A Culture of Faith: Evangelical Congregations in Canada By SamReimer and MichaelWilkinson. Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 284. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $32.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using data gathered from interviews conducted in 2009 with 478 senior pastors and 100 youth and children's pastors working in Evangelical congregations across Canada, the authors aim to 1) describe the characteristics of Canadian Evangelical congregations, and 2) explain why these congregations have shown resilience in an overall national milieu of declining institutional religiosity. Building on Reimer's earlier work, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide (RSR 30: 336–37), the authors convincingly argue that Canadian Evangelical congregations have fared better than their mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic counterparts partly because of their participation in a transnational, transdenominational religious subculture that promotes 1) an external locus of authority that constrains anti-institutionalism, 2) distinctiveness, or tension with those outside of the subculture, 3) an insular, communal form of religiosity, 4) personal—but congregationally located—religious experiences, satiating adherents’ desires for religious individualism, and 5) the retention of youth and children. They also note that 1) higher-than-average evangelical birth rates, 2) large numbers of Christian immigrants, and 3) Evangelical entrepreneurialism have significantly contributed to Evangelical congregational vitality in Canada, but that these first two trends are slowing down, raising some questions about the future outlook for Canadian Evangelical congregations. This book is required reading for all students and scholars of Evangelicalism in North America, religion in Canada, and congregational studies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".