This is Episode Seven of Season Three, featuring Dr. Ross Lockhart, who is Professor of Mission Studies at Vancouver School of Theology and Dean of St. Andrew’s Hall. Ross is also an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. His main areas of research are in Missiology and Homiletics. He is the author of numerous books, including Lessons from Laodicea: Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence; Beyond Snakes and Shamrocks: St. Patrick’s Missional Leadership Lessons for Today; co-author of Better Than Brunch: Missional Churches in Cascadia as well as Christianity: An Asian Religion in Vancouver and editor of Christian Witness in Cascadian Soil.  His newest book is West Coast Mission: The Changing Nature of Christianity in Vancouver and it formed the basis of our conversation.  We discuss what it means to be a Christian in Vancouver, a place where, honestly, there’s not a lot of hostility to Christianity, but maybe more a bit of disinterest or bemused curiosity for this minority religion.

Ross also gave us numerous excellent resources for understanding religion in post-Christendom Vancouver, which really, as Ross explains, was never a part of broader Christendom as in the rest of Canada. Ross mentioned the work of Lynn Marx, whose book Infidels and the Damn Churches Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia examines the religious history of the Canadian European wild west. Tina Block continues that work in her book The Secular Northwest Religion and Irreligion in Everyday Postwar Life that “debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that was serious about its secularity, consciously rejecting the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God.” He mentioned many other scholars, but I will highlight here the work of Paul Bramadat, also from Winnipeg, who among other writings co-edited Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest, which examines religion in all of its varieties in Cascadia.

What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.

Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Send me questions, send me ideas for guests, send me comments. Please follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter @biblejunkies, or on Facebook, at Biblejunkies, or on Instagram @biblejunkies. Or email me at [email protected]. Let me know what you think.

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John W. Martens