Courtesy: The Globe and Mail
There are six churches in Pugwash, a deep-harboured village on Nova Scotia’s North Shore, and just 750 people. For a rural community where the ancestral habits of church-going are no longer automatic, within a secularizing nation where Christianity has long since lost its historic dominance, that ratio does not bode well. he diverse denominations of Pugwash – United, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, plus the non-affiliated Meeting Place – have done the math and realized their collective future could be bleak unless they set aside the differences religions tend to generate and rediscover the fundamentals they have in common. And what better moment to demonstrate the new spirit of co-operation than during the holiest time in the church calendar
For Bill Martin, the Baptist minister who initiated this ecclesiastical crossover, the collaboration is an effort to get past an image problem of sectarian strife rooted in complex patterns of immigration, resettlement and theological divisiveness that produced so many separate places of worship. The tendency in the past was for churches to turtle in their own shells and set themselves apart because of tradition,” he said. “As a result, the public looks at us like we don’t get along or are unfriendly, or worse, that we’re fighting all the time. But the bottom line is that we have more in common than we realize, and we should be able to look past our traditions to see the things that unite us.
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