Some of the 16,000 youth who attended the recent YC Alberta event. Photo courtesy of YC Alberta

By Jim Coggins

IN A NATION that often pays little attention to religion, an hour-long television documentary has shone a spotlight on "a different kind of church."

'Revealed: Hip 2B Holy,' broadcast on Global TV May 25, looked at the evangelical movement in Canada and pointed out that it is not only growing but also evolving and finding new ways of reaching the younger generation.

The documentary told its story by focusing on Connexus Community Church, a new church in Barrie, Ontario and on Nate Gerber, a youth pastor and Christian dance artist from the Toronto area.

Global news anchor Kevin Newman, who narrated and co-produced the documentary, told CC.com the producers had to make a choice between doing a broad survey and "drilling deeper" into some representative evangelicals "at ground level."

The documentary put these examples into perspective by citing two experts: Ipsos pollster Andrew Grenville and scholar Sam Reimer, author of Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Culture in Canada and the United States.

Grenville pointed out that while mainline Protestant denominations are declining, evangelicals have quietly grown to 10 to 15 percent of the Canadian population.

But the documentary was more interested in the qualitative change. It described the Connexus church as "clearly conservative" in its theology and yet "informal and welcoming." It meets in a movie complex, uses YouTube to reach a younger generation and puts its sermons online.

Similarly, the documentary followed Gerber to look at a number of innovative outreach strategies: T-shirt tagging street evangelism, Christian hip hop dancing at a secular dance event, skateboarding demonstrations and Alpha in a pub.

"At the heart of every evangelical Christian," Newman observed in the documentary, "is the desire to convert others" -- and since the baby boomers and their children have stopped going to church, the new evangelicals have resolved to take church to the people.

"What interested us," Newman told CC.com, "is what's new and fresh."

But Newman said he was also concerned to document churches and people who were representative and not people on the fringes. "In any organization, you can find elements that don't make the organization proud, but we wanted to look at the whole movement."

Complex issues

The documentary also tried to understand the nuances of some complex issues and to protray, in Newman's words, "some of the ambiguities of the movement."

For instance, it noted that "a unique Canadian evangelicalism is evolving" that is "not as strident and fundamentalist" as American evangelicalism, but it also observed that there are similarities and connections between the two movements. The documentary also suggested that American evangelicalism is also evolving, partly due to the influence of Canadian evangelicals.

Similarly, the documentary looked at issues of church and state.

It showed a Christian rally in Ottawa that stressed making Canada more Christian. It also showed students at Trinity Western University's Laurentian Leadership Centre in Ottawa, who were serving internships with a variety of political parties and were interested in a broad range of issues, including the environment.

The documentary pointed out that evangelicals know they are a minority who lost political battles on abortion and gay marriage. But it also quoted Grenville that evangelicals are still a significant minority who deserve to be included in the conversation.

The documentary suggested that evangelical positions on moral issues have not changed greatly, but the methods they use to promote those positions have changed.

Both Carey Nieuwhof, senior pastor at the Connexus church, and Gerber suggested that using placards to protest abortion and homosexuality has turned people away from the church and made outsiders hate evangelicals. Gerber said it would be better to focus first on "heart changes" that will "lead to political changes." Nieuwhof added: "People change because God loves them; they don't change so that God will love them."

The documentary observed that it remains to be seen how successful this "softer evangelical voice" will be in convincing mainstream society to change.

Fair treatment

Newman told CC.com the documentary came about as a result of "pure, old-fashioned journalism" -- he saw something happening and decided to investigate.

What Newman saw was a massive advertising campaign for the Alpha Course program. He thought at first it was just a course on how to live a better life, but he asked a minister friend and discovered it was a non-threatening way to teach Christianity to people outside the church.

Newman had spent seven years in the US, where religion is more visible, and he began to wonder if there was a significant religion story in Canada that journalists had not seen because they were "not used to looking for it."

Janet Epp Buckingham, director of the Laurentian Leadership Centre, said the documentary "showed Canadians something about evangelicals that they probably don't know." She said the documentary was unusual for its even-handed approach to evangelicals but also for its interest in religion generally. For many journalists, "religion is not even on their radar screens -- they don't know much about it, and they don't want to take very much time to learn about it."

At the beginning, said Newman, he and co-producer Karen Pinker of 90th Parallel Productions sat down and decided they were not going to pre-judge anything but simply to explore and explain what was happening.

Some things they discovered surprised Newman.

For instance, he discovered that evangelicalism was not just growing in western and rural Canada but also in central, urban and suburban Canada. That is why they chose to focus on the urban Gerber and the Connexus Church in Barrie, the fastest growing city in Canada. He also chose Connexus because the church was just being launched when the journalists started their research and it gave them an opportunity to follow the church's progress from the beginning.

Newman was also surprised to discover that evangelicalism is "evolving into something uniquely Canadian" and is bringing new people into the church, particularly young people. These things are "counter-intuitive" in a Canadian society which is often thought to be increasingly secular and where many mainline churches are in serious decline.

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Newman's intent was to approach the subject objectively, so that believers would see "a fair representation of their beliefs" and nonbelievers would see "interesting people and new ideas."

Newman also addressed the antagonism that has sometimes been evident between evangelicals and journalists in Canada. He noted that Pinker had worked hard to "overcome the trust issues," so that the evangelicals they interviewed would speak freely and not be afraid that the documentary would distort what they were saying.

Nieuwhof admitted that participating in the documentary was "a faith venture" requiring him and his church to trust the producers to portray the church fairly. In the end, he said, he was "really impressed with the job Global did."

Aileen Van Ginkel, vice-president of ministry services for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, called the documentary "very fair" and "one of the most even-handed I've ever seen."

Unlike some other programs, he said, it did not present "a caricature of evangelicals as mean-spirited people carrying placards that put other people down." It "showed some of the excesses" within the evangelical movement -- "but that is fair too."

Van Ginkel noted that in focusing on just two, very innovative ministries, the program did not portray the full scope of Canadian evangelicalism, but the common "spirit of evangelicalism was well characterized." For instance, the program presented fairly the evangelical emphasis on conversion and the understanding that evangelicalism is less political in Canada than in the US.

Janet Epp Buckingham called the documentary "a pretty good piece" that for the most part approached the subject "from a neutral perspective." She thought the documentary portrayed the essence of the Centre's program "extremely well." She said the documentary did "perpetuate the idea that what evangelicals are doing on abortion and homosexuality is unusual" -- but "they didn't stay on that."

Gerber said the documentary "could have been a lot worse." Considering that the producers had to make "a bit of a leap to get into our world," they "did a fairly good job," he said.

The producers followed Gerber periodically over the course of four months and reduced all of that research to a few "sound bites, some not in perfect context," said Gerber, who added that there were "a lot more people who should have had a voice," and the documentary presented only "a small slice of the story."

Still, he said he was okay with what was presented and thought it fairly positive. He felt peace going into the project because he thought "God was in it."

Mike Love, executive director of Extreme Dream Ministries, said he was also "very impressed" with the documentary.

On the weekend before the documentary aired, Love's ministry had organized YC Alberta, a youth-oriented worship and teaching event that attracted over 16,000 youth to Edmonton's Rexall Place. He agreed that the documentary rightly portrayed evangelicalism's ability to reach the younger generation. If all churches are declining, "somebody forgot to tell 16,000 young people," said Love.

On the other hand, he also pointed out that the documentary did not portray the full range of evangelicalism. He agreed that the innovative ministries portrayed in the documentary have to be "part" of the future of the church in Canada. However, he did not agree that they are the only model.

Some of the more traditional churches are full and deserve to be honoured too, said Love, who added that there is a need for "a great variety" of churches to meet a great variety of needs and reach out to a great variety of subcultures.

There should be churches to reach the skater community and the sports community and eclectic churches that bring various groups together, said Love, who added that he is very hopeful about the prospect of the next generation of Christians reaching out to those around them -- "church isn't designed to be an indoor event."

Reg Bibby, a sociologist from the University of Lethbridge who has surveyed thousands of young people across Canada for about three decades, said he was producing "aerial photographs" and he welcomed the program for looking at "qualitative" questions and helping to "fill in the blanks."

Bibby's data do not show that evangelical churches are growing greatly or that they are reaching a lot of new people. However, he suggested that they are "holding their market share", which is "no mean feat" in today's society.

The documentary would have been "more convincing" if it had looked at a broader range of evangelical churches, since not all of them are growing, said Bibby. On the other hand, he added, there is definitely a lot of vitality in a lot of the evangelical movement, and that is something many journalists have not seen.

Results

Newman said it is too early to know what results the program will have. "What I mostly hope for is that it gets a discussion going about religion's place in modern Canada," he said.

Nieuwhof stated that his prayer going in was that the documentary would show "a different face of the church" and open up communication between churches and society. "Our hope is that God would use it to bring hundreds and thousands of people to him."

Photo courtesy of YC Alberta

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