Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver
    Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver
    Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver

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

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJun 20, 2023
    ISBN9781666752540
    Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver
    Author

    Jason Byassee

      Jason Byassee holds the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Hermeneutics at Vancouver School of Theology. Formerly senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, North Carolina, he is also a contributing editor at Christian Century magazine and the author of Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine.

    Read more from Jason Byassee

    Related to Christianity

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Books With The Most Impact

      Mar 15, 2022

      Books With The Most Impact
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Hunting for History Books

      Sep 3, 2019

      Hunting for History Books
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Years of Books

      Sep 15, 2023

      This issue marks my fifth anniversary as books editor. In the spring of 2018, I opened the BCHF Buzz, the BC Historical Federation’s (BCHF) e-newsletter, and read that British Columbia History magazine was looking for help with the books section. Aft

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Curriculum Connections

      Dec 15, 2023

      The inspiring stories of fifty remarkable women who changed the history of BC and the Yukon by defying social norms are featured in this book. From activists and writers to scientists and Cultural Knowledge Holders, this diverse group of women includ

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Founding Fathers?

      Apr 15, 2021

      Founding Fathers?
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Window Onto England’s Soul

      Feb 15, 2024

      A Window Onto England’s Soul
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Vacation with BC History

      Jun 4, 2019

      Books on British Columbia’s history are summer sidekicks for many of us. Packed into suitcases and taken on vacation, tucked into a bag and carted off to the beach, or read at home without switching on a lamp in the sunny evening hours. I usually sta

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Accessing BC History in 2020

      Dec 4, 2020

      Accessing BC History in 2020
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Refracting History | Stories In Digital And Print

      Mar 15, 2024

      In her debut book Unbroken, Angela Sterritt, award-winning journalist and member of the Gitxsan Nation, gives a voice—a frustrated and ready-for-change voice—to the many victims, survivors, and family members who have been impacted by the disproporti

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      State Of The State 200

      Jul 27, 2021

      State Of The State 200
      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Books With The Most Impact

      Mar 15, 2023

      Books With The Most Impact
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Scourge Of Civilisations

      Mar 14, 2024

      The Scourge Of Civilisations
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Refracting History | Stories In Digital And Print

      Mar 4, 2021

      British Columbia’s history is told through multiple lenses. We must seek out diverse perspectives, continually reframe the ways in which we understand the past, and carefully choose formats for sharing stories. Should a particular story be told in pr

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Legacy Of Hope And Glory

      Jun 9, 2021

      DESPITE my birthplace in the Mississippi Delta and my early years in schools whose teachers tried hard to educate the children in the poorest state in the Union, I reckon I had a head start when I arrived in Suffolk as the bride of a farmer. White ch

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The River Expedition That Opened The American West

      Dec 21, 2023

      In 1669, a French Jesuit priest living at a mission in present-day Wisconsin heard from members of the Illinois tribe about a great river. Intrigued, Jacques Marquette formulated a plan to explore the body of water and to learn about the Indigenous p

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Quaker Awakening

      Mar 9, 2021

      Quaker Awakening
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Man Behind The National Anthem Paid Little Attention To It

      Jul 4, 2017

      Francis Scott Key is most famous for writing the "Star Spangled Banner." But after he penned the now-famous lyrics, he hardly mentioned them.

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Native American Experience

      Aug 14, 2020

      The Native American Experience
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How James Fenimore Cooper Redefined “Pioneer”

      Feb 22, 2018

      Pioneer. The word often evokes esteem and reverence here in America, and those bold enough to earn the honorific are vaulted to an almost holy, prophet-like status. We cheer technological pioneers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; extol political pione

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Refracting History | Stories In Digital And Print

      Dec 15, 2023

      [The act] was an overtly racist law prohibiting the arrival of newcomers from China. It also required all people of Chinese heritage, including Canadian-born, to register with the federal government in order to stay in the country. Chinese Canadian c

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Origin Stories

      Sep 1, 2023

      Origin Stories
      20 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Missionaries

      Mar 10, 2020

      Missionaries
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Christianity

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Christianity - Jason Byassee

      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,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1