FAITH TODAY has sought to a “window on the world” for Canadian evangelicals, providing both information (a “view”) and a Christian interpretation of that information (a “frame”) about issues of immediate relevance (“faith today”). Looking back through the window of FAITH TODAY (FT) over more than ten years of publication, what does an observer learn about Canadian evangelicals?
First, it would confirm typical evangelical concerns. FT has discussed evangelism at home and missions abroad in a wide range of contexts. Furthermore, FT articles have demonstrated that evangelicals are interested in more than spiritual service to people, Articles have profiled relief and development agencies; explored the benefit and impediment of cultural differences in such work; and have regularly reported on the work of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s own agency, World Relief Canada.
One would also expect the coverage of ethical issues that have reappeared in FTs pages as they have animated evangelical discussion over this past decade. Euthanasia, AIDS and other questions relating to medical ethics have received attention. Pornography and homosexuality have been frankly discussed, the latter especially prominent in two cover features as the issue of homosexual ordination has come before several Canadian denominations.
Above all, abortion has consumed a great deal of evangelical energy, and FT has put it on the cover twice as well as featuring it at other times. In doing so, it has offered a moderate alternative to the radical options of both sides of extremists.
As the interest in abortion would indicate, evangelicals care about families, and FT has run cover stories on youth, age, marriage, parenting and the family itself as a threatened entity. FT also has probed the darkest sides of family life in cover stories on child sexual abuse and domestic violence. By doing so it has resisted the tendency among some evangelicals to idealize family life as they defend particular patterns of it.
Some of those patterns naturally have to do with gender, and FT has discussed female clergy, domestic roles, and the emerging “men’s movement” of the early 1990s. Unlike other religious periodicals in Canada and the United States, however, FT has published remarkably little on this subject that is front-and-centre in both public and ecclesiastical life. FT has had only female managing editors, so one cannot suspect male chauvinismin its offices. Perhaps instead the answer lies among its readers, many of whom may continue to resist confronting this question squarely.
Various aspects of church life have come into view in FT as it has examined innovative worship styles, the plane of the arts, Canadian gospel music, the general question of revival and renewal, and “megatrends” affecting all of church life. FTs interest has been realistic, so that related stories have dealt with less glorious but equally essential dimensions of church life, such as finances, congregational conflict, and even copyright violations by church choirs!
FT has not yet detailed the increasingly important role of parachurch movements among North American evangelicals, although one story did discuss the vexed question of church-parachurch relations. But paging through any issue of the magazine turns up advertising and news sections dominated by parachurch organizations, from missions to publishers and Christian schools.
Indeed, no evangelical interest has surfaced as often in FT as education. Christian concern about and involvement in public education; Christian options in private or home schooling; Christian higher education in Bible schools, seminaries, and liberal arts institutions: education is where crucial evangelical interests in orthodoxy, piety, family, and society intersect most intensely.
Television evangelists, though, have been the most notorious exemplars of evangelicalism in this past decade, and FT has devoted regular attention to Christians and the media. But it has ranged well beyond TV to profile Christian authors, to discuss the ethics of Christian periodicals reporting “bad news” about Christians, and to survey computer resources. (It has not ignored television, though. David Mainse’s photograph appears often, and FT once carried an article offering advice to would-be David Mainses who sought to use cable TV as a ministry medium.)
FT has opened up a much bigger vista, however, than these perhaps-predictable subjects would constitute. Substantial articles have analyzed capital punishment, the Gulf War and war in general, as well as prisons and the entire Canadian justice system.
International issues have not been as prominent as Canadian ones, but FT has pointed its readers to South Africa and apartheid, Israel and the intifada, and several times to Canadian’s response to refugees and other immigrants. And the growing global concern for the environment has emerged in FT particularly in the last five years.
Cover stories have looked at business and at labor, and as the recession has continued, FT has brought its readers honest bad news but also Christian hope about unemployment and poverty.
More than economics, though, Canadian politics has fascinated FT from the beginning. Stories on the emergence of parties with links to evangelicalism (and evangelicals’ general skepticism about each) have complemented a stream of articles on the continuing saga of the Canadian Constitution. In addition, many articles about other subjects have both highlighted political implications for and called for political responses from Canadian evangelicals.
FT generally has refused, however, to call for a return to a “Christian Canada” as some other evangelicals have. It frequently has run articles that rejoice in Canada’s Christian heritage but also recognize the ambiguities in that heritage and the reality of pluralism today. Indeed, FT’s regular spotlighting of Canada’s Christian past marks a historical interest unusual among evangelicals.
Perhaps surprisingly, religious ideas and options have rarely occupied centre-stage of an VF issue. Only three articles have devoted substantial attention to Christian doctrine: two on Jesus (including one cover) and one on prophecy. Creation and evolution provided the cover story of another issue, And religious alternatives such as Mormonism, Islam and the New Age have appeared once each. To its credit in this regard, though, FT routinely has included a theological perspective as part of its cover-story package.
Theology very quickly can lead to denominational differences, and FT has paid little attention to such differences. It has profiled a wide range of individuals and organizations, but has not yet explored the riches of Canada’s denominational varieties. (Only the beleaguered United Church of Canada has rated a cover story, and that was because of its woes, not its virtues.) Transdenominational organizations like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada tend to bracket out such differences in the interest of cooperation, But perhaps these can be seen as enriching rather than threatening evangelical life.
Nor has FT paid sustained attention to Canada’s regions. Quebec has been the major exception here, with regular news and a recent cover story acquainting FT’s anglophone readers with developments in that province. But one gains little sense from VF of the distinctives of Christianity in the Maritimes or in British Columbia – or, for that matter, even in Toronto. Perhaps in its next decade FT will offer an evangelical perspective on regions and regionalism – truly national issues worthy of a national magazine.
Indeed, for all the attention paid to Quebec and ethnic churches, and no fewer than two cover stories on native Canadians, FT to date has spoken almost exclusively with the Ontario-to-B.C. Anglo voice typical of its constituency: the Canadian evangelical network is still dominated by white Protestants who live west of Quebec.
On the other hand, FT has represented a commendably broad range of such people. It has featured authors from a spectrum of denominations (from United and Anglican to Mennonite and Pentecostal), and it has never drawn a gender line regarding writers or subjects.
Recently, moreover, FT has included a native Canadian columnist. So in these latter respects FT has been in the vanguard of the Canadian evangelicalism it represents.
As this publication continues, then, to expand its view and diversify its interpretive frame, this observer, for one, looks forward to what FAITH TODAYwill show to its constituency — and about its constituency — in another decade of worthy service.