Canada's Churches Respond to Immigration

“What is the Church?” This course addresses how Canadian Christians have viewed that fundamental question through the lens of immigration, and how they have framed the problem over the last 150 years. After an exploration of the answers given in several time periods, the course will grapple with the slippery issue of Canadian identity, focusing on the transitional years of 1960–1980 as Canada shed its British identity and considered what it meant to be a multicultural country within a bi-lingual framework. In the second half of the course, the governing question becomes “what will the Church look like twenty years in the future?” Students will explore contemporary modes of ministry that challenge churches and their members to become intercultural by embracing others and actively seeking to be transformed by the diversity of people who arrive from around the world to make their home within our borders.