New Canadians promise renewal for churches
Asia, Africa seeing more Christians
EDMONTON — With one hand, Rev. Ayodele Ayeni clasps Bill Fung’s right foot. With the other, he pours water from a silver basin.
It’s an ancient act of arresting simplicity. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus began the Last Supper hours before his crucifixion by wrapping a towel around his waist and washing his followers’ feet.
Last Thursday, the 39-year-old Nigerian priest sang in Cantonese before preaching in English about the difference between the clean feet of his flock at Mary Help of Christians Chinese Catholic parish and the dirty, open-toed sandalled feet Jesus would have encountered.
“When you wash those kinds of feet, you don’t forget easily,” Ayeni said with a laugh.
“Service, that is the message for today. Today is our turn to take care of one another.”
For some aging Canadian churches with declining attendance, the road ahead is grim and marked by suffering.
But for congregations being infused with new Canadians, there’s promise of resurrection and renewal.
At Mary Help of Christians, most of the 500 or so parishioners hail from Hong Kong or Taiwan, says Alan Ching, a 52-year-old physiotherapist who chairs the parish pastoral council.
Cantonese is the main language in two of three weekly masses at the old Knights of Columbus building, just off Jasper Avenue at 119th Street. The early Sunday morning mass is in English.
Approaching its 25th anniversary in May, the number of families at the church is holding steady.
“I can’t say that we’re growing. People come and go,” says Ching.
According to University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, congregations such as Mary Help of Christians might represent the future of Christianity in Edmonton.
The world’s fastest-growing religion, Christianity is making vast strides in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the next 24 hours, there will be 37,000 more Catholics and 30,000 Pentecostals, Bibby says.
There will be just 1,200 more atheists.
Immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere are already altering Canada’s religious landscape, bypassing the shrinking mainline Protestant churches while infusing Catholic and Pentecostal congregations with devout newcomers.
In Alberta’s Catholic churches, foreign-born worshippers are nearly twice as likely as native-born Catholics — 64 per cent to 39 per cent — to attend mass at least once a month.
Well-spoken, friendly Filipino and African priests helm congregations.
And the number of foreign-born Christians in Canada is likely to grow in the coming decades.
For example, about eight per cent of the people in China now attend religious services, but by 2050 the number of Christians alone in China could rise to 220 million people, or 15 per cent of the population.
“When you look at this global data, it’s obvious that a lot of these people are arriving as Catholics,” Bibby says.
“With the growth of Christianity in China, you would expect those kinds of parishes are going to grow all the more because of immigration.”
More than half of the parishioners at Mary Help of Christians were already Catholic when they arrived, Ching says.
He was a twentysomething “sheet of white paper” when he came in 1986. Having no religious past, Ching began attending four years later, curious at first, but increasingly comfortable with an accepting congregation and approachable clergy.
This Sunday, his 11-yearold daughter will celebrate her confirmation. It’s a special end to Lent, the traditional 40-day period of fasting and sacrifice leading up to Easter.
Many Christians forego chocolate or wine. This year, Ching endeavoured to spend less time daydreaming about material things.
“I tried to pray more, because I’m usually very lazy,” Ching admits. “I think it’s making a difference.”
Good Friday services were uncharacteristically quiet at the Ethiopian Evangelical Church, a small, slightly dilapidated Pentecostal church on 130th Avenue at 114th Street, where a few dozen members gathered in the early evening to contemplate the meaning of the cross, sing a few hymns, pray and also wash each other’s feet.
Twenty-two years ago, Terefe Sereke began meeting with four or five friends in his apartment at 107th Avenue and 158th Street.
They incorporated as a church in 1994, and now have more than 300 active members, with plans to move from their Calder location to a bigger building.
Sereke’s life is testimony to the growing worldwide influence of Pentecostalism.
The broad, intensely experiential conservative Protestant movement began in late 19th-century England and America and has grown to more than half a billion followers.
Pentecostals were virtually non-existent when Sereke was born in Addis Ababa 47 years ago.