Faith Today - November/December 2015

Kevin Flatt is associate professor of history
and director of research at Redeemer
University College in Ancaster, Ont.

On the Halifax waterfront, just down the street from the farmers’ market, sits Pier 21. Over the decades, this former stop for ocean liners has been a bridge to a new life in the New World for hundreds of thousands of new Canadians.

Through several great immigration booms – including the mass influx of European immigrants leaving behind the ruins of the Second World War and the more recent arrival of people from Asia and Africa – Pier 21 was Canada’s front door.

This past summer the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21

celebrated its grand reopening after a $30 million expansion.

Immigration and Christian faith are closely tied in Canadian history.

Long before there was a Pier 21, the first Christians to stand on our shores were foreign explorers and settlers sent by France and England.

They brought their particular forms of Christianity with them, as subsequent immigrants have done for the past 400 years. To be sure, many of Canada’s indigenous peoples ( themselves descended from much earlier immigrants) also embraced Jesus Christ and became His followers.

But since those early years of first contact, most Christians in this part of the world have been either newcomers or their descendants.

Just as Canada is a country built on immigration, so too Canada’s evangelical churches were built on immigration from other lands. In the 19th century the churches that benefitted the most from immigration were the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists.

Many English immigrants were Anglicans or Methodists already when they arrived. Scottish and Irish immigrants to Canada tended to be staunch Presbyterians. The large numbers of American immigrants who came to Canada in those years were most often snatched up by entrepreneurial Methodist and Baptist churches which sent evangelists on horseback to far-flung farms and villages.

Already in those years we see that the churches that benefitted from immigration were either churches with which the immigrants already identified or those that took bold steps to share the Good News with newcomers.

This pattern repeated itself in the

20th century. In the wake of the First World War the Salvation Army helped settle more than 200,000

British immigrants in Canada. After the Second World War the Lutheran and Christian Reformed churches grew through immigration from particular countries (Germany and the Netherlands respectively).

Other churches, such as the Christian & Missionary Alliance and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, grew by reaching out to immigrants from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Immigration continues to be a major source of growth and vitality for Canadian Christianity. Between

2006 and 2011 (the latest Statistics Canada data) 48 per cent – nearly half – of immigrants to Canada identified as Christians. The next biggest group was those claiming “no religion,” at 20 per cent. Only

17 per cent of immigrants in this period were Muslims, 7 per cent Hindu and 5 per cent Sikh. There were nearly three Christian immigrants to Canada for every one Muslim immigrant.

During those five years more than half a million people identifying as Christians came to Canada. Close to half are Protestants, including, for example, 21,250 Baptists and 25,555

Pentecostals. Many of them join small but rapidly growing denominations that are not well known. Rick Hiemstra, director of research at The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, has found that at least one African-based evangelical denomination, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, has over 50 congregations in Canada.

Today’s immigration is potentially an enormous boost to Canadian Christianity. Most newcomers are much more religious than the Canadian born. In 2011, 43 per cent of foreign-born Canadians attended religious services once a month, compared to just 22 per cent of those born in Canada. Due to immigration, over the 1990s religious attendance rates increased in some of Canada’s largest cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, while it fell in the rest of the country.

Immigration also brings the unreached world to our doorstep.

More than half of recent immigrants come from the “ 10-40 window,” a region of Africa and Asia with relatively few believers. This is a tremendous gospel opportunity. Will today’s Evangelicals, like those of previous eras, answer the call? /FT

Churches that benefitted from immigration were either churches the immigrants already identified with or those that took bold steps to share the Good News