How does the church welcome newcomers’ desires to believe and belong
The Rev. Ben Tshin is a priest at St. Paul’s Bloor Street in Toronto. Tshin says many of those who engage with St. Paul’s for the first time do so through its ESL program, which invites members of the communities in to hone their English skills and—perhaps more importantly—find a sense of belonging among people who have similar experiences as newcomers to Canada. Often, he says, it attracts people whose English is already very strong, but who are just looking for somewhere to make friends. In the process, he says, the program exposes them to the church’s sanctuary space, developing a sense that they are safe and welcome there even as they form community ties.
Becoming a Christian is a matter of both believing and belonging, says Tshin. And while many people might expect that belonging to be a matter of fitting into a community of people who have found the same answers, he says it’s more common in his ministry that a feeling of belonging develops as people voice their questions about spiritual belief.
“You don’t need to have everything sorted in your mind about what faith is or isn’t,” he says. Nor should we assume people proceed, in linear fashion, from believing to belonging, he says. “People are looking for belonging at the same time as they’re looking for believing. And sometimes belonging might go first.”
It’s common, says Tshin, for visitors to the ESL program to go on to the church’s Alpha program to find out more about the faith itself. In past years, he says, anywhere from one or two people up to seven per year have made that jump. In that way, people who began not even necessarily looking for a church so much as any place to gather with others ended up asking deeper questions about their lives and where faith fits into them, he says.
And when they begin to ask those questions or even to try out Sunday worship, he says, it’s important for the church to send the message that everyone, not just new members, is in the process of faith formation. Churches can do that by including explainers on liturgy in the service or the bulletin and encouraging newcomers to feel safe asking the questions that naturally form around faith.
“If you keep on telling them, ‘We are learning, not just you, and we have questions, not just you’—I think that might be a helpful posture of openness,” Tshin says.
Richard Liu, a new Canadian, Christian convert and parishioner at St. Paul’s Bloor, says something else that makes him feel comfortable asking those questions is a culture of openness to engage with outside belief systems and traditions. He tells a story of a Bible study at one church he visited where a parent was expressing fear of sending their child to university, a hotbed, in the parent’s view, of “bad ideas” and perspectives hostile to Christianity.“On a personal level, that lack of willingness to engage with people outside of the church was quite troubling to me,” he says. The experience made him feel less safe to share his own doubts and uncertainties.
Masha Koyama grew up in a nonreligious family and became a Christian after studying the King James Bible in a university English course. Like Liu, she says she shopped around for a church where she felt leaders and parishioners were open to her experience and perspectives.
“I wouldn’t say I was looking for a congregation that matched what I believed in in some total or complicated way. But I certainly didn’t want to go somewhere where there was a pronounced ideology that I disagreed with … And also [wanted one] where people were accepting of the parts of my identity which in some contexts are ideological, although not really to me.”
Koyama eventually landed at First Lutheran Toronto, where she says the presence of queer people in church leadership helped her feel at home as a trans person. But more important than shared identity or ideology, she says, is the willingness of a congregation to welcome even people they disagree with.
Loving people who disagree is fundamental to Christianity and should show in the way churches listen to and welcome new members, she says.
‘A story that connects the dots’
The Rev. Geoffrey Ready, an Orthodox priest and director of Orthodox Christian studies at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, says he has seen a decline in familiarity with Christian ideas, stories and modes of worship even among theology students entering his program. But for him this is far from a sign of defeat. Ready thinks of it as an opportunity to engage with some of the ideas students are bringing with them from their own backgrounds.
“There is with the younger generation today a real instinct for things like justice and addressing climate change or fighting racism, but they don’t know where to ground that at all,” he says. “They don’t have a story that connects the dots.” In some conversations he’s had, he says, digging into the reasons why someone feels it is important to safeguard the environment will quickly unearth their desire to connect to something larger than themselves and find deeper meaning, which makes for a short jump to talking about God and creation.
He believes a culture where a Christian background is no longer the default is actually a better starting point for that conversation. When most people were Christian, he says, it was easy to simply associate with Christianity for the benefits of fitting into the mainstream and keep living a materialistic life.
And like Tshin, Ready believes the process of formation necessary to bring people seeking answers into the fold as Christians is far more complex than just instilling intellectual belief. It’s a matter of welcoming them into a community and encouraging them to participate in group prayer and liturgy and build habits of Christian behaviour. That’s what eventually prompts people to return to questions about truth and purpose, he says.
“The more recent answer has always been ‘Let’s get them into a subgroup and teach them things, put the thought in their head.’ Well that’s just not how human beings work. What you want to do is get people to belong first,” he says.
For his part, Liu says the most important part in feeling he belonged was realizing other Christians—even clergy—struggled with some of the same questions he did. In the process of finding a church where he could work out whether Christianity would be a part of his identity, he tried out several congregations. The first was an English-speaking one where he couldn’t quite connect with the congregants across the cultural barrier. Then followed Chinese-speaking churches where he could better grasp the social and cultural context. But he didn’t get what he was looking for in a spiritual home, he says, until he landed at St. Paul’s Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
“I asked [one of the priests] a very long-winded question with a lot of nuance, a lot of detail. This is something that I had done at every church I had visited … because I wanted to know of the shepherds of that church, how do they approach things?” he says. “He looked at me and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And this was the first time I had heard a priest acknowledge that they didn’t have all the answers. This was the most mind-blowing ‘I don’t know’ I’d ever heard.”
The sense he had gotten at some churches was that parishioners and clergy were already certain in their answers to the big questions of life, says Liu. At some, people had talked about ideas and perspectives they disagreed with as if they were dangerous. Liu, who was still figuring out the answers to his questions about the faith, says that made him feel that if he didn’t also have his answers figured out, he didn’t belong. The priest’s uttering those three little words, “I don’t know,” let him feel like it was okay that he didn’t know either. And when the priest offered to look for the answer with him, he says, it let him feel like a member of a larger community of curiosity.
Liu continues to attend St. Paul’s Bloor Street, where he recently facilitated an Alpha course in Mandarin.
