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By Steve Weatherbe
LABOUR DAY, 1994 was a high point for Ben and Berni Calvo.
That day, the church they had scrimped for through the previous decade arrived
by barge at the Tsawout Reserve, after making a short journey north from
Victoria, along the east shoreline of the Saanich peninsula.
Now the Calvos are looking for help beyond the meagre resources of their tiny
congregation. Having sold their own home and spent all their savings on
renovating the church 15 years ago, and well into retirement age (he is 79, she
70) they are looking for support to build a $200,000-home on the church lot, for
themselves and Berni’s daughter.
This, said Berni, will keep the land in the hands of band members (herself and
her daughter), and so head off any band council effort to reclaim the property.
“It’s partly about band politics,” she said. And partly it is about maintaining a human presence for the church on
the reserve, which is troubled by problems of drug abuse, alcohol, poverty and
suicide.
The Calvos have been ministering to the Tsawout for 37 years – first from a “prayer room” in Berni’s father’s home. It was her father who provided the land, and her mother “who laid down the first $100 for a church.”
But it took many years of meeting in homes and other reserve buildings before
the Calvos wangled the old church belonging to a Victoria Methodist
congregation.
For many of those years, the Calvos worked off-reserve to support their ministry
– he as a public school janitor, and she in a nursing home and a daycare.
The church’s numbers have always been small: it counts 11 registered members. “People may ask, when they see only six people at a service, why we carry on,” said Berni. “It’s because we are here for the whole community.”
Much of the larger ministry is at funerals, where as many as 500 may jam into
the building. “We preach the gospel to them,” she said.
Since 2002, the Calvos have been assisted by Moses Seo. He is a Korean, who came
to Canada to found a Baptist church for Korean immigrants in Montreal in 1997;
there, he became interested in ministering to Canadian natives.
When Seo moved to Victoria he started the Korean Baptist Church there, and
supported himself as a barber. At first he only helped the Calvos out; but then
left the Korean church, and his work as a barber, to take on more of the work
at the Tsawout Pentecostal Church. “I am supported by some individuals and churches,” he told BCCN. “And my wife works.”
Help has also come from across another ocean. The church’s youth pastor is Marco Faasse, who brought his wife Margreet and three children
from the Netherlands three years ago.
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A successful business consultant with “the big home, the car, the works,” he received a call to work with natives – and after some resistance and negotiation, he responded.
His wife, he said, received the call even before he did. As a result, “we arrived in Vancouver with 10 bags and an old laptop.”
Seo and Faasse hold prayer meetings, community dinners and services throughout
the week. They also maintain a drop-in centre for children and youth on
different days, and conduct field trips and fun nights – often along with Island Christian Fellowship, a non-native Pentecostal
congregation.
The two men hope the Christian community on Vancouver Island will come together
to support the Calvos – who, after selling their home to rebuild the church, lived in its basement for
seven years.
Now they live off-reserve, to give Ben a chance to recover from prostate cancer.
But they hope to return to a modest, new dwelling. It needs to be paid for in
full, said Berni, because the band council must secure any mortgage, and could
well take the land back in the event of a foreclosure.
“We have ministered to three or four generations of children,” says Berni. “We’ve given them the message that God loves them and wants them to overcome their
troubles and their addictions. They go away from the church – but they’ve told us they never forget the message.”
October 2009
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