Welcoming the Other at Willowdale CRC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research project is an ethnographic study of the congregational culture and embodied hospitality of Willowdale Christian Reformed Church (WCRC). WCRC is a fifty-year old congregation in North York, Toronto that has welcomed about one hundred and twenty newcomers from Iran. The research used James Spradley’s ethnographic methodology. Through participant observation and interviews with four English speaking and five Farsi speaking informants, this research project seeks to understand the experience of a changing congregation. The theological reflection focuses on embodied practices of hospitality including sacramental hospitality and growing mutuality. My thesis is that there is an identifiable set of practices, rituals, or in other words a habitus, around welcoming and being welcomed. The results of the study include the importance of persons of peace among both Farsi-speaking Iranians and English speakers who bridged cultural differences. Both Farsi and English speakers made a commitment to be one congregation, as opposed to an us-versus-them church of inherent division. The study explored how these two communities were a gift to each other. For the Farsi-speaking Iranians, WCRC provided safety and security, refugee hearing support, older Christian role models, family, and a place to learn English and Canadian culture. For the English speakers, the Farsi-speaking Iranians brought youth, church renewal, energy, and inspiration. Eucharistic hospitality was experienced in weekly Lord’s Supper participation that transcended language and culture. The many baptisms of the Farsi-speaking Iranians were important to their experience of welcome and inclusion. The ordination of Farsi speaking elders and deacons helped the Farsi speaking guests to feel like they were becoming hosts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.057 | 0.005 |
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".