by Rick Hiemstra, Director of Research, The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada
Presented at the Fourth Annual Wesley Studies Symposium, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto, Ontario March 13, 2012
“Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.” —John Wesley
I was contacted late last year by Dr. Howard Snyder to see if I would present a paper to be titled “A Statistical Profile of the Wesleyan Community in Canada” at this Fourth Annual Wesley Studies Symposium. Given the enormousness of the task and the high expectations that go along with statistics, I thought it prudent to begin by managing expectations. You will not find attendance, baptism, sanctification, or conversion statistics in this paper. You will not learn about camping ministries, missions, or the activities of denominational structures. Rather, this paper limits its profile of the congregations of the Wesleyan Movement in Canada to what can be gleaned from Charitable Information Returns (CIR), the annual financial and program activity reports that the Canadian government requires of all registered charities, for the timeframe from 2000 to 2011. Instead of merely presenting a simple snapshot, however, I will try to illustrate trends.
Prior to accepting my current position with The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), I served as a Wesleyan pastor in Cornwall, Ontario. Out of this experience, I tried to find measures that pastors, board members, and district superintendents would find helpful in understanding their movement; and that could be dealt with in a brief paper. There are over 200 pieces of data in a CIR.1 The following data will be profiled in the paper:
location
fiscal year end
tax-receipted gifts, or what is essentially offerings (Line 4500)
total revenue (Line 4700)
total compensation (Lines 4880 and Line 390)
travel and vehicle expense (Line 4810)
occupancy costs (Line 4850)
education and training for staff and volunteers (Line 4870)
Methodology
Wesleyan Movement
For the purpose of this paper the five denominations that support the Tyndale Seminary Chair of Wesley Studies will be the Wesleyan Movement: The Salvation Army in Canada (Salvation Army or SA); The Free Methodist Church in Canada (Free Methodist or FM); The Church of the Nazarene Canada (Nazarene or Naz); The Canadian Conference of the Brethren in Christ of North America (Brethren in Christ or BiC); and The Wesleyan Church of Canada (Wesleyan or Wes).2 While there are other denominations which share a Wesleyan or holiness heritage – such as The United Church of Canada – when this paper refers to the Wesleyan Movement it will mean the Canadian manifestations of these five denominations.
Congregations
Identifying congregations is not as straightforward as it might, at first, seem. What is a congregation? Sociologist Mark Chaves offers this definition:
a social institution in which individuals who are not all religious specialists gather in physical proximity to one another, frequently and at regularly scheduled intervals, for activities and events with explicitly religious content and purpose, and in which there is continuity over time in the individuals who gather, the location of the gathering, and the nature of the activities and events at each gathering.3
While this may seem overly complex to ministry practitioners, these are the kinds of issues with which denominations and researchers need to grapple in order to identify congregations. An example from the BiC will help illustrate the issue. The Meeting House, a BiC church, bills itself as “a church for people who aren’t into church” – that is a single church.4 The Meeting House, however, contrary to Chaves’ definition, meets in several locations, not one. So while you may be “in physical proximity to” the people meeting at your Meeting House site, you are not in physical proximity to all the people who would affiliate with the Meeting House. Is the Meeting
House one congregation or many? For the purposes of this study I’ve decided to treat each Meeting House site as a separate congregation (as I do for other similarly structured “churches”).
In other cases, you could have several congregations meeting either simultaneously or serially in the same building for worship services. Usually, this is described as having several “services” within the same congregation, and these services often take on some of the attributes of separate congregations. Whether or not these “different services” are, in fact, different congregations is difficult to determine. It depends on how the church leadership encourages or discourages differentiation. This study will treat congregations with different services as one congregation. There are two very practical reasons for doing this. First, making the distinction is very subjective. Second, I simply do not have any data that would allow me to do so.
In other cases, church plants will function as a site of a mother church for several years even though, unlike the Meeting House sites, they are intentionally trying to foster a separate congregational identity. At what point does the church plant get added to a denomination’s list of established congregations? The answer varies from denomination to denomination, and sometimes congregations cross the threshold of criteria for congregational status set out by their denomination only to slip back again for a time. For the purpose of this study, if a denomination identified a church plant as a congregation, I treated it as such.
Identifying congregations is further complicated by the fact that this paper looks at CIRs, and not every congregation has a charitable registration number. The norm is still for each simple congregation (single-site congregation) to have its own charitable registration number. In cases, like the Meeting House, where there is only one charitable registration number for all of its sites, the data for all of its sites is aggregated in one record. Obviously, it is somewhat problematic to compare the Meeting House directly with a simple congregation. Still we are left without an alternative. The reader is encouraged to be aware that, while, in most cases, we are comparing simple congregations to other simple congregations, the data is, in fact, associated with registered charities. Further, generally speaking, church plants do not apply for and receive registered charity status until they have been established for a few years. In the intervening period, they will usually “run their books” through those of either a mother church or a denominational office. I did not have the information that would allow identification of the instances where this occurred.
There will tend to be fewer registered charities represented by a denomination’s congregations than the number of congregations for several reasons. First, multi-site congregations may share a single charitable registration number. Second, church plants may share a charitable registration number with a mother church or a denominational office. Third, without direct denominational input I was not able to identify or confirm all of a denomination’s congregations, and in some cases where a congregation was identified no confident matching to its charitable registration number could be made. Even with these caveats and limitations, the CIR data presented in this paper still represents about 85% of the Wesleyan Movement congregations (see table 1).
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