It's an ancient act of arresting simplicity. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus began the Last Supper hours before his crucifixion by wrapping a towel around his waist and washing his followers' feet.
Last Thursday, the 39-yearold Nigerian priest sang in Cantonese before preaching in English about the difference between the clean feet of his flock at Mary Help of Christians Chinese Catholic Parish and the dirty, open-toed sandalled feet Jesus would have encountered.
"When you wash those kinds of feet, you don't forget easily," Ayeni said with a laugh.
"Service, that is the message for today.
"Today is our turn to take care of one another."
Many aging churches face declining attendance, but for congregations being infused with new Canadians, there's a promise of resurrection and renewal that fits well with the message of Easter.
At Mary Help of Christians, most of the 500 or so parishioners hail from Hong Kong or Taiwan, says Alan Ching, a 52-year-old physiotherapist who chairs the parish pastoral council.
Cantonese is the main language in two of three weekly masses at the old Knights of Columbus building, just off Jasper Avenue at 119th Street. The early Sunday morning mass is in English.
Approaching its 25th anniversary in May, the number of families at the church is holding steady.
"I can't say that we're growing. People come and go," says Ching.
"In a way, yes, we have new parishioners, we have baptisms, new members, but on the other hand we have people going away for various reasons."
According to University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, congregations such as Mary Help of Christians might represent the future of Christianity in Edmonton.
The world's fastest-growing religion, Christianity is making vast strides in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In the next 24 hours, there will be 37,000 more Catholics and 30,000 Pentecostals, Bibby says.
There will be just 1,200 more atheists.
Immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere are already altering Canada's religious landscape, bypassing the shrinking mainline Protestant churches while infusing Catholic and Pentecostal congregations with devout newcomers.
In Alberta's Catholic churches, foreign-born worshippers are more likely than native-born Catholics - 64 per cent to 39 per cent - to attend mass at least once a month.
Well-spoken, friendly Filipino and African priests helm congregations.
And the number of foreignborn Christians in Canada is likely to grow.
For example, about eight per cent of the people in China now attend religious services, but by 2050 the number of Christians alone in China could rise to 220 million people, or 15 per cent of the population.
"When you look at this global data, it's obvious that a lot of these people are arriving as Catholics," Bibby says.
"With the growth of Christianity in China, you would expect those kinds of parishes are going to grow all the more because of immigration."
More than half of the parishioners at Mary Help of Christians were already Catholic when they arrived, Ching says.
He was a twentysomething "sheet of white paper" when he came in 1986. Having no religious past, Ching began attending four years later, curious at first, but increasingly comfortable with an accepting congregation and approachable clergy.
This Sunday, his 11-year-old daughter will celebrate her confirmation. It's a special end to Lent, the traditional 40-day period of fasting and sacrifice leading up to Easter.
Many Christians forego chocolate or wine. This year, Ching endeavoured to spend less time daydreaming about material things.
"I tried to pray more, because I'm usually very lazy," Ching admits. "I think it's making a difference."
Good Friday services were uncharacteristically quiet at the Ethiopian Evangelical Church, a small, slightly dilapidated Pentecostal church on 130th Avenue at 114th Street, where a few dozen members gathered in the early evening to contemplate the meaning of the cross, sing a few hymns, pray and also wash each other's feet.
Twenty-two years ago, Terefe Sereke began meeting with four or five friends in his apartment at 107th Avenue and 158th Street.
They incorporated as a church in 1994, and now have more than 300 active members, with plans to move from their Calder location to a bigger building.
Sereke's life is testimony to the growing worldwide influence of Pentecostalism. The broad, intensely experiential conservative Protestant movement began in late 19th-century England and America and has grown to more than half a billion followers.
Pentecostals were virtually non-existent when Sereke was born in Addis Ababa 47 years ago.
He grew up in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, among the world's most ancient branches of Christianity, which still counts half of the country as adherents.
Protestants make up 19 per cent of the population, while one of the world's most historic Islamic communities comprises one third.
Orthodoxy meant little to Sereke when he was 18, fleeing Ethiopia to avoid recruitment by a communist government to fight in Eritrea.
Early in his 3-1/2 years as a refugee in neighbouring Djibouti, a predominantly Muslim country, someone told him about Jesus.
"I thought I was a believer all my life, but I was not devout," he says. "I started reading the Bible and my life was literally transformed, day and night."
Known as Fasika in the Ethiopian language of Amharic, Easter celebrations in Ethiopia eclipse Christmas in scale and s i g n i fi c a n c e .
It was always a happy time during Sereke's childhood, when extended family would gather to feast on a lamb.
Many of Edmonton's Ethiopians will celebrate a traditional Orthodox-style Easter at the Debre Selam Medhanealem church on 124th Street, he says.
On Saturday evening, Sereke's congregation planned to break their weeklong fasts like their Orthodox siblings, with a potluck meal of injera and wat, a sourdough flatbread with spicy curry.
On Sunday, there's a regular service celebrating a living faith.
"It's more than tradition," Sereke says of Holy Week. "Resurrection means sin and death has been conquered, the grave has been conquered."
While immigration will continue to be a major theme in Canada's religious landscape, Bibby says its future isn't certain.
Despite the emphasis groups such as Pentecostals place on conversion, churches grow primarily through friendship, marriage and children, not evangelism.
"The question is, can the people who are coming here sustain those kinds of levels of involvement intergenerationally?" Bibby says.
"It's not inevitable that immigrants are going to become as secularized as those born in Canada, but the key is that they've got to find significance in terms of their involvement in congregational life."
The two Edmonton churches take different approaches to that task.
Mary Help of Christians relies on bilingual members to straddle English and Cantonese services and keep the generations united.
The Ethiopian Evangelical Church recently added an English youth service led by an Ethiopian-American pastor.
This Hybrid Youth Church will target second-generation Canadians as they learn to think "west and east at the same time."
"We have a plan to do a lot of inner-city ministry to reach the youth because African kids, some of them are in an identity crisis," Sereke says.
"Their culture is Canadian, their main language is English, but they still have grown up in an immigrant home."
Original Article
Source: edmonton journal
Author: Brent Wittmeier
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