Super, Natural Vancouver: An Urban Missiological Study of Canada's Preeminent West Coast City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering the lack of research regarding Christianity in Canada’s third largest city, the aim of this dissertation is to contribute much needed insight into the current and future trends of Christian witness in Vancouver. While the majority of Vancouverites report to Statistics Canada that they have “no religion,” there is little research available regarding Christian activity and response to this increasingly secular context. This dissertation engages the question of what a thick description of missional interaction with the city of Vancouver might teach us about the motivating beliefs and spiritualities of Christian communities with the aim of contributing to the larger North American discourse on missional theology. The research uses a mixed-methods approach in the field of congregational studies including survey and interviews. Significant findings from the research include a focus of Christians on befriending a “spiritual not religious” culture, affordable housing as a missional connection, specific models of Christian witness, the challenge of sharing the gospel in light of colonialism and Residential Schools, the impact of immigration upon the church in Vancouver, scarce sacred space for churches to worship and serve in light of Vancouver’s expensive housing market, and possible missional connections given Vancouverites’ high value placed on the environment and Indigenous culture. The main conclusions and implications from this research include the emphasis upon mission through relationships, mission and creation care, mission through walking worthily, and mission attending to the future church God that is bringing.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".