Abstract
The experience of diversity is not unusual in Toronto, where I live. In fact, it is the norm. As of the 2006 Census, some 43 percent of the city’s population was of racial minority status, and the number is expected to rise to 63 percent by 2031.1 There are many places where diverse peoples coexist in public spaces, but Toronto is one of the most diverse in the world. Indeed, with increasing intensity, throughout the past 50 years globalization has dramatically increased transnational migration, consequently reshaping sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and religious identities in Canada. My own home church is an excellent example, a downtown United Church of Canada community. With a long-standing and active Jamaican constituency, and a new and growing Asian membership (mostly Korean, but also Japanese), our church is now learning about being an “intercultural” community, thinking differently about its identity and mission.
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Notes
See, for example, Andrew F. Walls, “From Christendom to World Christianity: Missions and the Demographic Transformation of the Church,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 22, no. 2 (2001): 306–330.
See Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003).
Mary Jo Leddy, “Forward,” in Intersecting Voices: Critical Theologies in a Land of Diversity, ed. Don Schweitzer and Derek Simon, 4–8 (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004), 7.
See Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 47.
In Canada, three different categories under the term “Aboriginal” officially recognize groups of Indigenous persons: First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. First Nations refers to peoples who are neither Inuit nor Métis. Inuit designates t hose of common language who live in the Arctic region of Canada (nd are sometimes referred to as “Eskimo” peoples). Métis are a people of mixed ancestry, primarily First Nation and French or Scottish, who came to recognize themselves as a distinct group in the twentieth century. For an excellent survey, see John L. Steckly and Bryan D. Cummins, Full Circle: Canada’s First Nations, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008). On terminology, see also http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100014642.
John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008).
Nuper Gogia and Bonnie Slade, About Canada: Immigration (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2011), 15–16.
Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 116–122.
See Steckley and Cummins, Full Circle, 122–129 and Chapter 19; J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); and
John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).
James S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians (Toronto: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, Canada, 2009), 27–28.
Gogia and Slade, About Canada, 19–22; and Carl E. James, Seeing Ourselves: Exploring Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, 4th ed. (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishers, Inc., 2010), 175–176. See also B. S. Bolaria and P. Li, eds., Racial Oppression in Canada (Toronto: Garamond Press); and
W. E. Kalback and W. W. McVey, Demographic Bases of Canadian Society (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, Co., 1971). The treatment of 22,000 Japanese Canadians in horrible internment camps during World War II is often overlooked, though the federal government apologized in 1988. much vegetate to a low standard of living... many cannot adapt themselves to our climatic conditions.” Cited from A. Calliste, “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Backs from the Caribbean, 1900–1932,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 4 (1994): 131–147, esp. 136.
See Peter S. Li, “Deconstructing Canada’s Discourse of Immigrant Integration,” Journal of International Migration and Integration 4, no. 3 (August 2003): 315–333.
David Robertson Cameron, “An Evolutionary Story,” in Uneasy Partners: Multiculturalism and Rights in Canada, ed. Janice Gross Stien et al. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 80.
See Jeffrey Reitz and Rupa Banerjee, “Racial Inequality, Social Cohesion and Policy Issues in Canada,” in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, ed. Keith Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F Leslie Eidle, 505–519 (Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy, 2007); James, Seeing Ourselves, 108; Gogia and Slade, About Canada, 58–59, 75; Will Kymlica, “Disentangling the Debate,” in Uneasy Partners, ed. Janice Gross Stien et al., 148–149.
Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation (Government of Quebec, 2008). See also the first report, setting out guidelines for the process, Accommodation and Differences—Seeking Common Ground: Quebecers Speak Out (Government of Quebec, 2007).
See Reginald W. Bibby, A New Day: The Resilience and Restructuring of Religion in Canada (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2012); and Kim, “What Forms Us,” 88.
For example, Orlando O. Espin, Grace and Humanness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), 1–50;
Walter J. Hollenweger, “Intercultural Theology,” Theology Today 43 (April 1986): 28–35;
Volker Küster, “The Project of an Intercultural Theology,” Swedish Missiological Themes 93, no. 3 (2005): 417–432;
Werner Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology,’” Mission Studies 25 (2008): 229–251; and
Frans Wijsen, “Intercultural Theology and the Mission of the Church,” Exchange 30 (2001): 218–228.
Rich Janzen, Mark D. Chapman, and James W. Watson, “Integrating Immigrants into the Life of Canadian Urban Christian Congregations: Findings from a National Survey,” Review of Religious Research 55 (2012): 441–470, esp. 465.
Peter Phan, “The Experience of Migration in the United States as a Source of Intercultural Theology,” in Migration, Religious Experience, and Globalization (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2003), 149.
On this, see Mary Jo Leddy, The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls Us Home (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).
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© 2016 Thomas E. Reynolds
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Reynolds, T.E. (2016). Migration and Christianity in a Canadian Context. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Christianities in Migration. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031648_11
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