c. 1999 Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ A sound wave of church bells will begin on the Atlantic coast at noon on Jan. 1, 2000, and roll across Canada’s time zones to conclude with a crescendo of Haida drumming on the Pacific Coast.

The cross-country “joyful noise” is one of the special ways that the broadest coalition of Canadian Christians in history will try to put Jesus Christ back into the country’s millennial celebrations, which symbolically mark the 2,000th birthday of Jesus.

The Rev. Lilly Bell, a Haida native and Anglican priest on British Columbia’s rugged Queen Charlotte Islands, says she’ll lead roughly 100 Haida drummers into an open meadow near the ocean at noon Pacific Standard Time to drum “whatever comes to our heart _ a sound of new beginnings.” The drumming in the village of Old Masset, the most westerly settlement in Canada, will begin four and a half hours after the bells start pealing at a white wooden church called All Saints Anglican in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, which is the most easterly point in Canada.

The transnational roll of churchbell ringing, singing, guitar playing and drumming planned for noon in each of Canada’s time zones, and lasting five minutes, is being co-organized by an unprecedented coalition of the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC).

The sound wave, which will ring out in Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical and other churches in cities such as Halifax, Quebec City, Toronto, Edmonton and dozens of other cities, is the highlight of an ecumenical Canadian millennial project, called Together 2000.

It is a Canadian attempt to find memorable ways to celebrate the start of the third Christian millennium. It’s also an effort that has many Christian parallels in different parts of the world.

Janet Somerville, head of the Canadian Council of Churches, says most Christians know Jesus was born around 4 B.C., but that shouldn’t stop them from celebrating New Year’s 2000 as a Christian milestone.”Most of what’s happening around the world and in Canada is grassroots, communal, unofficial, neighborhood-based. We aren’t able to keep track of it all,”said Toronto-based Carolyn Whitney-Brown, who is helping coordinate Canada’s disparate millennial church celebrations (http://www.together2000.org).”But I think, all in all, it’s an extraordinary thing in Canadian history,” she said.

The Canadian Council of Churches, which represents mainline Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches, joined with the more conservative Evangelical Fellowship of Canada to form Together 2000 because it wanted to find low-key ways to show that the new millennium has spiritual connotations and to remind Canadians that Christianity has not been overwhelmed by the dominant secular culture.

The two church umbrella organizations were prodded into creating the millennial events, particularly the coast-to-coast sound roll of bells and drumming on Jan. 1, after an Angus Reid poll they commissioned early in 1999 showed only six out of 1,493 Canadians surveyed named Jesus’ birthday when asked what first comes to mind in connection with the year 2000.”The `joyful noise’ of that (Jan. 1) moment will help to re-establish the Jesus connection in the millennium in the face of widespread public forgetfulness of that connection,” said a co-statement from Archbishop Barry Curtis, president of the CCC, and the Rev. Gary Walsh, president of the EFC.

At Vancouver’s Christ Church Cathedral, Corinne Rogers said members decided to have a special Eucharist service and ring handbells at noon on Jan. 1 to mark the beginning of the new millennium and usher in what many Christians refer to as the Jubilee Year.

DEA END TODD