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It is also apparent that many Canadians practice "religion à la carte," as Bibby puts it, mixing and matching ingredients from several religious traditions in the quest for a personally satisfying spirituality. Yet most Canadians' overarching allegiance is to the Christian tradition, however distant they might currently be from its institutional expressions (congregations, creeds, pastors, and the like).
Bibby notes that evangelicals in particular have worked hard "just to stay where they are" as a proportion of the national population. Evangelicals, Bibby finds, have done a good job of retaining both their youth and those who move to other towns. These Christians are the most vital, the most orthodox, and the most successful in reaching outsiders. Yet the evangelical record of attracting fellow Canadians who lack an evangelical heritage is sufficiently modest to confirm Bibby's thesis: Canadians tend to attend churches with which they have long identified.
Bibby's advice to churches, then, is quite straightforward. Indeed, it bears a curious resemblance to the "homogeneous unit principle" of the Church Growth Movement: "They must find their affiliates, explore their interests and needs, and minister to them as possible." Churches will grow, he says, if they offer better versions of themselves to their natural constituencies—those many Canadians who continue to call themselves by the name of one or another denomination while rarely attending church.
The problem is not on the "demand" side, he maintains. Canadians tell his polling teams that they continue to be interested in spiritual matters, continue to want concrete and practical advice about everything from child-rearing to politics from their preachers, and continue to see the church as an important institution in society. The problem is on the "supply side." Canadian churches are not meeting those needs.
To be sure, Bibby doesn't offer data to support this contention, in terms of actually studying churches and what they do or don't do to reach their affiliates. The exhortation to churches comes as an inference from his study of the "demand" side: Canadians want these things from their churches and yet aren't going to church, so it must be the churches' fault. And this is where Bibby is both partly right and partly wrong.
As a longtime observer of the Canadian church, I entirely agree with Bibby that many of our congregations do not offer what we ought to offer to our neighbors. Clear, sound, and practical preaching; lively and nourishing Christian education; vital and serious worship; empathetic and useful fellowship; effective and compassionate assistance to the needy—these are all in shorter supply than they should be. Any denominational leader, any Christian pundit, any longtime pew-sitter will agree that the Canadian church needs to improve. Bibby is right: If we build the church better, more will come.
Yet Christians must always look askance at any construal of church life that measures success in terms of attendance figures. Following as we do a leader who was wildly popular one weekend, only to be popularly executed the next, we properly hesitate over any diagnosis of ecclesiastical life that takes popularity as its most important measure.
Could it be, instead, that the great "sorting out" of Canadian religion that has been going on since the 1960s is itself a blessing? Could it be that it is providentially for the best that, as Bibby himself observes, fewer people are attending church, but those who do attend show increasing loyalty, fervency, and involvement—across denominational lines? One alternative explanation for these trends is that the Canadian churches have not been doing a worse job in the last generation than they did in the generation before, but many more Canadians in our day simply don't want what orthodox, institutional Christianity has to offer. And the church in some ways is the better for this sorting.
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