The United Church of Canada: A History ed. by Don Schweizer (review)

John Webster Grant wrote, in 1988, ‘‘The United of Canada still awaits its historian.’’¹ The United Church of Canada: A History, published only recently, is the first academic history of Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, from Church union, in 1925, to the new millennium.². Edited by Don Schweizer, this collection features chronological articles by C.T. McIntire (‘‘Unity among Many: The Formation of The United Church of Canada’’), Eleanor J. Stebner (‘‘The 1930s’’), Ian McKay Manson (‘‘The United Church of Canada and the Second World War’’), John H. Young (‘‘A Golden Age: The United Church of Canada, 1946–1960’’), Sandra Beardsall (‘‘And Whether Pigs Have Wings: The United Church in the 1960s’’), Joan Wyatt (‘‘The 1970s: Voices from the Margins’’), Tracy J. Trothen (‘‘The 1980s: What Does It Mean to Be the United Church of Canada? Emergent Voices, Self-Critique, and Dissent’’), and Ross Bartlett (‘‘1990–2003: The Church into the New Millennium’’), as well as thematic articles by William S. Kervin (‘‘Worship on the Way: The Dialectic of United Church Worship’’), Charlotte Caron (‘‘A Look at Ministry: Diversity and Ambiguity’’), Alf Dumont and Roger Hutchinson (‘‘United Church Mission Goals and First Nations Peoples’’), Alan Davies (‘‘Jews and Palestinians: An Unresolved Conflict in the United Church Mind’’), and Michael Bourgeois (‘‘Awash in Theology: Issues in Theology in the United Church of Canada’’). Editor Don Schweizer’s concluding essay is ‘‘The Changing Social Imaginary of The United Church of Canada.’’

This volume is an institutional history, focused especially on the work of the United Church’s national governing body, the General Council, and it has two stated aims: on the one hand, it seeks to fill a gap in Canadian historiography by offering an ‘‘academic history of The United Church of Canada’’ (xii), while, on the other, it wants to help the people of the United Church ‘‘find a new vision’’ (xiv). The collection, as such, needs to be judged against these two goals.

Academically, the strengths of the book are many. It is a uniquely detailed and extensive survey of the United Church’s past, from its origins as an ambitious ecumenical ideal to its present as an established institution. The strategy of combining chronological and thematic articles has provided a useful blend of breadth and depth. The book itself is very readable and attractive: its print and illustrations are very easy on the eyes. Overall, the collection presents a fair portrayal of the United Church as a Canadian religious institution of national significance, showing with clarity how it has struggled to forge and evolve a meaningful sense of purpose and identity in a rapidly changing and, at times, radically challenging social context. The authors, in their unique ways, have given a good sense of the United Church’s challenges and opportunities as well as failures and successes, while being measured in both praise and critique. Although the quality of the articles is somewhat uneven, several are outstanding, and the book would be worth having in one’s library for any one of the better articles alone.

As a piece of scholarship, however, this collection does have its limitations. While it is ‘‘academic,’’ as opposed to ‘‘popular,’’ it is not researched or written at the level of critical scholarship. This much becomes obvious when, in the first chapter, McIntire reminds readers that the Great War is the same thing as World War i (17). Were it wanting to pique the interest of a learned audience, the book would be significantly longer and more detailed. Also, the individual articles, or possibly the book as a whole, would want to sustain more significant and compelling theses than they do and it does. To demonstrate simply that the United Church was once a youthful and enthusiastic Church, perhaps overly optimistic in its pursuit of being a ‘‘national’’ Church, but that since the 1960s it has entered into a long period of sustained institutional decline...