Each year, the In Trust Center provides Resource Grants to support schools with matching funds for special projects. This story, by Karen Stiller, is part of a series highlighting initiatives made possible through these grants. Learn more about the Resource Grants program here.
In the heart of Montreal, Quebec, The Presbyterian College has been preparing leaders for missional service since 1865 – two years before la belle province (“the beautiful province”) joined three others to form what was then the original Dominion of Canada.
The College has been a quiet witness to Quebec’s famously rocky relationship with the Church. In the 1960s, Quebec society made a decisive shift from being one of the most religiously active cultures to what is now considered to be one of the least. The Roman Catholic Church has loomed largest in Quebec’s story of faith, but there has always been a small and scrappy Protestant and evangelical presence in the only province in Canada whose sole official language is French.
Within that religious landscape, Principal Rev. Roland De Vries, Ph.D., notes that “small theological colleges offer education in this province, with many of the Protestant and evangelical schools typically receiving their accreditation from other institutions.” And, not surprisingly, he adds: “There’s not a lot of money in the Quebec context for theological education in French.”
“As we launched a new academic program and a new phase in our institutional life, the In Trust Center provided a Resource Grant that was just what we needed – and at the right moment. The grant not only supported our work financially but also provided a sense of personal support and impetus to pursue our project with energy and creativity.” – Rev. Roland De Vries, Ph.D., Principal of The Presbyterian College, Montreal, Quebec
A French theology department has deep roots at this College, however. “From the 1870s until 1925, there was a French theology department here,” explains De Vries. And so, a new, two-year French-language Master of Theology offered by the College is, he says, “like recovering something from our roots in theological education, without the anti-Catholic spirit of these early evangelically minded Presbyterians.”
The historic missional impetus of the College is reflected in the degree’s raisons d'être. “Fundamentally, the degree is about equipping missional leaders for the evangelical Francophone context,” says De Vries. “We have a diverse community of students and a set of constituencies, in terms of churches. We have some who are pastors, but mostly laypeople who just want to be equipped to help their congregations engage with their communities.”
The program was initially offered in partnership with Institut de Théologie pour la Francophonie, but a realization of significant administrative overlap between the groups eventually led to The Presbyterian College taking sole ownership of the program. With four graduates so far and 26 students currently enrolled – five of whom are expected to complete their degrees this year – the program is small with steadily growing. The goal is ambitious: “The hope is to become a center of ATS-accredited French-language education,” says De Vries, along with the Montreal School of Theology, the accredited body of which the college is a member.
“To build a truly bilingual college requires significant time, energy, and resources – it also requires time as the institution begins to catch up to the reality of a French-speaking student body and of a program that must operate at all levels in that language,” he says.
That work includes sourcing and providing resources students need in the language of the program. The Presbyterian College received an In Trust Center Resource Grant that helped provide those materials for its MTS students.
“We didn’t have a lot of resources in our library in French,” explains De Vries. “The grant meant we could buy some key and core texts for our library. Charles Taylor’s work is a big part of what we do in the MTS. To provide some of his work in French for our students has been important. There is an immediacy to those needs that the grant helped with. We also used some of it for the technology piece, which has been essential.”
De Vries points out that building up the resources for a program like this is “incremental by nature,” and that the support of grants offers significant help along the way to programs and colleges.
Meanwhile, students enrolled in the program are focused on equipping the churches they serve in one of the most unique religious settings in North America.
One student completed his MTS work on church architecture. “It was an interesting project for Evangelicals, who in this context aren’t often thinking about that,” explains De Vries. “He did a study on theology, space and mission in architecture. This student was thinking about their congregation, which was moving into an old Catholic church. How do you think theologically about the space you inhabit? That was an important question for a congregation making that move. These MTS projects are all rooted in some dimension of the life of the Church.”