For singer/songwriter Steve Bell, life still filled with surprises—including a new album called "The Glad Surprise"

For Winnipeg Christian singer and songwriter Steve Bell, the release of his 23rd album this month is surprising for a few reasons.

For starters, Bell — who will be 65 next year — is surprised to still be recording and touring more than 45 years after starting in the music business.

“When I started in my late teens, I never expected to still be playing all these years later,” he said. “I’m actually shocked to still be making music at my age.” 

Read more about other things that surprise Steve, along with more information about his new album in my Free Press column.

“We wanted to know how our faith could be real for others in Altona.” Seeds Church finds a creative way to serve through The Community Exchange

During my 21 years as a faith columnist and reporter, I have chronicled the changes to religion in Canada—especially the decline of Christianity and decrease in attendance at and affiliation with churches. 

When it comes to what's happened to Christianity in Canada over the past two decades, there’s no sugarcoating it. The changes are real and have accelerated since the pandemic.

But that’s not the only story about Christian faith in Canada these days. That’s why I am happy to also tell stories about congregations like Seeds Church in Altona—congregations that are finding new and creative ways to be church in their communities. 

In 2022 the church created The Community Exchange (TCE), a separate organization that uses their building to provide people with meals, a place to practice English skills, to pick up warm clothing for winter along with other essential household items, or to get connected with various kinds of services. 

“We had some vibrant conversations about what it means to be the church in our community,” said co-pastor Darlene Enns-Dyck. “We wanted to know how our faith could be real for others in Altona.”

Read about Seeds Church in the Free Press. Bonsus sidebar about Central Station in Winkler, which inspired the creation of TCE. It was started by the Winkler Mennonite Brethren Church.

50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons: From a portal to the demonic to being used by churches to engage youth

 

Fifty years ago, a new game appeared on the scene: Dungeons & Dragons. Soon after being introduced, the fantasy role-playing game, with its magic, wizards, sorcerers and warlocks, was criticized by many Christian leaders who saw it as a portal to the demonic — a way for Satan to steal the souls of unsuspecting youth. 

That was during the time of the so-called “satanic panic,” when some Christians saw the devil everywhere they looked, from heavy metal music to graffiti. 

In at least two churches in Winnipeg today, however, D&D is seen in a very different light—they use it as a way to engage and reach out to youth.

Read about it in the Free Press.

When it comes to religiosity, what if we are measuring the wrong thing?

When it comes to religiosity, what if we are measuring the wrong thing? That’s the question that came to mind when I read a report about the decline in church attendance in Canada. 

I ask the question because attendance at religious services is one of the important ways Statistics Canada measures religiosity — along with religious affiliation (what faith you identify with), frequency of participation in private religious or spiritual activities (prayer or devotions) and the importance of religious or spiritual beliefs in how to live one’s life. 

Of those four markers, attendance at worship services is one of the more easy to measure. (And also one of the easiest to fib about since many people say what they think they should be doing, but not what they are actually doing.)

Whether people are fibbing or not, attendance at Christian worship services is clearly in decline (with some exceptions). That's what a 2021 report by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and Leger, a Canadian-owned marketing and analytics company, found. 

According to the survey, respondents who said they never attend services increased from 30 per cent pre-pandemic to 67 per cent in 2021. 

And not only that; the poll found while 60.5 per cent of Canadians who say they strongly believe in God never or rarely attended a religious service since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Those findings echo a survey in fall by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. It found that weekly religious service attendance in Canada fell from 11 per cent pre-COVID — a figure that was stable for several years — to nine per cent during COVID. This included online services. 

It’s easy to blame the pandemic for the decline. After 22 months of interruptions and cancellations to in-person services, it’s easy for people to fall out of old habits or develop new ones. 

But attendance was falling even before COVID-19. According to Statistics Canada, from 1985 to 2019 the number of people who said they attended a group religious activity at least once a month fell by almost half, from 43 per cent to 23 per cent.  The pandemic didn’t cause the decline, in other words — it just accelerated it.   

And it’s not like not attending services is affecting the way many Canadians view spirituality. Despite the drop in attendance, the poll by ACS and Leger found a third of Canadians still say religion is important in their lives. At the same time, there was only a slight decrease in belief in God. 

A survey in spring by Angus Reid found something similar related to attendance. It prompted Angus Reid president Shachi Kurl to say while some people suffered in terms of spiritual health, “others came out stronger than ever before . . . people saw that God is not in a building, God is also inside us.” 

The drop in attendance makes me wonder if the counting the number of people who attend religious services isn’t a good way to measure religiosity in Canada any longer. 

That’s the view of Brian Clarke, who teaches at the Toronto School of Theology. “The idea that gathering for weekly congregational worship is the chief form of religious observance is a Christian one,” he said, referencing how Christianity has traditionally operated with saved or unsaved, heaven or Hell and member or non-member categories. 

As fewer Canadians identify with organized religion today, Clarke is becoming interested in the concept of “lived religion,” the study of what people do outside of sanctioned sacred spaces and activities like worship services. 

For him, it’s about looking at what practices people engage in and asking how they appropriate them, refashion them and cobble ideas and practices from various religious traditions together — with or without attending formal religious services. 

Lori Beaman of the University of Ottawa feels similarly. Yet, as someone who studies religion in Canada, she is reluctant to give up counting bodies at services. By dropping that marker, it would be tough to compare changes in religion in Canada over time. 

“I think in a perfect world we’d keep the old categories and introduce several more to capture the dynamic nature of religion and nonreligion,” she said — things like including alternative spiritual practices like doing yoga, a walk in the woods or walking a labyrinth. 

This will be hard, she acknowledged; how do you measure the spiritual influence of a daily walk in the woods? And yet, it’s the same with attendance. Going to services can only provide a limited amount of information about the role it plays in people’s spiritual lives. Just being at a service doesn’t reveal much about a person’s individual spirituality. 

This is not a new question. Back in the late 1990s, William Closson James addressed this topic in Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature and Canadian Culture. (Wilfred Laurier University Press.) 

In the book, the professor emeritus of Queen’s University said: “To the extent that our culture is secular, or the extent that we exist amidst a plurality of cultural forms infused with religious material, to that extent it is impossible to generalize about a single sacred anchoring point for Canadian culture, as if there were only one.” 

For that reason, he preferred to speak in the plural of “locations of the sacred,” in Canadian life, something he regarded as being “multiple, fluid and impossible to fix in any permanent or lasting way.” 

Today, as attendance at religious services declines, maybe researchers will need to find new ways to understand the many ways Canadians encounter the sacred. I look forward to what they discover.

From the January, 2021 Free Press.

Do lakes have rights? Indigenous people in Manitoba say yes

Are Indigenous people in Canada the William Wilberforces of our time when it comes to the environment and protecting creation? 

That’s what I ask in my most recent Free Press column, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization in Manitoba declaring Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person. 

That may strike non-Indigenous Canadians as unusual. That’s how some viewed Wilberforce 200 yearw ago, when he argued for an end to the slave trade in Great Britain. Opponents cited the negative economic consequences if it was ended. Some even used the Bible to justify its continuation. 

Wilberforce was not swayed. Saying he felt called by God to end slavery, for 20 years he advocated tirelessly for an end to the buying and selling of human beings. In 1807, his efforts were rewarded when the slave trade was abolished in that country. 

Today, Indigenous people are doing something similar, arguing that the earth has rights—just as Wilberforce argued that enslaved people had inherent rights, too. He concluded one speech about the horrors of slavery by telling his fellow Parliamentarians: “Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way. But you can never again say you did not know.” 

Because of the Southern Chiefs, maybe when it comes to the health of Lake Winnipeg we can never say we didn’t know, either. 

Read the column here. 

Photo above: Southern Chiefs’ Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels. Credit Brook Jones of the Free Press.

Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities mark Oct. 7 anniversary

Monday is the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. 

It’s a tough time for Jewish and Palestinian/Muslim communities alike. As religion reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press, I looked at how those two communities in the city are responding to the anniversary, along with what some Christian groups are doing. Find the links below. 

Anniversary of Oct. 7 trauma colours High Holiday observance for city’s Jewish community 

Churches lament war’s anniversary 

A ‘very hard’ time for Muslims (sidebar to story above) 

And this one, about how Palestinians in Gaza honoured the memory of Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, originally from Winnipeg, who was killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. An aid station in Gaza was named in her honour. (See photo above.)

Indigenous Christian scholars respond to the First Nations Version of the New Testament

 

I didn't have room in my column for responses from Indigenous Christians and scholars to the First Nations Version (FNV) of the New Testament—what did they think of it? Find a couple of responses below, Read the original column here.  

Shari Russell is the director of NAIITS, an Indigenous learning community (formerly the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies). She is treaty status Saulteaux (Anishinaabe) from Yellow Quill First Nation in Saskatchewan and an ordained Officer in The Salvation Army where she serves as the Territorial Indigenous Ministries Consultant and has been actively involved in Indigenous ministry since 2004.

One issue is context. This version was written in the U.S. context. There isn’t very much Canadian representation in it, or in the advisory group that helped create it. It would have been helpful if that was noted. 

It’s very challenging to create something that addresses all First Nations, to make a monocultural document. For example, in the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the book of Mark, it talks about people throwing their buffalo robes on the ground. That works for some Indigenous people (on the prairies where there was bison), but not necessarily for others on the west coast or in the eastern part of the country. 

It’s impossible to make a singular First Nations Bible. There are over 600 First Nations in Canada alone with different languages. Within the same languages there are different dialects and images and expressions that grow from within their contexts. 

I do appreciate the storytelling approach they take to it. It can bring new life and vitality to the scriptures, providing new insights that can touch hearts in new ways. It can bring new life to the scriptures, showing how the Gospel story isn’t limited to one people group or place. It’s good news for all people.

The way they render John 3:16 is problematic from an Indigenous perspective. It says that “for God so loved human beings.” That is very limiting from an Indigenous perspective. Like in the original Greek, that uses the word “cosmos,” Indigenous people think of God loving the whole creation, not an anthropocentric, or human, point of view.   

Should people buy it? If it helps people on their spiritual journey, then it is appropriate. 

Christopher Hoklotubbe associate professor of Religion at Cornell College and director of graduate studies for NAIITS. He is a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The FNV is a Native American paraphrase of the Bible that exemplifies Native American interpretations of the Bible, similar to how other cultures have interpreted the Bible.

It has been said that the FNV is best described as a paraphrase, not as a translation. For many who think this way, they regard translation projects to consist of trained biblical scholars and theologians pouring over ancient fragments and manuscripts. While the FNV isn’t this, there is something to be admired and celebrated in the theological poetry that results from the collective wisdom of the Native translation council working together with Terry Wildman.

One concern is the voice Wildman selected to use. He wanted the voice to sound like an elder speaking to a grandchild. And what greater elder for many Indigenous people of Wildman’s generation than Black Elk. Black Elk's book Black Elk Speaks, in which he discussed his religious views, visions, and events from his life, inspired many Native Americans to begin a process of investigating and reclaiming their own Indigenous spiritualities.

For some, this resonated—as illustrated by one appreciative letter Terry received from a Native reader of the FNV who expressed how in reading the translation they could hear their own grandparent’s voice.  For others, this choice is problematic as it does not reflect how the vast majority of North American Natives speak and it can easily fall into caricature, or the trope of the Hollywood Indian.

But that is true for all biblical interpretation and reading. Each culture reads into the verses its own characters—for generations western Christians in Europe and North America have seen Jesus and others in the New Testament as white people or at least behaving and thinking like ‘white people’ in Galilean cosplay (or costume).

Why shouldn’t Indigenous people also see it through the eyes of their culture? And what fresh new ways of reading and finding meaning in the text might Native readers encounter when they are encouraged to hold close the goodness of their own Indigenous heritage, which we hold was given to us by the Creator.

If we recognize that the cultures, economies, and ways of life of the ancient Hebrews and early Christians were more akin to Indigenous cultures than modern Canadian and United States societies, might such works like the FNV help us to better appreciate both biblical and Indigenous worlds? I really think there is something here for Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers. Non-Indigenous ministers that I have encountered have greatly appreciated the FNV.

Doing any translation or paraphrase of the Bible is a charged project. Doing one for Indigenous people is even more so, considering how the Bible was used to inspire, justify, and facilitate the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the placement of our parents and grandparents into residential and boarding schools. I’m not surprised it has elicited a whole range of responses.

Personally, as a biblical scholar, I find it refreshing to read. It makes me stop and think in new ways about the passages, like when it talks in the Beatitudes about the Creator’s blessing resting on “the ones who walk a trail of tears, for he will wipe the tears from their eyes and comfort them” (Matthew 5:4 FNV). My Choctaw ancestors walked that literal trail of tears, and I found tears in my own eyes when I read that. It was a poetic and spiritual moment for me.

The name for Jesus, Creator Sets Free, helps readers think differently about Jesus. It helps us to imagine how Jesus’ healing and teaching ministry, Jesus’ exorcism of demons and criticism of religious teachers and priests who had lost their way, Jesus’s communion among the poor and broken, are all manifestations of how Creator Sets his people Free.

Reading the FNV distinct translation helps me to connect dots in the stories and theological themes that I hadn’t thought to connect before. Also, it’s a reminder about the importance and meaning of names in Indigenous culture.

Some elders I have spoken with think the FNV dropped the ball in paraphrasing John 3:16. It’s translation of the Greek cosmos as “world of human beings” that “the Great Spirit so loves" is too anthropocentric, too focused on humans. Indigenous people would see cosmos as including all of creation, which includes non-human persons like animals, plants, and even rocks.

And yet, it would be true for the Greek culture when the New Testament was written; they had a very human-centric mindset—a mindset that I would say doesn’t reflect the heart of Creator nor the broader witness of Scripture.

I have deep regard for the challenge that faces any paraphrase or translation in trying determine the nuance of a given word or theological vision of sacred texts that were written thousands of years ago in times and cultures that are only partially accessible and known to us.  

This can be a helpful Bible for non-Indigenous people, to help them see the scriptures in a new way, and for Indigenous people, to help them see themselves at the centre of the biblical story, not at its margins.