The Cairn

10/03/2021

If you want to join our gathering online we’re moving that to Zoom starting this week at 5 pm. You can enter the zoom meeting through our homepage!

The Cairn Canmore is a church based in Canmore, Alberta, that seeks to be a church that strives to bring the kingdom imagination to every sphere of society in the Bow Valley. We embrace and live out the good news of Jesus restoring all things, we pray that we will see transformation in Canmore that

08/15/2021

Our Sunday gathering is cancelled this week, Aug 15. Let’s enjoy some sabbath rest and we’ll see you next Sunday at our normal time and place!

06/10/2021

We believe in the practice of resurrection! What we mean by that is that In Jesus’s resurrection a new world has begun in which we are participants in its making. We become fellow workers with him restoring all things. We cultivate hard and broken spaces to see new life bloom.

A few weeks some people from our church family did that in Exshaw. We laboured with others restoring habitat destroyed in the 2013 flood, and the whole time I couldn’t help but thinking of Wendell Berry’s words:

Every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world...Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Call that profit...practice resurrection.

I’m excited for the life our community helped plant. I’m excited for the beauty that will be shared and discovered along the creek for generations to come. I’m excited for the flourishing that Jesus wants for all creation finally, I’m excited he shares the task with us: his friends and co-labourers.

05/30/2021

“It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us...therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian family.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today, as we prepared the bread for the Lord’s Table, we reflect on the goodness of God to sustain us in our scattered virtual reality, but we also anticipate the embodied gathering tonight for the first time in 6 months. To hear another’s voice beside us, to hear laughter and see kids playing, to hear the word spoken in front of us and over us, and to share in the body and the blood of Jesus, will all be grace and nothing but grace.

God is good friends! Come join us! 117 Bow Valley Crescent at 5 pm!

04/18/2021

We often wonder what shapes our lives will take if we embrace certain people or things. The same is true as we approach Jesus. What will our lives look like if we tether our desires, affections, habits, relationships and even control to him?

We believe James seeks to answer this question. Written to people who were sojourning and displaced, it offers wisdom, encouragement and correction away from self-serving values that are picked up from society and back toward the ethic of love embodied by the resurrected saving King Jesus.

So join us in our journey as we seek to live into James’s vision of being scattered, alternative and whole communities.

04/02/2021

On this day the true motives of humanity are revealed. The things that we desire at a foundational level were exposed. Our lust for power and self-allegiance were all made clear at Golgotha. The murder of Jesus showed how far we were willing to go to keep our feeble hold on these things.

Good Friday is many things, but like this sculpture, it is revelation on how exposed the cross makes us as humans. What we think we hide well, our foundational loves, motives and desires are aired at the cross. And what is most holy, the pinnacle of history, we discover is often put out of sight and buried.

Interestingly enough, this sculpture is entitled “Device to Root Out Evil” by the great Dennis Oppenheim. It seems to represent our own folly in human attempts toward that end. But on this day in which we lament the cross—the true device that rooted out evil—may we reflect on what the cross exposes about our own foundations and the holy things we try to put away.

(Sculpture by Dennis Oppenheim, Device to Root Out Evil, placed at 5th St Square, East Village, Calgary)

03/27/2021

We want to wonder out loud with you, our Bow Valley community! As a church that values the common good of all, we want to get to know the thoughts and assumptions of people that we seek to serve.

So a couple times a month we want to post a question where we can all wonder out loud together. No right or wrong answers, we just want to cultivate a space for listening and learning.

Here’s the first question: is there a role for the church to play in the Blow Valley community? If so, what is it? If not, why?

The best way to participate in this project is to 1. Comment with your answer (or DM if you want to remain private) and 2. Share this with others! The more answers we get, the more collective wisdom we can draw upon!

Happy answering!