Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver

By Jason Byassee, Albert Y. S. Chu, Ross A. Lockhart and 2 more

Is God changing the face of the church in North America today? The secularization thesis makes it appear that churches are inevitably declining in membership and influence. Too often, however, this assumption of decline is based on only watching the denominations that were "church plants of Western Christendom" in North America. Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver focuses on the context of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and notes through a mixed-methods study including interviews and participant observation that many churches in Vancouver with predominantly Asian composition are growing both in size and influence. What might we learn about God's transforming power by looking to Asia rather than Europe to predict the future of Christian witness in the Pacific Northwest of North America?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666752540

Jason Byassee

Jason Byassee teaches preaching at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, where he holds the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics. He is a longtime contributor to Christian Century magazine and the author, most recently, of Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England (2020).

Book preview

Introduction

V ancouver Chinese poet Jim Wong-Chu describes tradition as being like a bundle of leaves carefully wrapped with a string. A gentle tug and the string gives way as the leaves open to reveal the precious gift of sweet rice within. ¹ Wong-Chu’s personal story offers a tradition quite different from the dominant narrative of Canada’s founding as a European colonial project. Wong-Chu was born in Hong Kong in 1949 before he was brought to Canada in 1953 as a paper son ² to be raised in British Columbia by aunts and uncles. While working in the Chinese Canadian restaurant industry, moving from dishwasher to delivery boy to short order cook, his artistic talents flourished on the side. He enrolled in what is now called Emily Carr University, and while studying photography and poetry, Jim Wong-Chu helped bring Vancouver’s Chinatown to life in curated images and words. Wong-Chu’s life and work bears testimony to the creation of an emerging civic culture that challenged, and then helped reverse, the default origin story of Vancouver as a tale of ever westward expansion of European power. ³

From creation tales to family trees to Hollywood studios, origin stories are powerful, compelling, and enduring narratives that help frame our understanding of what it means to be a human being in a particular place. As a city, Vancouver traditionally had a well-known, often repeated and, until recently, rarely challenged origin story itself. The city takes its name from English Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver who first visited the region and met with Indigenous peoples in 1792, a year after the Spanish first appeared in the area. British settlement of the territory began over thirty years later with the establishment of Fort Langley in 1827. New Westminster, which today is a suburb of Vancouver, was the first area developed by the British on the banks of the province’s longest river, named for the Northwest Company’s famous explorer Simon Fraser. The two British colonies on Vancouver Island and what is now the Lower Mainland were united in 1866 with New Westminster as its capital for two years, until the more established city of Victoria (dating back to 1843) became the home of the legislature and government bureaucracy. Meanwhile, on July 1, 1867, the British North American colonies of Canada (Upper and Lower Canada known today as Ontario and Quebec), along with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, were united in confederation to form the Dominion of Canada. Four years later the colony of British Columbia joined Canada, with the promise of a railway connecting east and west, and the majority of male, British, non-Indigenous citizens who were permitted to vote did so to join confederation on July 20, 1871.

The railway would take another fifteen years to finally reach the West Coast, but when it did arrive, the city of Vancouver began to take shape, as the Canadian Pacific Railroad found that the Gastown area (now a tourist haven for cruise ship passengers) was a better harbor and terminus for shipping than the original Port Moody site further east. That is the traditional, Eurocentric telling of Vancouver’s origin story. But, as University of British Columbia urban geographer David Ley argues, In the quest to understand society, things are not always as they appear; causes and consequences may be concealed; subtle explanations may on the surface seem implausible.⁴

Indeed, as Vancouver set out plans for Canada’s 150th anniversary of confederation, public awareness had turned away from the former origin story of the city and a growing movement took hold of Canada 150+, recognizing that the Indigenous history of this West Coast territory goes well beyond the century and a half of a modern nation-state.⁵ Instead, as the former origin story of the city of Vancouver breaks down, gaps in the Eurocentric narrative create space for the witness of neighbors for whom there has been no bard that others listen to attempting to tell their tale or a statue to commemorate their history. From Canada’s First Peoples to more recent newcomers with roots in Asia, Africa, and South America, the lived experience of those who are not of European ancestry are finding voice and sharing their painful and challenging stories of what it is like to be here but not always seen or heard. Jim Wong-Chu captures this in his poem How feel I do? where he explores the pain of an Asian immigrant adjusting to an English-dominant culture confessing that he feels at home in the embarrassment of one trying desperately to fit in and adapt to this new Canadian culture.⁶

This project emerged out of earlier research focusing on missional churches in the Pacific Northwest region of North America known as Cascadia, that includes Greater Vancouver with its population of 2.6 million people.⁷ That project highlighted the vibrancy of Asian Christian congregations in Vancouver and sparked our curiosity as researchers to move beyond interviews with clergy leaders alone. And so, we began a new project conducting interviews with laypeople who reflected the growth of Asian Christianity in this region where the dominant narrative in media and culture is one of religious decline and irrelevance. The authors, three friends who are pastors preaching regularly in the city, as well as engaged in distinct work on a university campus, listened carefully to these stories of Asian Christian laypeople whose devotion to Jesus Christ often goes unnoticed in the culture around them. Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver is meant to surprise and reorient our understanding of religious identity in a context where so often the broader secularization thesis is accepted without question. Missiologist Stefan Paas describes the secularized nations of the West today as being characterized by low and decreasing levels of church attendance, low and decreasing levels of other types of church involvement (baptism, church weddings, Christian funerals, etc.). For Paas, they have a widespread lack of belief in traditional Christian doctrines (a personal God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, heaven and hell, etc.), a general indifference towards traditional religious questions and cultural elites that are often quite critical of religion and religious institutions.⁸ Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor attempts to describe this shift in the West to secularity as a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.⁹ This leads to a dominant cultural narrative, fueled by a media that still attends primarily to (formerly) mainline denominations, that gleefully proclaims the end of Christianity in Canada with a best before shelf life of 2040.¹⁰

And why not? After all, Canada is well-known among observers of secularization for its standout irreligiosity. Our friend Jason’s native United States of America is the standard go-to counterargument for secularization theses in general. It has long been observed that as cultures industrialize and grow wealthy, their faith adherence declines. That has been true in western Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, and in Canada, but not in the world’s most industrialized and wealthy nation, the United States. Canada is significant in this counterargument as a fellow North American country colonized by the English and French that has, in fact, declined precipitously in its faith adherence. Even the part of Canada colonized by the French has been a standout: Quebec fell from perhaps the most widely Christian place on earth to one of the least in a very short time, in its renowned 1960s Quiet Revolution.

In short, Canada is much more like its European forebears in its decline in faith. The United States of America stands out as a counterexample. At least for now.

On a neighborhood level, our neighbors with European heritage here in Vancouver and its suburbs tend to think of Christianity as something their grandparents once believed in. Aside from cultural accretions like statutory holidays and Christmas lights, the cross is not something that shapes their lives, much less those of the children they are raising. As they or their parents moved to the West Coast of Canada, they left behind whatever observation of Christian faith they may have once had. Mark Noll has documented that Canada was once more faith-observant than the United States of America.¹¹ This faith was allied more closely with the English crown and the Canadian government than was ever the case in the breakaway United States. Yet as Christian officialdom declined in Canada, so did church attendance and profession of faith among Canadians as documented by our colleagues at The University of Toronto.¹² If you ally with the government, and the government turns its back on you,