In 2015, our pastor Jedidiah Carpentier asked Janice Penner to start a children’s church program. She laughed, as there were only two school-aged children attending our church at the time.…
Tag:
interculturalism
It was a deadly summer. Senseless terror attacks in civilian spaces in Europe and racialized police violence in North American assaulted the human spirit every time we turned on the news.…
Portage Avenue opens arms to ethnic churches “When a church goes through a decline in attendance, there’s a grasping,” says Jedidiah Carpentier, senior pastor of Portage Avenue Church, an 86-year-old…
From Times Square to Timbuktu: The Post-Christian West Meets the Non-Western Church
Author: Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
A common theme emerges as I listen to the stories of families who have been members of the Mennonite Brethren church in Canada for many years…I recently attended a government-sponsored event that invited the church into a conversation regarding the role and function of faith in our intercultural Canadian society. What does the church have…
Few Christians in Canada can deny that the faces in our community have changed. Between 1986 and 1999 Canada received 3.5 million immigrants, many of whom have not received the gospel of Christ. The church has a tremendous opportunity to reach out to immigrants and demonstrate Christ’s love.
Killarney Park identifies itself as an intentionally intercultural church. This means, explained associate pastor David Chow, a young Canadian-born Chinese married to a Caucasian, that people of different ethnicities, generations and cultures come together under one roof to celebrate God together. Some 65–70 percent of those who attend (about 160 people) could be considered Anglo–Canadian, about 25 percent represent pan-Asian ethnicities, and other groups make up about five percent.