When Missions Became Development: Ironies of 'NGOization' in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing mainly on the United Church of Canada, this article highlights changes in organization, discourse, and practice that were part of a missions-to-development trajectory in the mainstream churches during the 1960s and ironies arising from that shift. The article shows that, despite these churches' increasingly non-evangelistic approach to missions in this tumultuous decade and their desire to escape the taint of colonialism, globally minded young Canadians were not won over. Instead of choosing a missionary vocation, many became volunteers with Canadian University Service Overseas ( cuso ), a secular development organization founded in 1961. Meanwhile, as the United Church and other mainstream churches took on development and solidarity work in the Global South as their new 'mission,' they lost the support of conservative Christians, who continued to hold a more traditional understanding of the missionary task. Although the overseas outreach of the mainline churches survived the challenges of the 1960s, it was in a greatly changed and attenuated form. In practice, the everyday concerns of these faith-based ngo s often had little to distinguish them from the concerns of their young, secular counterparts . Ciblant principalement l'Église unie du Canada, cet article souligne les changements au sein de l'organisation, du discours et des pratiques survenus dans le cadre du recentrage, des missions vers le développement, des principales Églises dans les années 1960, de même que l'ironie née de cette réorientation. Il montre qu'en dépit du choix de ces Églises, dans le tumulte de cette décennie, de recourir à une approche de moins en moins axée sur l'évangélisation et de leur désir d'éviter toute forme de colonialisme, elles n'ont jamais su séduire les jeunes Canadiens universalistes. Au lieu de choisir les missions, plusieurs devinrent bénévoles au sein du Service universitaire canadien outremer ( suco ), un organisme laïque de développement créé en 1961. Au même moment, alors que l'Église unie et les principales autres Églises firent du travail de développement et de solidarité dans les pays en développement leur nouvelle « mission », le soutien des chrétiens conservateurs leur échappa, ceux-ci adhérant toujours à une interprétation plus traditionnelle du missionnariat. Si le rayonnement outremer des principales Églises a survécu aux défis des années 1960, ce fut sous une forme fortement revue et atténuée. En pratique, les préoccupations quotidiennes de ces ong fondées sur la foi se distinguaient peu de celles des jeunes laïques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".