Saving Souls in Quebec

With interest in spirituality on the rise and church attendance in a freefall, a week-long National Post series considers the state of Canadian Christianity and whether the way forward may in fact be the way backward.

JOLIETTE, Que. - When Francois Verschelden envisions the focal point of the thriving Baptist ministry he is trying to build in this small community, he has his building already picked out.
It is an abandoned government building in the centre of town, just up the road from the century-old Roman Catholic cathedral -- a location with a symbolic significance that is not lost on Pastor Verschelden, a bespectacled minister who grew up as a Catholic in this province and who knows that his life's work is all about supplanting the dominant religion here.

"In Quebec, if you change religions, they have the impression that you are rejecting the culture, the two are so intertwined," he says.

"And they don't consider evangelical churches as credible, simply because they have no knowledge of what it is."

The 43-year-old is the rancophone church planting co-ordinator of the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists, an organization whose mission is "1,000 healthy reproducing churches by year 2020."

The goal is certainly daunting on a national scale but sounds particularly improbable in a region that remains Catholic at heart, if not in practice, and where many consider evangelical churches on a par with cults.

So alien is the U.S. version of evangelism to people in this area that the kindly- looking father of two, who became a born-again Christian when he was 19, has been ridiculed, threatened and even had parents warn their children to stay away from him for his proselytizing since returning to his home province.

So how can a single Baptist preacher turn around the prevailing attitude toward the evangelical movement?
The answer is that Pastor Verschelden has some big American backers in his campaign for religious conversion, who for a range of reasons have settled on this small Quebec community of about 50,000, about 75 kilometres northeast of Montreal, as the unlikely focus of their efforts to boost the presence of evangelismin Canada.

The movement has already had some quick success: In just four years, Pastor Verschelden has founded a church in St. Felix, north of Joliette, called Eglise du Rocher Vivant, and another, Renaissance Bible Church, in Rawdon, northwest of Joliette, and has recently started what is known as a "kitchen-table church" in the town proper.

But those, along with regularly handing out Bibles at a local flea market and putting pamphlets on car windshields, are modest ventures compared to what is planned for the new year.
Beginning in March, six successive waves of Baptist mission teams -- the largest, a group of 50 --from Texas, Kentucky, the Carolinas and British Columbia will roll into Joliette and proselytize in God's name.

By then, the first of four one-hour DVDs explaining the gospel, hosted by Pastor Verschelden in his native tongue, will have been mailed out to each of Joliette's 18,000 homes.
He says this kind of multi-media mass blitz is an entirely new way of building a church where none existed before.

"It's the largest population and target, and most expensive piece we've ever put together," says Pastor Phil Young, director of Global Reach Foundation, the south Florida Baptist ministry that is backing Pastor Verschelden in his efforts.

The foundation is an off shoot of The First Baptist Church at the Mall, a megachurch so named because it has a 37,000- square-metremall as its home.

Its congregation is 7,000 people strong, which provides the fundraising base that allows Global Reach to finance the US$100,000 cost of Pastor Verschelden's DVDs, in addition to his salary and the lease on the new building.

Its aim is to embark on what it calls "a worldwide church planting effort" that in a five-year period would establish at least 30 new evangelical congregations in "the most un-reached places on Earth" -- or what Pastor Young describes in an interview as a mission to "prayerfully hunt for places that we consider dramatically under-churched," a criteria that puts Quebec alongside such places as Albania, Moldova and Tanzania.

The decision to focus on Joliette (one of six ministries to be established by the group in 2007, bringing the total to 27 in only four years,) came after Pastor Young and a team of student missionaries toured eight areas in Quebec that they deemed statistically to be dramatically in need of an evangelical church.

After a day of walking and praying through town, the American pastor and his team experienced an "unusual spiritual experience," he says.

"It was a place where the seeds of the gospel had never been sown, at least in a long time. There was desperate void."

The irony, of course, is that the Catholic Church colonized Joliette long ago.

But by the year 2000, when weekly church attendance in Canada had dropped to around 20%, the decline was particularly pronounced among Roman Catholics, especially in Quebec.

By 2005, in another survey of monthly- plus attendance of religious services by leading sociologist Reginald Bibby, Quebec was the lowest in the country, at 22%, compared to the highest attendance by those in the Atlantic region (50%) and Manitoba/Saskatchewan (49%).