Have you been to Picton Ontario recently? One of the only landmarks I remember was a large red brick church right on the main street of the town. The church is gone now.

This church in Picton, Ontario, was for sale in 2004 and was bought and was eventually demolished in 2010. According to one source quoted below, the furnace room concealed multiple forced air furnaces and so the reality of the situation was that it would have been a real trial to keep the building warm in the winter, and it would have been quite expensive too. It was sold and was available for lease in 2006 and then finally wrecked In 2010 - the building was demolished. One chronicler (Liam Quin: “May 2004, Prince Edward County and Toronto” , photo credit) writes, “Picton lost a landmark, and for no good reason except an incompetent council with five realters on it, hoping for a cut.”

At one point there was a rising tide of local citizens who wanted the demolition stopped and the church saved as a historical building – it was rather central to the beauty and charm of the town of Picton Ontario. There were stories in the Belleville Intillegencer Loss of Local Landmark. and Toronto Star demolition of church in picton – loss a heritage landmark  picton residents tried to save it and all sorts of people got involved , too late. Politicians, property owners, a Toronto mortgage broker and local people from other churches too of course. Many of these elements were behind a 2009 proposal to buy the property for $250K but it was hopeless because there was no will. The lack of respect for Canada's Christian heritage is one thing, but there's a passive attitude toward religion lurking behind this incident; the demolishion of a church in Picton is not an isolated event.

Canada is fast becoming a post-Christian society. The once dominant Anglicanism is moving to the margins of public life, according to a study reported by Michael Valpy at the Globe and Mail an assessment of the state of the church in Canada looks at the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia and then across the country and concludes that, ...at the present rate of decline -- a loss of 13,000 members per year -- only one Anglican would be left in Canada by 2061. ... Nationally, between 1961 and 2001, the church lost 53 per cent of its membership, declining to 642,000 from 1.36 million. Between 1991 and 2001 alone, it declined by 20 per cent."

 IN USA Today 2009 Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds  describes the only upswing as the rise of spiritualism and reports that nearly 2.8 million people (in the United States of America, 2008)  now identify with dozens of new religious movements, calling themselves Wiccan, pagan or "Spiritualist," which the survey does not define For instance, the most visible “guru” of this movement has been actress Shirley MacLaine. She has used her fame as a platform to reach hundreds of thousands of people. Oprah Winfrey has her own religious following which is a study by itself

Ovverall the percentage of America who call themselves Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere,more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.