Training for service : the Bible school movement in western Canada, 1909-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the origins of, and the developments among, the approximately one hundred Bible schools that existed in western Canada prior to 1960. Although these schools influenced thousands of people, they have been almost entirely ignored by scholars, thereby leaving a significant lacuna within Canadian religious historiography. This study demonstrates the vital role played by the Bible schools in the development of evangelical Protestantism in western Canada. The numerous Bible schools in the region are divided into six clusters based on denominational or theological similarities. A representative school (or schools) is selected from each cluster to serve as the focus of an institutional biography. These biographies explore the circumstances surrounding the origin, and subsequent developments (up to 1960) within, each school. The multiple institutional biographies create a collage that is both comprehensive enough to provide an understanding of the movement as a composite whole, and sufficiently varied to illustrate the movement's dynamic diversity. This dissertation, therefore, presents a more multi-faceted explanation of the movement than previous characterizations that have generally depicted it as a part of an American fundamentalist reaction to Protestant liberalism. Although fundamentalism was a significant influence within some, particularly the transdenominational, Bible schools, at least as important in understanding the movement in western Canada were the particular ethnic, theological and denominational concerns that were prominent within the denominational clusters. The Bible schools typically offered a Bible-centred, intensely practical, lay-oriented program of post-secondary theological training. They were an innovative and practical response to the many challenges, created by massive immigration, rugged frontier conditions, geographical isolation, economic hardship, ethnicity and cultural assimilation, facing evangelical Protestants during the first half of the twentieth century. The Bible schools represent an institutional embodiment of the ethos and emphases of their respective constituencies. They served the multiple denominational and transdenominational constituencies, which made up the larger evangelical Protestant network, as centres of influence by preparing future generations for church leadership and participation in Canadian society. The Bible school movement offers a unique window into the diversity, complexity, dynamism and flexibility that characterized the development of evangelical Protestantism in western Canada.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".