Growing up in a Buddhist family in mainland China, Richard Liu didn’t know much about Christianity. He had great respect for his family’s beliefs, he says, as he did for all the religions of the world. But he also wasn’t fully comfortable with what he was taught at the temple they attended.
“I had desired something different, believing there must be other ways to approach life, existence and the universe,” he says.
Through a religious studies class at an international high school in Beijing, he says he picked up a few ideas about Christianity—that God loved people, for one thing. But he had also picked up the cultural ideas popular in China that Christianity was a white, colonialist religion brought in during the Opium Wars, he says.
When one of his classmates, who was ethnically Chinese like him, invited him to visit her church, he took the chance to experience it for himself. When he did, he says, he found much that was new and unfamiliar to him.
“My first impression was the people were friendly and the music was nice. I’m sure the preacher must’ve said something, but I don’t remember what they said, which, I can only venture to guess, was because I didn’t really understand what they said,” he told the Anglican Journal.
Since then, he has moved to Canada, been baptized and—after a search for a church where he could feel spiritually at home—settled at St. Paul’s Bloor Street in Toronto. But doing so, he says, involved a long process of finding a church where he felt comfortable asking the questions he needed to build familiarity with Christianity’s rituals, practices and stories—and how they applied to his own life. He needed to figure out how these things fit into his own cultural and family background.
As the Anglican Church of Canada sets the church up for a renewed focus on evangelism with a discipleship and evangelism task force, it faces a changing society—one in which familiarity with Christianity is waning. More and more Canadians, like Liu, have never encountered church before. If the church wants to reach out to Canadians today, several specialists in evangelism tell the Anglican Journal, it will need to consider how to introduce the faith to these people.
According to Margie Patrick, a specialist on religious literacy in school curricula for the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy, a nonprofit that promotes understanding and tolerance between spiritual traditions in Canada, there is little official research data on how familiar Canadians are with the basics of the Christian faith—but there are hints. Many clergy and academics, she says, say they are encountering more questions and less certainty from parishioners and students than before about Bible content, the diversity of denominations and theology. There’s also census data that shows shifting religious demographics in Canada: the portion of the population reporting no religious affiliation doubled from 16.5 per cent in 2001 to 34.6 per cent in 2021. And Patrick points to a 2010 research paper from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion in which authors Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme found that religiously unaffiliated parents are less likely to teach their children about religion or attend religious services. As a result, there is reason to suspect Canada’s younger generations have a greater proportion of members with less exposure to religion in general and church in particular than their parents.
Meanwhile, Canada posted a record population growth of 1 million people in 2022, about 96 per cent of it in the form of international newcomers. Many immigrants—about 527,420, according to the 2021 census—belong to some Christian denomination already, but hundreds of thousands belong to other faiths or no faith. Some, like Liu, come from cultures where Christianity is unusual or viewed with discomfort or suspicion.
To date, much of the successful evangelism in Canada is reaching people who have already encountered the faith, suggests research from a Wycliffe College study (See Anglican Journal, April, p. 2) of self-identified converts to Christianity in Canada over the past 50 years. Out of about 318 respondents, over half had already been to church before, and about a third said they did not find it difficult to start going because they had someone to go with them and help explain what was going on. The much smaller number of converts (about three per cent) who reported having trouble beginning to go to church, however, said their discomfort stemmed from not knowing what to do in the service, worrying that they would be singled out, and unexplained fear or emotional resistance to entering the church for the first time.
Those, moreover, are the experiences of people who ended up staying long enough to consider themselves Christians, notes Jeremy McClung, transitional director of the Institute of Evangelism at Wycliffe College and one of the two professors who conducted the study. What the study doesn’t provide, McClung says, are the experiences of people outside the church—those who may have tried out Christianity and given up because it was unfamiliar, those who left the church because they felt it was harmful or irrelevant, or those who grew up outside the church and stayed there.
One piece of hope the study does offer, though, says McClung, is that among those who did convert to Christianity, the most frequent factor respondents named was a friend who was already Christian—much like the one who invited Liu to church. And when asked what these friends did that influenced them, the top three things respondents named were demonstrating the love of Christ, inviting them to church and living an attractive life—all things, McClung points out, that lay people can do as well as clergy. That might offer a strategy for reaching out to people who are uncomfortable with outreach from official representatives of the church, he says.
That discomfort is increasingly common among people outside the church, says the Rev. David Deane, a Roman Catholic associate professor of theology at the multidenominational Atlantic School of Theology. Too often, he says, evangelism projects start from the assumption that all churches need to do is open their doors for people to come running to find out what the faith has to offer. That mindset just doesn’t work, says Deane.
“It still assumes that we are fantastic in the eyes of the world … [but] people think we’re crap,” he says. He points to an Angus Reid survey in 2022 in which a narrow majority of respondents said Islam, evangelical Christianity and Roman Catholicism were damaging to Canadian society.
In one example of that sentiment, Patrick points to a controversial K-6 education curriculum unsuccessfully introduced in 2021 by the Conservative government of her home province of Alberta—often thought of as a sort of “Bible Belt” province. Many citizens and media across the province criticized the curriculum, calling it politically biased and culturally insensitive. But Patrick was surprised by one powerfully negative response—reactions on social media not just against the specific contents of the social studies curriculum as it applied to religious subject matter but to the idea of students learning about religion in school at all.
In today’s cultural climate, says Deane, “The church is a toxic brand, based on one particular reading of history which sees the church as being the root of most evils.” As a result, outreach from clergy offering to answer outsiders’ questions or funnelling potential converts through a catechism class may not be welcome. A better place to start may be with the people already in the pews, he says.
Deane, however, also believes it’s not only the people outside the stained-glass windows who may be less familiar with theology and Scripture than the average Canadian of 50 years ago. He imagines a model in which churches invest in the faith formation of their lay members with the aim of giving them the tools they need to understand the beliefs, practices and history of Christianity better. Thus equipped, he says, they may find it easier to share their faith with friends and family in daily life. He doesn’t believe that will take the form of preaching on a street corner or trying to make a direct pitch for a visit to church. But it might take the form of lay people living out their faith in a way that others might notice, he says, or of inviting friends to meet in coffee shops for a weekly book club to talk about things that matter to them.
The key, he says, is for these to be relationships based on sincere care and interest, not any kind of sales tactics or forced cheerfulness to educate, which immediately set off warning bells in the current cultural climate.
The Rev. Connie denBok, a United Church of Canada minister and fellow member of AST’s faculty, suggests a similar idea of investing in the faith formation of existing Christians. She compares the current situation to that during Christianity’s early years as an illegal underground religion. According to historian Alan Krieder’s book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, she points out, the church was growing at a steady rate during those days—reaching up to 40 per cent per decade, by some estimates—despite all the opposition and persecution it faced—despite, she adds, the fact that it was what she would call “seeker-unfriendly.”
“They would kick everybody out before the Lord’s Supper, so people started rumours that they were drinking actual blood. So why would they convert at that rate?” she asks. “I think it was the depth of character and [faith] formation in the Christians.”
At the time, she says, Christians went through a slow catechesis that could take years before finally undergoing baptism only when they demonstrated the character of Christ. Rather than scaring people off with the big commitment, she says, that model had the effect of showcasing a deep dedication and an enthusiasm that proved contagious.
“If you believe that your life is a manifestation of Jesus … that you’re learning to reflect his character in a mystical sense, when [that] happens, people will catch glimpses of Jesus—not just the idea or the religion, but they will catch a glimpse of someone who is either compellingly attractive or you’re not going to like the guy at all.”
In at least one popular program, the strategy of working on the faith formation of existing Christians has already borne unexpected fruit.
Mark Elsdon-Dew is a spokesperson for Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), a U.K. church whose success at planting new churches and welcoming newcomers has made it a model for growth initiatives in Anglican churches in Canada, such as Montreal’s St. Jax. Elsdon-Dew says one of HTB’s most successful programs, Alpha, originated as a way to encourage faith development among the church’s existing members.
Alpha had originally been created as a discipleship course to introduce a wave of new converts in the 1970s and 1980s to the basics of the faith they had joined. But what HTB leader the Rev. Nicky Gumbel found when he took over running the Alpha course in 1990 was that it was attracting not just existing parishioners, but also newcomers who had heard about the course and ended up becoming Christians as a result of it.
Since its inception, the course has been duplicated in almost 70 countries across multiple denominations and enrolled nearly 29 million people. And at HTB, at least, those people overwhelmingly come to the course for the first time, he says, not because they saw a billboard or walked into the church off the street on a Sunday morning, but because they received a personal invitation from a friend.
Those relationships, says Deane, will remain the heart of any form of Christian outreach. And vitally, he says, preparing lay people to do that work need not—and should not—be motivated by a desire to funnel people into the pews or pump up a parish’s Sunday numbers.
Instead, he says, “We can begin work on that prior to and leading up to the Sunday [visit], whether that is relationships, water cooler talk,” he says. If Christians don’t think beyond attendance numbers, he says, “we don’t share the good news that despite the shittiness of the world, hope is possible. Despite the way things are, love is real. Despite the way things are, people have a purpose. These are things that can be shared no matter where we are. But it does involve a little bit shaking the tyranny of seeing everything as focused on a Sunday morning.
