Beyond trying harder and before giving up : the story of a missional church in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Somewhere beyond trying harder, and just before giving up, there is a sacred place of grace to be discovered, personally and corporately.God called me homeward, near to the place of my birth and upbringing, to find it.Located among the marginalized of society on the southeast side of the city of Welland, Ontario, Canada, is 36-year-old Christ Community Church.In the aftermath of successive short-term pastorates which ended badly and included an exodus of members in 2005, amid the further economic decline of a once prosperous manufacturing city of 50,000 people, the ministry then 26-years-old was in crisis.With the support of Classis Ontario a specialized Interim Minister was hired for the purpose of discerning whether the church could be revitalized.I accepted the "Call" to serve as its Pastor in June of 2006.It was then that a journey of transformation began.This is a story of dependency on the grace of God.The Apostle Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 12:9 "But he (the Lord) said to me 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" 1 It is a story that affirms and challenges traditional ecclesiology.It affirms the importance of learning from others in our family of churches through documents such as Transformed and Transforming.2 Yet, this story challenges traditional ecclesiology with regard to the expectation of self-sufficiency and selfsustainability.It is a story of a small Canadian Church in a hurting place that is being transformed by and with the marginalized people in its context, all the while being 1 Bible quotations in this document are from the New International Version unless otherwise indicated.2 Appendix A Chapter 3. Bruised and Yet Blessed Section 3:1 -Introductions Verbatim of Self-Introductions……………………………………………….Setion 3:2 -Self Reported Data (Phase I) Resiliency…………………………………………………………………...
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.098 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".