Dr. Kevin Driver pastors a small church in the resort town on Banff, Alberta, Canada. He deals with seasonal workers, transient influx during high tourist seasons, and a intercultural mix of congregants.
“Banff Full Gospel Church is a small church in a rural resort town and, and our churches, what I would call intercultural or international. Our town is made up of 90 different nationalities. We have about 14 different nationalities represented in the church.”
“It’s really frustrating, I think, for small churches to use a definition of churches as noses and nickels. We’re growing but we never grown. The budget never gets bigger. And the attendance never gets larger. And yet the completing of the mission that we’re called to keeps on going andwe can, we can look at the fruit of our labor. . . Look at the folks that have come through and where they are.”
“One of the best advice I ever got from from from a mentor was don’t quit on Monday.”
“I did my doctorate looking at our church in our context and did it for how small churches can be welcoming communities for rural immigration. We’re also very multi ethnic as a town – because of the temporary foreign worker and people in the immigration process. . . You can come back in six months and 50% of my church might be new people. Just depending upon the changing of the season, it slowed down because of COVID because we sent a lot of our temporary foreign workers home. But it’s still transient. It’s always saying hello to visitors, finding out who’s actually visiting for the weekend compared to who’s here for six weeks, six months, six years.”
“We’re intercultural, rather than a mosaic or a melting pot. We don’t have critical mass of many folks. Why don’t we have a Filipino church, for instance, when they make up a good third of the church? Well, that Filipino group is broken up into three different major languages. And so that critical mass becomes important because regardless of which language they actually speak, they still come back to English because that’s the language they all know.”
“I think there’s seasons. So it’s circular, you kind of get a critical mass and you can do things. And then you lose that critical mass and you just have to come back in and find the energy and just build it again. It’s sort of a lot like campus ministry where your people are going to be going, but you still want to embrace. You want to embrace them fully.”
“We work well together. But there’s always that cultural baggage we hold for instance, with the Japanese and the Korean, especially with with some older folk. In the Korean community there’s a little bit of animosity and hostility because of past wrongs. So we kind of catch that and flag that as quick as we can and have conversations about that. This is the biggest gift we give as leaders is we can help people process things that they may not be processing.”
“I would say don’t change their culture, but create culture. The Bible talks about this, . . . Ephesians 2:19 through 22, Paul talks about Ephesus church, and he tells them, you are citizens, you are family, you are a temple. And, and there was great wisdom in that because Paul’s calling them forward to something. And he first talks about citizenship that we all have a voice. And then he talks about family that is in Christ. Not only do we have a voice, we also have acceptance. And then he talks about a temple not only a voice and acceptance. But then we have a purpose, we’re going towards a goal now and then understanding that in broader terms, that there’s people at different points in relationship. And different points in their life.”
“Sometimes they’re only in the church because they want a voice. They just want to be seen. I exist. Yeah. And, and to, you know, there’s a tension there. And sometimes that’s all we give people is we just say, Yeah, I see you, have a great day. And then there’s, there’s those that want something more they want family, they want that acceptance, and especially here in the immigrant community, you do not have extended family, your family is 1000s of miles away. And so you’re living in different time zones you’re living in, in a tension that that can be quite overwhelming. As a church, we can give that acceptance in that forever family and part of that family and that acceptance is not trying to change them, not trying to to make them more Canadian and less something else. You know, that’s not what they need at this moment. You help them navigate where they’re at.”
“And then there’s still that purpose that we’re calling them forward. And this is can be a very frustrating thing and a small church is calling them forward to purpose, to build something and to have that passion. But understanding that revolving door – that you’re calling them to a passion and building in Christ, but they may never build your church. You’ve got them established and then all of a sudden, their dream, their home, is across Canada. And you have to let them go and you have to let them get established. You’ll still be their family. They’re still part of the kingdom of God, and so so we have what we call Kingdom partners. It’s trying to to keep that relationship long after they’ve gone, to keep those doors of communication open. . . We’ve got a lot of our former folk, our kingdom partners, that tune in from literally around the world because not everybody who came here got citizenship, or permanent residency, they came here to work.”
COVID and ministerial? “We still meet in person, we’ll see what happens this afternoon. And we’ve been doing that since June. But the only way we got to do that was all our churches in town got together and help each other write policies, go back and forth with each other with the health codes and the fire codes and just breaking it up. So it was doable for us. We ended up with four churches being open and we meet every week on Zoom. And, and and we talk about how we can best manage the the new things we have to manage as well as how we can continue with pastoral care. And and so I feel really privileged to be part of that ministerial. . . It was here when I got here 22 years ago. And then within the first three years, I was the longest serving pastor. So then it kind of dropped on my plate to keep it going. Which is another unique thing about here is one of my parishioners calls it the Church of the revolving door.”
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