New immigrants' zealous Christianity is rejuvenating the faith in Canada
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, January 27, 2002
By Bob Harvey
Immigration is changing the look and feel of Canadian religion.
Where immigrants once came almost entirely from Europe, now they are more likely to come from Asia, Africa and Latin America, and they have brought new styles of worship and different concepts of God.
That has peppered our skyline with mosques and Buddhist temples, but Reg Bibby, a sociologist of religion at the University of Lethbridge, says it has also helped kick off a renaissance in Canada's mainline and evangelical churches.
In Restless Gods, a new book to be published in April, he documents what he says is a significant religious rejuvenation in Canada, a reversal of much of his earlier work in documenting declines in church attendance and in interest in God.
Mr. Bibby says that most Canadians assume the growing cultural diversity will bring a greater religious diversity. But he challenges that, and says the interesting story today is the effect of the growing cultural diversity on the churches.
"The assumption is that immigrants from developing countries are not Christians," said Mr. Bibby. "But one of three of them are Christian, and they arrive with a high level of zeal."
Canadians not only are believing in God, but in startling high numbers are talking to God and are convinced that they are experiencing God.
Mr. Bibby has been surveying Canadians on the subject of religion since 1975, and he says that in a poll conducted last year, he found that not only is there a higher level of commitment among church members, but also a greater incidence of prayer among the general population.
"Canadians not only are believing in God, but in startling, high numbers are talking to God and are convinced that they are experiencing God," he said.
Seventy-five per cent of Canadians reported they pray, and 50 per cent said they "experience" God.
This is a reversal of much of Mr. Bibby's earlier work in documenting declines not only in attendance but also in interest in religion.
Although the number of Muslims has more than quadrupled in Canada in the last 20 years, Statistics Canada data from the 1991 census indicate that, like Canadian Jews, Muslims and members of other non-Christian faiths will be hard-pressed to resist assimilation.
Because their communities are relatively small, many members of minority faiths marry Roman Catholics, Protestants or partners of no religion, and raise their children in those beliefs instead of their own.
Ottawa's Roman Catholic churches now include not only German, Italian and Polish parishes, but also communities of Vietnamese, Koreans, Eritreans, Latin Americans and Chinese. Members of 35 different national groups attended the recent Homelands Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral.
Canada's major cities also boast Arab Baptist churches, Vietnamese evangelical churches, Ghanaian United churches, Chinese Anglican churches and many others, all with their own languages, music and styles.
Some of these churches, like Ottawa's Fire of God, started out as "ethnic" churches but now are attracting wider audiences. Fire of God began more than a decade ago as a small group of Latin Americans meeting in a spare room at Bethel Pentecostal Church, but now it has its own building on Murray Street in the Market. Pastor Alex Osorio holds trilingual services seven nights a week, and twice on Sundays, and draws more English- and French-speaking adherents than Latin Americans.
The attraction, says the church's music director, Alexander Osorio Junior, is songs of praise set to Latin American rhythms: salsa and meringÈ belted out by trumpets and other brass instruments.
"We have broken away from the traditional thing the churches are used to. There is lots of dancing, lots of shouting, lots of praying, lots of freedom. Nobody is going to tell you to be quiet," he said. His motto: "If you come to our church, we're not going to let you fall asleep."
Rev. Richard Choe, general secretary of ethnic ministries for the United Church of Canada, said his denomination now includes more than 50 ethnic congregations from at at least 20 national groups, including Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, blacks from the Caribbean and Filipinos.
"The number of culturally diverse congregations is also growing, and it is the same for other denominations," he said.
"In the 1960s, as long as a minister knew Shakespeare and the Bible, he was okay. Now we use a lot of images from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and examples from African and Korean writers."
He says the Chinese and Korean concept of God differs from that of Europeans, and their concept of love is "wider and broader and deeper than the European concept."
One of the differences, he says, is that Africans were ahead of Europeans in having both masculine and feminine images for God.
"The name that one group in Ghana gave to their supreme being was 'grandmother-grandfather God."
Rev. Emmanuel Ofori, the minister at a small Ghanian United Church congregation in Toronto, is documenting some of the differences in African concepts of God for his doctoral studies.
Ethnic congregations like Mr. Ofori's are enriching Canadian churches, but they do not always endure.
Rev. David Yue, the priest at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Ottawa, said his parish was founded in 1980, but attendance has been declining in the past few years. Part of that is due to layoffs in the technology sector, but another reason is the exodus of most of the children of the original members.
"They have all left for English-speaking churches. Their Chinese is not too good," he said.
© Copyright 2002 The Ottawa Citizen
Published here with permission of the Ottawa Citizen
For evidence of this, get hold of a copy of Torrent, published by the Canadian Chinese Chrisian Business and Professional Association. Sending a message to Edward Ng, eng@magma.ca may be a way to get hold of a copy of Torrent. — Tony Copple
See also Matters of Faith
