PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Justin Tse, University of British Columbia:  jkhtse@interchange.ubc.ca

Students of the immigrant church to North America have oftenrelied on the insights of R. Stephen Warner and the “new paradigm” of Americanreligion, a paradigm that sees American religious congregations as spaces where religious subjects volunteer to attend and are controlled by those voluntary attendees with a de facto congregational polity.  While this approach contextualizes the Americanization of transnational religion well, it is limited in approaching the transnational linkages of immigrant congregationsto North America.  A study of the geographical imaginations of such religious subjects broadens Warner’sperspective.

In my research at a Chinese church in the Greater Vancouver Metropolitan Area in British Columbia, Canada, I have researched such geographical imaginations by conducting 38 semi-structured interviews with 40 persons and nine months of ethnographic participant observation.  While the church is ostensibly an ethnic Chinese church serving as a mission to the Chinese population in Vancouver, a study of the geographical imaginations suggests that what is meant by Chinese is much narrower: that this Cantonese-speaking church is in fact a Hongkonger church.  Their imaginations of what it means to be a Christian were often developed in educational, familial, and religious spaces in Hong Kong.  Imagining Christian places to be (often) Western spaces of peace in a competitive Asian city, many Hongkongers migrated to Canada seeking such peace, especially in light of Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.  But coming to Canada has challenged such Hongkongers with a form of multiculturalism they did not expect.  As the second generation grows up in North America and a large influx of mainland Chinese migrants come to Vancouver, such Hongkonger Christians find their identities challenged.  Such challenges in the end press on the question of faith as their religious experience needs to be re-imagined in transnational space.