“My name is Arch Wong, and I’m professor of practical theology at Ambrose University. I’m also the Associate Director of the flourishing congregations Institute. . . . Before coming to Ambrose, and being the Associate Director of the Institute, I was a pastor for about 10 years at a Chinese church in Toronto. And one of the passions for me in pastoring was in the area of spiritual formation and discipleship, wanting to see people grow in their faith, but also people coming to the faith, you know, and watching their faith, journey, start and continue.”
“Let me start off with the institute’s mission is really to provide good empirical research for the Canadian church context. Many things that come up from the US or from the UK or Australia, all good data and all good work and research. But we found that there needed to be a Canadian flavour, so to speak. And, and, and really then taking seriously the Canadian context, which is, you know, quite what should I say multicultural, diverse in lots of races, in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and so on and so forth.”
“Start with with the four of us: Joel Thiessen, who is a sociology of religion person, and we needed a good sociologist, I should say on the team, and Joel brings that that background, working with congregations, but also some of his areas is around religious nones. Joel is, is actually the director of the Institute. And then folks that are our other members of the team are Keith Walker from the University of Saskatchewan. And then Bill McAlpine, just retired several years ago. So he does work with us here and there.”
We’re looking at a broad spectrum across ecclesial families. So basically, from Catholic to mainline and conservative Protestants, to small churches, to larger churches, medium sized churches, urban, you know, rural distinctions. A lot of our our work covers that demographic, and so some of our conversations is to think about flourishing in the sense of, what does that look like and what does it mean for say a small congregation or a rural congregation or what does flourishing mean for a large urban church?”
“And so what does that kind of mean for them? What we found, I just found that really interesting, especially around the earlier research that we did, finding that really flourishing regardless of theological traditions, . . . It all depends on context. You know in ministry it’s always context context.”
“Instead of asking what’s wrong with the church, we’re asking what’s right with the church. When you ask what is right with the church, we found that it’s very generative.” . . . three areas – organizational ethos, and then internal and outward. And under those three domains were 11 constructs. And so, for example, an organization ethos, we talked about, a clear self identity, leadership, innovation, structures and processes. When we talked about internal we’re thinking about discipleship, we’re talking about community, hospitable community, and diversity. And when we talk about outward, we’re thinking about neighborhood involvement, evangelism and partnerships.”
“What we’ve found is that there’s no perfect church, or perfect congregation where all these level constructs are working and humming at 100%. So what we found is that flourishing happens in various aspects, and also various times in the lifecycle of a church.”
“[An] other thing that we’re doing now from the national survey, is we’re moving to our case studies that are starting this fall. So we have I think about 10 to 11 collaborators that are working with Joel and Keith and I, and we’re looking at case studies of various congregations throughout Canada. And from basically from Vancouver to Halifax. . . . , spending, anywhere between eight to 10 to 11 weeks with a congregation and trying to understand in that particular context – What makes this congregation flourish? And then what are the mechanisms, what are pathways that help congregations to flourish?. . . . we’re looking at as well is just to ask them questions, and to look at their congregational history and their life cycle to see what, are there things that help flourish? Have there been past incident periods of that congregational life that have helped them to flourish? And that really the fourth thing that we’re looking then at is this, is there general principles? And are there good and promising practices that arise from these case studies that could be, helpful to other congregations in Canada. And so that’s sort of the next phase. We’re gathering data right now.”