Joanna Chapa is a Mission Mobilizer on the Midwest USA team. She also serves on a team called Multiply Justice, which exists to bring awareness of diversity, reconciliation, and justice issues throughout the organization. The team does this by facilitating conversations and humbly listening to the marginalized in order to encourage intentional actions that express the justice of the kingdom of God. Other members of this team are Stephen Humber (USA), Silvia Lopez (USA), Aurelie Michou (France), Kyla Sinclair-Peters (Canada), John Johnstone (Canada), Cecil Ramos (USA/Thailand), and Nasser al’Qahtani (USA/Middle East/North Africa).
Tysyn has lived his entire life in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His father is Cree First Nations, from Treaty Eight in Sucker Creek, Alberta. His mother is from European background. “My dad was a musician,” explained Tysyn, “and he moved our family from Alberta to Saskatoon because he just wanted something different. Maybe he didn’t think too much about it, but he extracted our family from our culture, and that left me and my siblings feeling ashamed of our Indigenous heritage.”
As Tysyn looks back at his family’s journey, he sees them being an example of successful assimilation. “We embraced Canadian culture, and we distanced ourselves from everything Indigenous. And I was okay with that. Maybe that was the goal of colonization.”
However, ten years ago, Tysyn was invited to play drums for the worship team at SOAR Saskatchewan, a ten-day mission training program in Saskatoon. “I wasn’t very good at drums,” admitted Tysyn, “but I said yes anyway.”
It was at SOAR that Tysyn first started to hear fellow believers talking about nurturing a positive relationship with First Nations people and culture. “God was working in my heart,” Tysyn explained, “and SOAR was definitely one of those places where he challenged me. The leaders there were actually investigating what reconciliation might look like with First Nations. I had never heard of that before. I had been a Christian for about six years, and I had never encountered that kind of conversation.”
According to Ryan and Terri Epp, the program leaders of SOAR Saskatchewan, reconciliation has been one of the pillars of the program since before their time as leaders. “And it’s a very specific core value,” Ryan explained, “that is postured toward honoring our relationship with First Nations in Saskatchewan. It’s part of our call to local mission in the Saskatchewan context.”
Ryan admitted that when he and his wife took over the leadership of the program five years earlier, he did not fully appreciate the significance of that pillar. In fact, he wanted to change it slightly so that it was less specific. However, he changed his tune dramatically after spending more time in discussion with program founders, Lloyd and Carol Letkeman, as well as with local First Nations church leaders like Dallas Pelly, who has also been involved with SOAR for many years.
“We are now more committed than ever,” said Ryan, “to being on mission in the Saskatchewan context. For SOAR, that means valuing the relationship with our First Nations neighbors, however complicated that may be.”
The complications, Ryan made clear, run deep. “Canada has a broken past, a dark history when it comes to mission,” he shared frankly. “Our country attempted to train Indigenous peoples to think and act like European settlers through a mandatory schooling system. That led to huge amounts of damage and generational trauma.”
For the Epps, and Multiply’s regional leadership team, the way forward was to clarify the role that a mission training program like SOAR could play: “SOAR is an event, but it’s also a voice among our churches. We’re wrestling with our country’s past of dishonor and mistreatment, but we’re also advocating for something different. SOAR can also be an educational tool for the churches to engage in tangible ways in mission, modeling good relationships with First Nations.”
For young Indigenous leaders like Tysyn Cardinal, SOAR has been a tool in God’s hand to radically change his life. “God used SOAR to ignite something within me,” he said. “That’s where I started to reconsider my identity, my background, my people.”
In 2021, as Tysyn was beginning to learn more about his Indigenous heritage and about what reconciliation might mean for him personally, he heard news about the discovery of a mass unmarked grave for Indigenous children in Kamloops, BC. “I had heard about stuff like that growing up,” said Tysyn, “so I wasn’t really shocked by it, I just felt numb. But that’s when I realized that I needed to figure out how to reconcile my faith with being Indigenous. At that point, I knew I needed to walk that path, and SOAR played a massive role in helping me process that.”
In 2023, at SOAR Saskatchewan, there were about thirty Indigenous youth that participated in the ten-day event, making up about one-third of the total number of participants. “That was so inspiring to me,” said Tysyn. “I love that SOAR has become a safe place where Indigenous youth can come and be themselves and be accepted.”
Tysyn knows that the special environment at SOAR didn’t just happen. “That’s the result of a continual focus on reconciliation over the years,” Tysyn affirmed, “and a faithful choice on the part of the program leaders to learn how to be reconcilers, peacemakers.”
Today, SOAR’s commitment to build bridges into the First Nations community in Saskatchewan is bearing fruit relationally and spiritually. “I’m so thankful for Ryan and Terri, how they have continued that emphasis on reconciliation at SOAR, that vision, and for their support, and for everyone who was praying for SOAR. I know I wouldn’t be in this place spiritually if it wasn’t for all that. I wouldn’t have known that it was okay to be Indigenous and Christian.”
Based on his experience, Tysyn is optimistic about the long journey that his country is walking toward reconciliation. “God used SOAR to reinvigorate that in me and to teach me how to be more faithful to the call of Jesus. I believe that God is going to bring reconciliation in the way that we need it here in Canada. I have hope for that.”
PRAY
Please pray for justice, peace, and reconciliation to be expressed through the work of Multiply worldwide.
To learn more about SOAR and other mission training programs, go to multiply.net/go
