How beautiful, on the mountain top, are the feet of those, who bring good news, who speak good tidings of peace, who proclaim: God reigns! Isaiah 52:7 (paraphrased)Rural ministry is unique – as we are reminded in any number of places on pages and posts on the United Church Rural Ministry Network website (ucrmn.ca) and in the Rural Town Hall meetings in which we’ve participated over the past few years.
And there are some rural ministry places that are themselves unique. After I was called to serve in ministry with the people of Jasper United Church in 1993, I remember spending some time in consideration of what kind of ministry we could assign to the work in Jasper.
Yes, it is a small town – roughly five thousand people, which would qualify it as a rural ministry according to population, but we were reminded on more than one occasion that on a typical summer night when every campground site is full and all the hotel rooms have been booked, that the population swelled to twenty thousand – which would easily make it city size in Alberta. We used to joke (although it wasn’t really a joke) that you had to wait until November, when most of the summer tourists were done visiting and the ski hill hadn’t opened yet, to know who the locals were.
It was also in a national park – with limits on how much it can grow (not at all) and who owns the land (technically, the crown).
I sometimes said (only partly facetiously) that Jasper was a resource town – where the gold was mined from the pockets of the tourists.
It wasn’t just the town that swelled in the summer. It was such an inspiration to serve in ministry in Jasper, and particularly to lead worship in the summer when the congregation, completely atypical of most other United Church congregations, would grow in size.
I thought of it as a unique opportunity to let visitors know about The United Church of Canada – for very often the congregation members on a summer Sunday morning came from places all around the world.
There was a tradition at the beginning of worship in the summer to invite the visitors to stand, identify who they were and where they were from. It could be a bit daunting because there were often ministers on vacation who dropped in for worship, to see what worship was like in The United Church of Canada.
And so you can imagine our worry and heartache as we heard of the fire in late July 2024 that was approaching the townsite. We had lived out a scenario like that in 2003 when fires on both the west and the east seemed to be converging on the town. Mercifully, they stopped before that happened and the result was a huge fire-smarting push in the town – to remove fuel from the outskirts of town and hopefully protect it from the destructive power of fire.
I have to say that I expected the fire smart work to do its job as the news talked of the approaching fire.
How wrong I was.
We knew literally the names of hundreds of people who had evacuated. You can’t live in a town for a dozen years, serving there in ministry and in community service, without knowing the names of the people who live there and it started to dawn on us, as the word got out about how the wall of fire had come into Jasper from the south that we also knew hundreds of people who had lost all their worldly goods, except for what they had taken with them on evacuation. Many people didn’t take much. They too had placed great hope on the fire smarting. And it wasn’t only belongings that were destroyed. Businesses, and the jobs they provide were also gone.
And that beautiful wooden church of untreated wooden siding and cedar shake roof – built in 1979 and dedicated by then Prime Minister Joe Clark, to replace the Little White Church in the Rockies, along with the matching McCready Centre – where so many visiting youth groups, Girl Guide and Scout troops, and other visitors had spent the night on their Jasper ski trips, and the adjoining manse – home to us for a dozen years were all gone.
Fire is and should be part of the national park landscape. But for many years, fire was suppressed – to preserve the “beauty” of the land. In latter years, a different mind set has been at work – with prescribed burns to take the place of fires that might have occurred naturally in the past as a result of lightning for example.
But as we learned, prescribed burns can only do so much – and I’m sure that the shock of burning “perfectly good” forest has had an impact as well – such that prescribed burns have been limited in both scope and frequency – to say nothing of the ones that got away – like the one that scared us in 2003!
We like to live in the midst of nature. It speaks to our understanding of the relationship between Creation and Creator.
But as we have learned, it has its risks.
When I made a prayer request at the church at which I worship now, on the Sunday following the devastation of the foray of the Jasper Complex Fire into the town of Jasper, I said that Jasper is in some ways Alberta’s town, Canada’s town, a World town. It has been visited by people from all around the world, loved for its’ beauty by people from all over the planet, held dear by any number of folks who marvel at the natural wonder of mountains, forests, rivers, glaciers and wildlife.
And so we wonder, and lament, and marvel, and hope.
Rev. Peter Chynoweth (retired), Cochrane, Alberta