Toward a Critical Intercultural Ecclesiology for Mennonite Church Canada: Theo-Ethical Guidelines for Becoming an Intercultural Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The peoplehood of Mennonites, a religiously-motivated utopian movement that emerged in the sixteenth century, became associated with Mennonite ethnicities, particularly with Swiss, German, Dutch, and Russian backgrounds, as they settled in Canada. As society and Mennonite churches have become increasingly ethnoculturally and racially diverse, there emerge challenges to the dominant ethnic identities of Mennonites and the whiteness they represent. Newly converted and “non-ethnic” Mennonites, especially people of colour, often experience barriers to full belonging and are seeking more active participation and mutual relationship. In this situation, a faithful and transformative response to these challenges for Mennonite Church Canada is to become a critical intercultural church that: addresses the issues of faith, culture, ethnicity, and race in the Mennonite community; identifies exclusive practices within and outside the church; incorporates the voices and the experiences of marginalized people; and offers ways to live into its own historic peace church tradition and its missional identity in the current Canadian multicultural context. While the process of becoming an intercultural church is complex and multifaceted, this thesis concentrates on constructing theo-ethical guidelines that may lead and empower churches within MC Canada toward becoming intercultural. Toward this goal, I survey Canadian Mennonites’ understanding of peoplehood by exploring both the “believed church” (the church as a theological reality) and “experienced church” (church as sociological reality) of the Mennonites, highlighting specific tensions between these related to culture, ethnicity, race, and faith in Mennonite peoplehood in multicultural Canada. Later, through the work of contextual and cultural theologians, I examine the intrinsic relationship between culture, ethnicity, race, and faith, and I situate Mennonite peoplehood in Canadian multicultural society. From these analyses, I then critically reassess Mennonite peoplehood and integrate Mennonite theological perspectives, a foundational principle of interculturality, convivencia/shalom, and its key concepts to offer four theo-ethical norms—shalom, justice & love, hospitality, and mutuality—that are correctives for and complementary with Mennonite ecclesiology. These norms can function as guiding frames for becoming an intercultural Mennonite church in Canada: inviting work toward intercultural unity, practicing radical discipleship and radical hospitality, striving for shalom and prophetic dialogue in multicultural publics, and seeking repentance and reconciliation in Indigenous-settler relations.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".