canadianchristianity.com email interview with Rick Hiemstra, program manager, Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism

1. What is the state of the church in Canada numerically, both in terms of the number of church members and the number of Christians? What branches of the church-such as, Catholic, mainline, charismatic, postmodern, evangelical -- are growing and shrinking? In what parts of the country-provinces, urban areas, rural areas -- is the church growing or shrinking? Among what demographics is the church growing or shrinking?

Outreach Canada and Bruce Guenther have denominational measures for this data. Statistics Canada provides substantially different data by religious affiliation. The Statcan data is 2001, as is Bruce Guenthers. You could see my article in Church and Faith Trends on the multiplicity of answers when it comes to counting evangelicals.

2. What is the ethnic makeup of the church in Canada and what impact is immigration having on Canada? What percentage of immigrants are already Christian? Are we converting immigrants to Christ? Are other religions gaining adherents? Are we winning our children or losing them? How multicultural is the church, how representative of the Canadian population?

Statcan is releasing new 2006 immigration data on Dec 4th.

The last StatsCan study to link ethnicity and religion was done in 2002 http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=4508&lang=en&db=IMDB&dbg=f&adm=8&dis=2. There are no plans to repeat this study. You could also look at the 2001 data on the church and multiculturalism.