By Jim Coggins

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Looking back over the past year, the editors of CC.com have selected several stories which represent key trends in the Canadian church. Third in a series.

TRINITY Western University's Institute for the Study of Religion hosted a study conference February 9, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines in both Christian and secular academic institutions. What they had in common was an interest in the study of religion in Canada.

Those who attended said that while church attendance has declined in Canada, widespread expectations that Canada would become a secular nation have proven incorrect; Canada remains very religious. Moreover, there is even renewed interest in Canadian universities in studying Canadian religion.

Beyond the conclusions of the scholars attending, the event is symbolic of several other trends.

TWU's Institute for the Study of Religion was founded in 2007. That is the same year that the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada's Centre For Research on Canadian Evangelicalism began publishing its online journal Church & Faith Trends; the Centre itself was founded the year before.

While Trinity Western's Institute looks at religion in Canada generally, the EFC Centre's efforts are more narrowly focused.

It is significant, not just that religion is increasingly being studied in Canada, but that evangelicals are taking the lead in that study. This is evidence of the growth of evangelicalism in Canada. Over the past quarter-century, evangelicals have grown to the point that they make up more than 10 percent of the Canadian population; in fact, attendance at evangelical churches is almost twice the attendance at mainline Protestant churches.

Moreover, the two study centres just mentioned are evidence of the growth of what Regent College professor John G. Stackhouse has called "an evangelical intellectual culture." A quarter-century ago, there simply wasn't "a critical mass of scholars interested in evangelicalism."

Further, the two centres are only part of the trend.

It used to be said that Canadian Christian higher education followed a different path than that followed by American Christian higher education. Evangelicals in the United States operated many "liberal arts colleges" (small universities offering a general education from a Christian perspective), while Canadian evangelicals operated Bible colleges (which taught basic Christianity to lay people and also trained missionaries and pastors).

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Mainline Protestants in Canada (and to some extent Roman Catholics), on the other hand, often operated theological colleges attached to secular universities (the University of Toronto, for instance, has several of these colleges). Often these theological colleges were remnants and reminders of the fact that those universities were originally founded in the 18th century as Christian schools. For instance, McMaster Divinity School in Hamilton, Ontario, is a reminder that McMaster University used to be a Baptist institution.

This Canadian pattern changed in 1962 with the founding of Trinity Western University in Langley, BC by the Evangelical Free Church. This was followed by the founding of St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick in 1975, and by the founding of two Christian Reformed schools, King's University College in Edmonton in 1979 and Redeemer College (now Redeemer University College) in Ancaster, Ontario in 1982.

The trend has gathered steam with the conversion of a number of Bible colleges into universities.

Concordia University College of Alberta completed a long transition from a Lutheran college affiliated with the University of Alberta to a free-standing university in 1995. Atlantic Baptist University's conversion from a Bible college became official in 1996. Canadian Mennonite University was founded in 2000 from two Bible colleges and a college attached to the University of Winnipeg. What had been Ontario Bible College became Tyndale University College & Seminary in 2003. Ambrose University College was founded in Calgary in 2007, an outgrowth of Nazarene and Christian and Missionary Alliance Bible colleges.

Institutions that have remained colleges have sometimes dropped "Bible" from their names, and they have begun offering a more general academic curriculum and some vocational training in areas such as early childhood education.

This trend for evangelicals to move from a Bible college model to a university model suggests that Canadian evangelicals are moving from a fringe movement to being part of the mainstream. So does the fact that evangelical scholars are holding conferences and interacting with scholars from other Canadian Christian traditions and even secular scholars.

This raises the question of how far this joining of the mainstream will go. Will these evangelical schools will eventually become secular universities just as the mainstream Protestant schools did in the 20th century? (For instance, Brandon University was once a Baptist school, Queen's University was a Presbyterian school, and the University of Winnipeg was a United Church school.)

The even larger question is the extent to which evangelicals will enter the mainstream and how that will change them.

• See State of the Canadian Church - 2008.

January 15/2009