Evangelistic belief and behavior among Canadian congregants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the recent surge of “religious nones” in many Western nations, there is a growing interest among some church attenders to effectively “reach” this demographic. In this article, we build on theories of strictness and social embeddedness to tackle three questions regarding evangelistic belief and behavior in Canadian Catholic, mainline Protestant, and conservative Protestant congregations. First, in what ways are evangelistic beliefs and behaviors similar or dissimilar across theological traditions, notably when comparing stricter and less strict contexts? Second, how are evangelistic behaviors similar or dissimilar based on a person’s frequency of church attendance? Third, what challenges do people confront in their evangelistic efforts? Drawing on survey data with over 9100 Catholic, mainline, and conservative Protestant respondents in over 250 Canadian congregations, this study compares responses across theological sectors, reported levels of importance that church members attach to evangelism, as well as church attendance frequency. Data reveal that those in religious traditions with stricter “insider–outsider” boundaries and who were more socially embedded in their religious groups (i.e., conservative Protestant traditions) were the most likely to embrace evangelistic attitudes and behaviors, in contrast to those in religious groups with less strict boundaries or social embeddedness in their religious group (i.e., United Church of Canada). However, those with the strongest “us–them” boundaries also found those boundaries particularly prohibitive to their evangelistic efforts reflected, in part, in a widespread leaning toward passive versus assertive forms of evangelism.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".