the line itself, Ken now reminds her). The United church in Arden, however, still carries on today. Ken comes from Parham, not as far north as Arden but smaller. The church he attended has long since closed, a sign not of diminished population but changing lifestyles. The Canadian farm population dropped from 27 per cent in 1941 to 4 per cent in 1986.

"When I grew up," Ken says, "there were five, six farms within a half a mile of ours, and now there are none left. There has been such a shift. Now most people work in Kingston."

In response to altered demands, the Verona IGA no longer offers the plaid flannel work shirts and rubber boots it did just 20 years ago when I arrived. Now, it stocks wonton wrappers, kiwifruit, The Globe and Mail, and five brands of salsa. The dump just south of town, once available to any treasure seeker, now hires a caretaker who checks for township residency beside a sign that warns, "No Scavenging." New houses sprout on acre lots severed from family farms. Streets that look remarkably suburban radiate out from Verona.

Church is no longer the highlight of the week. In 1957, 60 per cent of Canadians attended church once a week; in 1990, the figure was 32 per cent. Today, rural churches compete with the same distractions that keep city churches half empty; television, stores open for business, a dwindling interest in religion, too little time to take on another commitment and communication systems from telephones to the Internet. Rural churches have problems of their own. There is no public transit in Verona, and some members live many miles away. Rural ministers spend half their lives on the road, especially since they serve two, even three or four churches. Trinity in Verona is part of a two-point charge, paired with St. Paul's in nearby Harrowsmith. Elizabeth Lemon conducts a service in Harrowsmith at 9:30, then drives ten minutes north to repeat the service at 11:15 at Trinity. The morning of Kalandra Paulette's baptism, Lemon has already baptized a baby boy at St. Paul's.

When Lemon was a theology student, she worked at a two-point charge in northern New Brunswick. "In one church if I had six out for worship I was doing well. That was Upsalquitch. There used to be a general store there, but the only thing they had left was the church, and the only place to get groceries was an hour away. Robinsonville, the other point, was a bit bigger. We had 15 or 20 for a service." Lemon says of the two-point charge: "It doubles all your meetings, it doubles your distances. I feel as if I'm split down the middle half the time." She's been here for four years and will head off to a one-point city charge after Easter.

Rural congregations have, in a sense, only the part-time help of a minister, and they usually inhabit old, drafty buildings only recently given indoor plumbing and still in need of expensive wheelchair ramps. Yet these buildings remain powerful symbols of something people consider too valuable to lose, whether or not they attend themselves. Marion Best, who holds the preeminent title of moderator of the United Church of Canada, had just come from visiting small towns in Manitoba when I saw her in Kingston last fall. She said, "What I heard a lot," she said, "was that even though the people are small in number in the church, either by attending or financially supporting it, the community sees the church as theirs and they expect the church to provide pastoral care in the community. When somebody dies, if somebody gets married, if there is a crisis, they expect the church will be there for them. And we've had that kind of ministry. We've tried to put a church in every small town, and we've tried to minister to the community, not only to the people inside the building.

"What we hear in most of these places is, 'They took away our post office, they took away our school, we're not going to lose the church.'" Unlike many small towns around here, Verona still has its elementary school and its post office. But when I drive from Verona to Kingston, a half-hour south, I pass three rural churches that have closed. Trinity struggles to pay its bills, but it remains in the black.

"This day, Kalandra Montgomery Paulette has become a member of God's family." Elizabeth Lemon carries her up one aisle and down the other so everyone can have a look. Having seen the baby, the remaining dozen or so children charge out the back door to Sunday school. Elizabeth Lemon and the rest of us turn to the bulletin, whose cover is a colour picture of a stream flowing through a snowy woods. Inside is printed today's Prayer of Confession. "O God," we read in unison, "we confess the uncertainty of our faith and the hesitancy of our commitment..."

Church membership is down, so the work is spread over fewer shoulders. One year, Vera Brown remembers, she taught Sunday School, sang in the choir and served as an elder, one of the church's spiritual leaders. It seems important work, not just for us but for others. The community still wants church weddings, baptisms and funerals. They crowd the long wooden tables at Trinity for the annual beef supper crowned with home made pies. Whether or not these people belong, whether or not they consider themselves Christian, they crowd the pews for the choir's Christmas concert. They want the old carols, the pageant featuring the local kids dressed as shepherds and angels and, above all, the reassuring presence of the buildings that recall the faith of their fathers and mothers. But the people maintaining those buildings are ageing, too. As I approach my 50th birthday, the church is one of the few places where I still feel relatively young. According to Statistics Canada, the people most likely to attend church now are 65 or older.

Roxanne Kellett-Stephen, who is in her 30s, is one of a handful of younger members at Trinity who break the pattern. She and her husband John Stephen migrated to a lakeshore property not far from Verona 10 years ago, but it wasn't until she had Kayla and Shiloh, now seven and four years old, that Roxanne wanted to join a church. "The kids were the main drawing card," she says. "I wanted them to have the faith and believe in a higher power that wants you to do good and to find out the reasons for being good, and I wanted it in a structured way." She visited several churches, but the friendliness and the size of Trinity drew her in. "I enjoy the smallness because that's how you meet people. I like the community atmosphere. A lot of the time I'll be walking down the road in Verona and I'll see someone, and I don't know who they are but they say 'hi' because they know me from church. I've done the city church routine and you just don't get that."

I know what she means. Twenty years ago, when I moved to a small house on a dirt road outside Verona, I brought memories of a suburban childhood and city career. In those places I had had friends, but Verona was different. Here, I barely knew some of the people who helped me out. The postmistress knew my name from church and worked at the post office, so a letter from a young nephew in British Columbia addressed simply "Auntie Jenny, Verona, Ontario" was delivered without a problem. It wasn't just church people either. When there was a grass fire next door, my neighbours appeared with their shovels, brooms and pails and stayed, smoky and worn out, till the last spark was extinguished. Neighbours brought food when I was recovering from surgery, pulled my car behind a truck when it wouldn't start and propped up my front porch when it collapsed under a load of snow. Then I moved to a nearby road surrounded by a few of the remaining dairy farms. When I was newly wed, the neighbours treated me and my husband to a shivaree. along with fiddler, step dancer and a table weighted under gifts of homemade preserves, maple syrup and honey. In both homes, I had become part of a web that was here long before I arrived, and that assured me that I was being watched, being cared for.

The support that comes from country churches is rooted in that same community spirit. When I was choir director at Trinity, a new member of the choir, a single mother just arrived from Toronto, had a house fire. The collection I gathered from the choir consisted mostly of $50 bills anonymously tucked into an envelope by people who got by on little themselves. There are stories like that on every road around here. Frank Daw was overwhelmed by the help he received from neighbours and members of the Verona Free Methodist church after his house fire: "People spent hours in the freezing cold lifting walls. It's a good feeling when you realize there are people who care."

Mark and Karen Snider, who live a half mile from me, both grew up in the area. When their house was destroyed by fire, their deep family and church roots translated into thousands of dollars of support, as well as building supplies and expertise. "People we didn't even know would show up at our parents' home with a cheque for $50," Karen says. "At Christmas, we received more than a dozen cards with money in them. You say thank you but it just doesn't seem to be enough, the impact it has on you."

Two years ago, Lyn Taft and Reid Makepeace's first home, a ramshackle bargain just up the highway from Trinity, burned down before it was ready to move into. Reid says when he came out to have a look at the charred remains, someone from the local Lion's Club presented him with $200 cash. "We had the clothes we were standing in and a load of laundry we were doing at my parents' place. We had insurance, but with the paperwork, it takes a long time to get anything. There's just so much chaos."

"If we hadn't had your parents to stay with, we would have needed a hotel that night," says Lyn, whose father was once minister of Trinity. Although the couple does not attend Trinity, the church set up an account for them in the local branch of the Bank of Montreal. Soon a cheque was delivered, and over the next couple of weeks, two more came, as well as donations of furniture and dishes.

Reid says, "It maybe had more of an impact on me than it did on Lyn, because I didn't know any of these people. I was really impressed with how quick they were."

"But you've never lived in a small community," Lyn adds. "I was surprised, but I can understand."

Lyn's remark is reminiscent of something Ken Brown expressed when I visited: "It's going to be harder to achieve the financial goals we'd like, but spiritually we can still do a lot for the community."

"The gospel does make a difference," says Dr. John Young, another of Trinity's former ministers. But Young, who now teaches rural ministry studies at Queen's Theological College in Kingston, points out that there is a danger that politicians might look to this kind of community support as a replacement for government social systems such as welfare and unemployment insurance. "Rural churches will help out in emergency or tragic situations, but they've not had the history of doing that in an ongoing way."

Kalandra is just four months old after all, and she can't keep her composure forever. But not until the congregation has finished its confession and Elizabeth has given the first scripture reading from Isaiah, "The Lord hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name," not until the choir is midway through Lead Me Lord -- "for it is thou, Lord, thou Lord only that makest me dwell in safety" -- does Kalandra finally howl, matching the choir pitch for rising pitch. She is carried swiftly out the same door the Sunday School children thundered through, her white baptismal gown flowing behind her.

"I went to a big Kingston church recently, and there's a sense of tradition there, but there's a vastness as opposed to the coziness of our own church," says Jean Reynolds. The word cozy comes up often when Jean talks about Trinity. It is an apt adjective from a woman whose every bed in her modest Verona duplex is covered with a handmade quilt. When I visited her, she was reading Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt, a novel recently made into a movie. Last year, Reynolds was the driving force behind a quilt show at Trinity. "I've always been interested in quilts," she says, "and I thought it would celebrate the talents of not just the ladies of our congregation but the ladies of our community." On the day of the show, 136 handmade quilts, some more than a century old, were draped over the back of every pew. The church had become a celebration of colour, life and history, a testament to the patience and artistry of several generations of rural women who found a way to make the world cozier.

What Jean likes best, though, are church suppers. "My fondest memories of church are the warm lemonade and soggy salmon sandwiches we had at the Sunday school picnics. That's why I'm interested in church suppers, because they bring people together at a time that's not a tragedy, but just for a pleasant time together.

"Being widowed," says Jean, who lost her husband Bruce a year and a half ago, "I appreciate that each time you do something in a small church, there's a nucleus of people who are the same. I think maybe in a rural church, it's easier to find an opening for a conversation."

Elizabeth Lemon returns to the lectern for the second scripture reading. It is from the gospel of John: "Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and said unto them, What do you seek? And they said to him, Rabbi (which means teacher), where are you staying? He said to them, Come and see. They came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day." Roxanne Kellett-Stephen is listening. She told me she appreciates the Sunday school not only because it makes church fun for her daughters but also because it gives her a chance to focus on the church service.

The sermon today, entitled "Speak Up and Speak Out," is about Saint Andrew, one of the lesser known disciples, Elizabeth Lemon points out, but one of the most devoted. After the sermon, two women take up the collection: Viola Leslie, who still lives in the farmhouse where she raised her family, and Elfleda Watson, the woman who brought the cheques to Lyn Taft and Reid Makepeace. We sing the old favorite, "O for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer's praise"; conclude the service with a sung blessing, "Go now in peace"; take our seats; and then gather up our things, ready to go.

Wendy reappears with Kalandra in her arms, serene again, the diva returned for her curtain call. She is surrounded by fans who know Wendy from her days in Sunday school. After the service, all the aunts, uncles and cousins will make the short walk back to Vera and Ken's home to celebrate.

A few days later, I receive a phone call. It is Jean Reynolds. Would I bring crackers and cheese to church next Sunday, she asks. It will be an important occasion. A member of our church is studying to become a minister, and he will have his covenantal service that day. We should have lunch after the service.

Yes, I say, I will bring crackers and cheese. It seems the least I can do.