There’s a story about evangelicals in Quebec that needs telling. Last fall, Marg Buchanan in an article in ChristianWeek (“Quebec Christians: the urban legend,” November 12, 2004), did us a great service by debunking the idea that Quebec counts as many Christians as there are in the remote valleys of Farflungistan. She also referred to data which shows that 0.5 per cent of the French-speaking population attends an evangelical church and another that indicates that 4.5 per cent identify themselves as evangelical Protestant.

Now, if post-modernism has not yet thrown the field into disarray, arithmetic tells us that 4.5 per cent minus 0.5 per cent equals four per cent. In real numbers, it means that close to a quarter of a million Québécois feel comfortable wearing the tag “evangelical Protestant”—at least under the anonymity afforded by a survey—and yet shun the pleasure of a Sunday morning drive to church on the province’s eerily empty roads!

But the true significance of these numbers may lie in their connection to what missiologists might be inclined to describe as a case-study of the negative impact of mission done with little concern for contextualization. Stated more bluntly, what has happened with the French-speaking evangelical movement in Quebec is an illustration of how we probably ought not to have done mission.

Before we try to explain this episode of our history, let’s do an etch-a-sketch rendering of how it unfolded. It might sound like this: thanks to a sudden and profound change in culture, French evangelical churches experienced a phase of rapid growth in the 1970s and early 1980s. The number of adherents went from something like 2,000 to 30,000, or even 40,000, and has remained at that level ever since.

What these numbers do not say, however, is that for each person still sitting in a pew today there are three, perhaps four, who came through the doors of our local churches because of a significant spiritual experience, were part of our fellowship for a time and then left, never to come back. The lack of retention was such that we cannot speak of a “revolving door” but more of an “open floodgate.”

The reasons their defections numerous but three seem to stand out (and here allow for some inflationary caricature):

One is emotional bruising from a conflict resolution approach that had more to do with football than 1 Corinthians 13.

A second was an ethos often experienced as emotionally and spiritually nurturing as a marine boot camp.

And a third was leadership with a lack of theological sophistication and pastoral skills that tempted one to long for the days of Jesuit, Dominican, Franciscan or Benedictine spiritual mentoring.

Whether we think these criticisms fair or not, they point to something that was real in these people’s experiences and therefore needs to be heard.

It goes without saying that we need to tackle the question of what was really at the root of this incredible setback, of a magnitude perhaps unparalleled in the history of Canadian evangelicalism. We’ll have to wait for rigorous scholarship to come up with precise answers, but I’d like to suggest fragments of an answer. It has to do with a very strange chemistry created by the mix of two ingredients.

The first ingredient can best be described as a very other-worldly, culture-denying and rigid brand of evangelicalism (I like to call it the pre-Crabb—after the famous Christian psychologist-type of evangelicalism) that Quebec French-speaking evangelicals were immersed in.

The second ingredient was the typical profile of many of the new converts. Often they were people with very little sense of who they were (not very surprising considering the sort of cultural meltdown that shadowed our so- called Quiet Revolution) or with many unresolved issues. Needless to say, only the resilient ones were able to withstand the side effects of the resulting brew on the life of the communities.

I conclude on a more personal and slightly more sober note. As a Québécois who was raised a “cultural” Catholic, came to faith as a teenager and then was intimately associated with the life of a local evangelical church for the following 30 years, I can testify to the fact that several of us who survived the whirlwind of the last three decades are still a bit shell-shocked. We also regularly find ourselves dealing with a certain amount of grief.

Despite this, we find comfort in three things. The first is that amidst our pain and disappointments, God has helped us start doing away with some of the arrogance, triumphalism and black and white approaches of the past.

Secondly, God has also shown us that even through the messes created by some of our ways and theologies, in mysterious ways His Spirit touches and transforms lives.

Thirdly, we rest confident that with the prayers and support of the rest of the church in Canada, we will see the gospel make greater inroads into Quebec society, a society that sorely needs it.

Éric Wingender is dean of the École de théologie évangélique de Montréal/ Montreal Evangelical School of Theology.