Disruption in Toronto's Anglican Churches, 1960-1985: The Effect of West Indian and Other Minority Immigration on Parish Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Changes to Canada’s immigration regulations introduced in the 1960s opened the door to an influx of immigrants from non-traditional sources, that is countries outside of the British Isles and northern Europe. The challenge of incorporating this racially and ethnically diverse array of newcomers compelled Anglicans to rethink their conventional views on race, culture, tolerance, and assimilation. This transformation is most evident in Toronto where the racial minority population increased sevenfold in the years 1961 to 1986. This study adds an important element to the thick description of the identity shift that the Anglican Church underwent in the latter half of the twentieth century. The research provides contextualization for today’s Canadians as they mutually negotiate the incorporation process, and for the Anglican Church as it presents the Gospel to an increasingly diverse population. By focusing on the interplay of immigration, a critical element in the formation of contemporary Canadian identity, and the Anglican Church, a body identified with Canada’s dominant culture and values, this thesis locates the historiographical discussion in the centre of Canadian history. By drawing upon unpublished sources, the thesis enlarges the existing narrative and makes a unique contribution to Canadian scholarship in immigration studies. This thesis, which focuses on the seminal period 1960 to 1985, demonstrates that immigrants—primarily Black West Indies—seeking to find a home in Toronto’s Anglican churches disrupted established patterns of parish life in a church still largely British. While the opening chapters provide a national and diocesan context, the second half of the thesis looks at the changes wrought by immigration in three Toronto parishes. In seeking to incorporate newcomers, these parishes redefined their identity in relation to an increasingly multicultural Canada, their historic ties to Britain, and a multiracial Anglican Communion. While the number of parishes experiencing large-scale immigration was limited, the impact of the changing demographics was embraced by the diocesan leadership, resulting in policies and programs affecting the whole diocese. The self-understanding reached by the Anglican Church during the period 1960–1985 generated fresh opportunities for evangelism and challenges for the practice of ministry in an increasingly pluralistic context.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".