“They Built a Kingdom”: Developing a Free Reformed Church Community in Southern Ontario, 1950-1976
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the establishment and development of a religious community of immigrants from the Netherlands to Canada, whose lives centered around a small denomination called the Free Reformed Churches of North America (FRC). The purpose of this thesis was to explore major reasons for the insularity of the FRC community in Southern Ontario between 1950 and 1976. Primary sources for the research were the FRC’s denominational newspaper, The Messenger, and oral interviews of FRC members. \nThe first chapter draws on the life stories of interviewees to explore the challenges of their early years of settlement in Canada, and the comfort they found in the church community. Chapter two focuses on the history, structure and leadership of the church, the faith and beliefs of members, and the connections between church and faith. The third chapter delves into the FRC’s perspectives on and relationships with other churches and Canadian culture. Chapter four considers beliefs about women’s roles and the experiences of FRC women at church, home and work. This thesis argues that the following factors contributed to the FRC’s sustained insularity and isolation: the church, its activities, leaders and laws; the individual faith of members; the strong ideological resistance of leaders and members to change and ‘outside’ influence; and the social support and pressure of friends, family, and fellow members of the church community.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".