Will spiritual awakening in the churches claim Canada as a ‘nation under God’?
The celebration of Canada’s 100th birthday will be the largest and most lavish the world has seen. Montreal’s Expo ’67—a $500 million window on “Man and His World”—will presumably attract more than six million visitors from sixty or more nations. And the Centennial is already under way. On New Year’s Eve, Prime Minister Lester Pearson lit a Centennial Flame as bells from 22,000 churches pealed the start of the great celebration. Throughout the nation, many are already enjoying a kaleidoscopic offering of cultural and historical activities.
Responsible celebrations by Canadians could very well point to this vast land as a “nation under God.” That hopeful slogan is a far cry from the phrase used to describe the early rendezvous of the founders of Prince Edward Island: “the reeking slough of debauchery.” Much has happened to give new perspectives to the world in which the nation of Canada was born. When Queen Victoria gave assent to the British North America bill on March 29, 1867, the two-century-old provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had a population of 3.5 million, almost what the thirteen states of America had had when they declared their independence ninety years earlier. Today the original four provinces have increased to ten, with the addition of two territories, and the population of the nation has swelled to nearly 20 million. Two million Canadians claim membership in one or another of the six major Protestant denominations.
What has the Church accomplished in the last 100 years? What have been its failures? At a time when the government of Canada will say little about the role of the Church in shaping Canada’s past, it is imperative that the churches evaluate themselves, uniting to help guide the nation spiritually in the years ahead.
Of major importance to the leading denominations in Canada’s first century has been the matter of church union. The first big merger came in 1925, when Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists formed the United Church of Canada. This did not reduce the number of denominations. Not all Presbyterians joined; Methodists regrouped, forming the Free Methodists and adding to the Pentecostals, who expanded from 7,012 in 1921 to 143,877 in 1961. The uniting of three denominations to make one actually resulted in four, and possibly more. But the merger was exciting to denominational leaders, and many viewed the new United Church as a stirring achievement, an impetus to greater ecumenical endeavors.
Drawing upon the lessons of the past 100 years, observers predict an intensifying of the efforts for church union: more churches will unite, again giving rise to splinter groups. But many of these observers also deplore the fact that efforts for church union continue to sap the energies of top denominational officials. They argue that the misleading advance in numbers by merger distracts the Church from the primary obligation to evangelize. The Church will achieve vitality and regain forward momentum, they say, only as it again strikes out with boldness to proclaim the Gospel of the crucified and risen Christ.
On the educational scene, the decades of church merger have been accompanied by an increasing scarcity of evangelical and biblical scholars and a disheartening inertia in the seminaries. Only five of eighteen denominational seminaries have full accreditation with the American Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. These institutions, with an average of only forty-two students each, cannot provide a high standard of instruction. Undersized and ill equipped, they fail to attract good scholars, and the resulting dearth of published writings by Canadian church professors is appalling. Knowing that the Church’s virility depends upon those who man the pulpits and teaching desks across the land, without whose strong evangelical persuasion the Church can produce only muffled and uncertain sounds, Canadian evangelicals should be challenged to establish a great evangelical seminary with full accreditation and with a heavy accent on biblical scholarship.
In the past twenty years, the evangelical churches have had a phenomenal outreach in foreign missions. Many persons have responded to the call for full-time foreign service. The Pentecostal and Fellowship Baptist churches, who claim a total membership of not more than 275,000 persons, have more than 800 workers overseas.
By contrast, Canada’s two major denominations, the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, claim more than 1.5 million members, yet support only 325 persons in mission work abroad. The Reverend Roy Webster of the United Church of Canada’s world-mission board maintains that the evangelical “interpretation of a missionary is from a rather narrow perspective.” He argues that “the United Church is heavily involved in ecumenical mission work in the other churches and was in on the start of Canadian Overseas Volunteers from which the Canadian University Service Overseas was formed.” He attributes the actual numerical decrease in United Church missionaries overseas to the expulsion of 187 of them from China in the 1940s.
Yet the figure of 325 missionaries is not based upon a narrow interpretation of the missionary task. It includes doctors, teachers, and engineers as well as pastors and evangelists. And though every North American mission board lost out in China in the 1940s, in the decade between 1950 and 1960 the total number of workers from North American Protestant churches increased by more than 12,000.
Since the striking increase in the number of missionaries supported by these boards has come from the smaller evangelical churches, the conclusion appears obvious. Within the larger and more liberal churches, the urgency that gripped John Geddie, William Carey, Hudson Taylor, and Jim Elliott has been replaced with a concern for “dialogue,” “encounter,” and “technical assistance,” and the increasing tide of universalism and syncretism on the national and international scene drastically cuts away the biblical imperative to evangelize. Perhaps even more tragic than its blunted outreach is the satisfaction and arrogance of the churches in allowing the ambassadors of Jesus Christ to be replaced in large measure with the choices of government-sponsored agencies, such as the Canadian University Overseas, where atheists and agnostics gain an equal footing with believers.
To strengthen the evangelical outreach in Canada and around the world, the first national Congress on Evangelism will be held next year in Ottawa. Many strands of evangelical effort will be drawn together. A large number of evangelicals will unite to give a witness and plan a strategy. It is hoped that this strong voice will stimulate a new effort across Canada to come to grips with the Church’s missionary responsibilities.
The Canadian churches stand at the threshold of a crucial decade. What will be their guidelines as they face a new century in Canada’s history? Will the Church be able to rise above the lethal pronouncements of the new morality and the God-is-dead cults? Will it wrestle with the task of world mission, or will new concepts of evangelism continue to blunt its message? Will the seminaries be able to turn out Christian men who are gripped by the Gospel and concerned for the evangelistic task?
The Canadian church would do well to ponder these questions in this year of celebration. The Church can never afford to be monastic or insular. A Church sure of its message and certain of its answers to the problem of sin may be loud in proclamation. And a strong Gospel earnestly believed can provide the moral backbone of a nation. With five full-time evangelistic teams operating in Canada in 1967, with a Canada-wide Congress on Evangelism in 1968, and with the rise of vigorous evangelical groups within the bigger denominations, we may yet see, and ought to pray for, a widespread spiritual awakening. Canadians may then truly sing:
Lord of the Lands
Beneath Thy bending skies,
On field and flood,
Where’er our banner flies,
Thy people lift their hearts to Thee,
Their grateful voices raise:
May our Dominion ever be
A temple to Thy praise.
Thy will alone, let all enthrone;
Lord of the Lands, make Canada Thine own!
Still A Great Land
We don’t profess to know the hidden secrets of American life. But we just can’t accept cries of “bias” when the wrongdoings of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell or of Senator Thomas Dodd are exposed, or when a draft board disallows Cassius Clay’s exemption on the basis of his claim to be a Muslim minister. Nor can we bow to extreme critics who sometimes imply that honesty in government has died and that duty has long been replaced by spite and prejudice as the guidelines of conduct for national leaders and civil servants.
Has the day come in American life when duty is a dirty word, and when seeking one’s own advantage at the expense of others is generally considered wise and good? We do not believe it. In fact, we see evidence to the contrary. Powell has been barred from his seat by fellow congressmen in spite of his threat to expose irregularities similar to his own on the part of other leaders. And Dodd is being questioned by the Senate ethics committee in spite of his age, prominence, and Caucasian descent. Undoubtedly there is in most public affairs a mixture of motives, some laudable and some not; yet there are still many in all walks of life who act on principle.
If only the great majority will stand up and be counted—congressmen devoted to duty, young men gladly bearing their country’s colors in honorable fulfillment of international commitments, and others—America can face the future unafraid. Ours is still a great land, with a bright flag to fly. Let those speak out who know there is no higher bias than to the truth and to the call of duty.
Not For The Indifferent
In Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, ten minutes from Cal Tech, a prominent scientist spoke on Easter of the risen Lord. Dr. Elmer W. Engstrom, chairman of the executive committee of RCA, acknowledged that some ask how those “trained in science or technology” can accept “the guiding hand of a Creator,” let alone the Easter event. Without proximity to developments in the field, he said, nobody can understand science; so too, “if one is to apprehend and understand the providential acts of our Lord, one must have an intimate relationship with Him.” Indifference is as costly as unbelief.
Five months have passed since the World Congress on Evangelism, and several facts are now clear.
1. If the world is to be evangelized in our generation, evangelical Christians will need to do it.
2. The National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches as movements have not responded significantly to the Berlin congress.
3. Deepening commitment to evangelism is apparent on the part of evangelical leaders both inside and outside the conciliar movement.
4. Neither the American Council of Christian Churches nor the National Association of Evangelicals as a movement has rallied to the evangelistic priorities of the Church. The ACCC continues to slander the Berlin congress as semi-liberal and semi-Communist. NAE response so far is individual rather than corporate, but the movement recognizes the primacy of evangelism and has asked evangelist Billy Graham to address its twenty-fifth anniversary convention next month. Its regional directors have thrown full weight behind evangelistic concerns, and Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, NAE’s general director, actively participated in the World Congress as chairman of its executive committee.
5. A pan-evangelical cooperative thrust is needed to coordinate the evangelistic outreach on a global basis and to secure the fullest public impact and interest.
The barrier to evangelism in conciliar Christianity lies in its leadership. The establishment is preoccupied with the goal of a great world church while the theology of the Church is in decay, the evangelistic task of the Church is neglected, and the influence of the Church is misused politically. But it would be a mistake to spend our energies in assailing the failure of administrators. We need to pray for the divine forgiveness of their sins, and ours, and move swiftly to fill the vacuum in the life of the churches.
In America, the National Council of Churches includes many ministers and laymen who have a deep longing for evangelistic renewal. But ecumenical officialdom does not respond to these desires. For one thing, sights are so set on political concerns that many now tend to view socio-political action as evangelistic effort. After its General Assembly meeting in December gave visibility to Billy Graham and to an evangelism that seeks the personal salvation of individuals, the NCC proceeded to forget about evangelism at its General Board meeting in February and carry forward its effort to convert or revolutionize social structures. Response to the pleas of the World Congress for vigorous evangelistic outreach has come only from individuals, including some denominational directors of evangelism. The evangelical community should fully welcome and reinforce this limited response through trans-denominational and trans-ecumenical cooperation.
The World Council of Churches may yet, it is hoped, emphasize evangelism in Uppsala in 1968. The movement has tended to neglect both revealed truth (unity is the first article of the ecumenical creed; almost all other heresies are tolerable) and the Great Commission (not a single major consultation has been devoted to it). Failure in Uppsala would be a further calamitous derailment of the Church from its prime mission. Even so, the World Council’s insistence that assembly and consultation papers speak only to the churches and not for the churches leaves all its emphases hanging in mid-air. But the WCC’s 110-member policy-making Central Committte will meet August 15–26 on the Greek Island of Crete to review the movement’s attitude toward evangelism since the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948. It will also discuss implications of last year’s World Conference on Church and Society, which tilted far left, for WCC member churches.
One sometimes wonders whether our generation can still be rescued from a vagabond ecumenism’s misconceptions regarding Christ’s Church. But no amount of evangelical wailing about the death-of-God Mafia, new-morality beatniks, Unitarian bishops, and political clergy will fill our empty-souled generation with the truth of God. Let evangelical believers go to prayer, band together in witness for Christ, clasp hands across denominational lines to proclaim the Gospel, and get on with fulfilling the Risen Christ’s command to the Church. Many troubled believers both inside and outside conciliar ecumenism will give world visibility to the unity of believers in this holy mission. By obedient love for Christ, by theological confession of the truth of the Bible, and by evangelical witness to the lost we may yet be able to redress the evangelistic failure of conciliar ecumenism in the twentieth century.
This movement is already under way in many places as evangelistic effort is being redoubled from Australia to Pakistan in the aftermath of the World Congress on Evangelism. Southern Baptists, in promoting the Crusade of the Americas, are discovering that many American Baptist pastors are cooperating individually despite the refusal of their national General Council and the universalist slant of their national director of evangelism. In the United States, leaders whose hearts are burdened for evangelism are trampling down old prejudices, and hopeful signs appear of a unification of scattered evangelical forces for the great purpose of giving visibility to the demand of the crucified and risen Christ for personal faith in him.
Tribute To Samuel M. Zwemer
April 12, 1967, marks the centennial of the birth of Samuel Marinus Zwemer. Because through his adult life he gave himself as a missionary to the Moslems, his friends smilingly—and fittingly—called him “Samuel Moslem Zwemer.” He was one of that remarkable galaxy who late in the nineteenth century and in the forepart of the twentieth led the Protestant world mission in a new era. As young men and into old age they strove, with striking success, to give reality to the watchword of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions: “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” That movement, which arose in the United States in 1886 at a summer conference under the direction of Dwight L. Moody, spread to Canada, the British Isles, the Continent of Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Under its impulse thousands of Christian youth went to Asia and its fringing islands, Africa, Madagascar, and Latin America.
Zwemer’s parents were immigrants from Holland. He was one of fifteen children and was reared in Michigan in the manse of the Dutch Reformed Church. Not until later did he learn that his mother had early dedicated him to the Christian ministry. As was natural for one of his background, he went to Hope College, and then to the theological seminary of his church in New Brunswick. In his seminary days he joined with a fellow student in organizing a missionary fellowship.
In 1890, Zwemer, at the age of twenty-three, was sent by his church to that supremely difficult mission field, Arabia. There he first made his residence at Basrah, in the present Iraq, sixty miles north of the Persian Gulf. Six years later he married a nurse who was under appointment of the Church Missionary Society. Meanwhile he had moved his station to Bahrein where he held street evangelistic meetings, met people, and supervised colporteurs of the American Bible Society.
For twenty-two years Zwemer’s base was Arabia. He learned Arabic, became a specialist on Islam, and traveled in various parts of that vast subcontinent. He had an urge to write and gifts in literary as well as verbal expression, and he early began producing books, chiefly on Arabia and Islam. Among the many he wrote during that period are Arabia, the Cradle of Islam, The Moslem Doctrine of God, The Unoccupied Mission Fields, and Raymund Lull.
On his furloughs he spoke in churches, religious gatherings, and student assemblies. He became the first candidate secretary of the Student Volunteer Movement. John R. Mott, chairman of the executive committee of that movement, often enlisted him for its programs and for other gatherings. He had marked ability in raising money and recruiting personnel for the Arabian mission. For years a Southern woman paid his salary.
In 1913 Zwemer moved to Cairo. As the intellectual capital of the Moslem world, located on main lines of travel, Cairo gave him the opportunity to broaden his outreach to all Islam. To acquire familiarity with its main centers, he traveled extensively in India, Africa, and the East Indies, and even visited the large Moslem population in Northwest China. He organized and chaired the first and second Protestant missionary conferences on Islam, in Cairo and Lucknow.
After the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (1910), Zwemer founded and edited Moslem World, a quarterly journal devoted to Islam, and to Christian missions to its adherents. He continued to write, not only articles for this journal and others but also pamphlets and books. He furthered the production and circulation of literature for Moslems. To aid in this, he founded the Christian Literature Society for Moslems and through it distributed a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of books and tracts. At his initiative, a new building for the Nile Mission Press was made possible by a gift of $10,000 from Mrs. Nettie McCormick of Chicago.
Again and again Zwemer spoke at missionary gatherings in Great Britain and the United States. Because of his familiarity with Dutch through his family background, he was frequently on the platform in the East Indies and South Africa. Before the meeting of the International Missionary Council on work with Moslems planned by Mott, Zwemer, at Mott’s request, led conferences across North Africa. After that meeting, he and his wife reported on it to missionaries to Moslems gathered at a conference in Baghdad.
In 1929 Zwemer became professor of missions at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he continued in that chair until the age of seventy brought emeritus status. There he interested prospective pastors in the world mission, helped to prepare missionaries, and continued to write. While in that post he produced a major work on The Origin of Religion.
In his theology Zwemer was frankly conservative. He had no doubt of the deity, incarnation, and resurrection of Christ. The book of his that is said to have had the largest circulation is The Glory of the Cross. In a widely read volume, he flatly came out for Christianity the Final Religion. He wrote on many phases of Islam in such books as The Influence of Animism on Islam and Al Ghazali: a Moslem Mystic. Yet in Mohammed or Christ he made it abundantly clear where his convictions and message lay.
Zwemer was a forceful speaker, pungent, and with an apt phrase to give point to his message. He had a robust sense of humor and an endless supply of stories. He was gifted with seemingly inexhaustible physical and nervous energy. Highly emotional, he never seemed to be fatigued by his outpouring of himself.
Characteristically, his terminal illness began after he had made three addresses in one day at an Inter-Varsity gathering. Death came suddenly and quietly on April 2, 1952, ten days before his eighty-fifth birthday. He was a profound believer in prayer, both for guidance and strength for himself and in intercession for others.—
KENNETH SCOTT LATOURETTE
