The Changing Church

New voices and new tendencies

One does not have to be a skeptic to question the thesis that the dominant element in the founding of the American Republic was the Puritan tradition. By the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Continental Congress, under the impact of latitudinarianism, deism, and the Enlightenment, let alone the laws of spiritual atrophy, the witness of biblical Protestantism was on a pretty shaky footing among the articulate class of the new nation. The picture changed very greatly in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but this did not alter the spirit of ’76. And it is here, at the point of origin, that the contrast with Canada is great.

In 1867, when the four British North American provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia came together in a federal union, evangelical Protestantism was everywhere very much in evidence. The Methodists, since the turn of the century the dominant form of evangelicalism in British America, still retained this position. The impact of idealism, scientism, and biblical criticism had scarcely been felt, although the emergence of a fashionable and popular evangelicalism, which testified to the Church’s attempt to accommodate to growing urbanization, already disturbed the discerning. In Canadian Presbyterianism, as in Scotland and Ireland, the long reign of Moderatism was a thing of the past, and the churches associated with the dynamic evangelicalism of Chalmers and the Free Church were forging ahead. A similar situation prevailed among the Baptists. And, although evangelicalism had been fairly slow in gaining an effective Anglican foothold in the new world, by the 1860s the evangelicals were a force to be reckoned with in many key Anglican dioceses.

The geographic problems facing Canadians were great. For a great many citizens, all energy was absorbed in making a living and attempting to maintain a state that defied so many of the basic geographic laws of nationhood. As a result, ideas were largely imported, and theology suffered along with the other fields of thought. So Canadian Christians, clerical and lay, have never been distinguished as a theologically minded lot. The tradition of self-conscious loyalty to Britain has undoubtedly encouraged our well-known qualities of moderation and unimaginativeness, while the “French fact”—one-third of the population, centered in Quebec, maintaining French law, language, religion, and culture—has exerted its own pressure on Canadian Protestantism.

Another distinctive of the Canadian religious situation was the tendency to treat the fourth of the population that came from Central and Eastern Europe as pieces of a mosaic rather than ingredients for the melting pot. As a result, Canadian Protestantism has largely been deprived of the great benefits conferred upon its southern neighbor by the active participation of those of European background in the mainstream of evangelical life.

Theologically, the changes, though predictable, have been amazingly pervasive. There were able champions of biblical Christianity, such as Principal Caven of the Presbyterians’ Knox College and that remarkable group of men at the Anglicans’ Wycliffe: Sheraton, O’Meara, Dyson Hague, and Griffith Thomas. But they were bypassed. Late nineteenth-century Canadian clerical biography shows that many men looked to F. W. Robertson of Brighton, Channing, and Bucher as their popular theological mentors, and one does not need much imagination to know where this would end.

Methodism moved most quickly in this direction, and after the church union in 1925 the United Church appeared to many to be entirely dominated by this approach. Accordingly, it has had difficulty in keeping its evangelical people from running off to the smaller denominations. And it has the reputation, at least, of a liberal theological intolerance. Responsible leaders in the church have often said, for example, that you can’t have both its New Curriculum and Billy Graham.

Canadian Anglicanism, sometimes described as possessing glacial mobility, may not have moved very fast but has generally moved along the lines laid down by Gore in Lux Mundi, which might be described as a synthesis of high-churchmanship and liberalism. The 40 per cent or so of the Presbyterians who remained out of the church union in 1925 have often been accorded evangelical accolades from around the world, which are not altogether in order. Remaining Presbyterian did not necessarily make one a true-blue Reformed theologian, although often it did most certainly imply this. Many lay people remained Presbyterian through inertia or a dislike of the enthusiastic Methodists. Among the ministers, there was at least one—and he the principal of one of the theological colleges after 1925—who stayed Presbyterian because he feared the doctrine of the United Church might not be modern enough. A kind of liberal evangelicalism prevailed in the Baptist colleges; but this, of course, was not necessarily reflected widely in the pulpits, and certainly not in the pews.

Barthianism had considerable influence in Canadian theological circles after World War II, but it is questionable how far these views have penetrated even that often mentioned intangible “the intelligent layman,” let alone the average church member. And, of course, under the modem movements, academic theology is marching leftward once again.

As for worship, it is probably enough to say that almost every Canadian congregation has been influenced to some degree by the liturgical revival. Prayer meetings or midweek services have largely disappeared, except among the staunchly evangelical. Cell groups are supposed to have taken their place, and one can only hope this is so. But in the absence of evidence in Canada for the mushrooming of home Bible studies that is reported in parts of the States, one is uncertain. A statement once heard in a church in Cambridge may hold true for Canada as well as England: “The only people who really know how to pray are the Roman Catholics and the conservative evangelicals.” Evening services are absent in most suburban congregations, but many city churches hold on to them. Increasingly, however, the Board of Managers is debating whether it pays to heat up the church for just a handful.

If evangelicalism was present in Canada’s early days, then surely evangelism was there as well. In the 1770s and ’80s Henry Alline engaged in a peripatetic ministry among the expatriate New Englanders of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and his ministry did much to establish what is still the pattern of Baptist witness in that area. The early Methodists, many of them sent northward by Asbury, used all the revivalistic methods, such as camp meetings, protracted services, and the mourner’s bench. Presbyterian moderates were naturally skeptical of special evangelistic efforts, but so were the evangelicals when they looked across the border and saw what evangelism had apparently done to Finney’s theology. Among them, however, Calvinistic, parochial evangelism flourished. Many of the Scottish immigrants of the 1830s and ’40s had come under the influence of such great evangelists in the old land as “The Apostle of the North,” Dr. Macdonald of Ferintosh, and their new communities in the backwoods of Canada often throbbed with evangelistic activity.

One of the most famous seasons of evangelism took place in the congregation at Kirkhill in Glengarry in eastern Ontario in 1862; it was recorded in The Man from Glengarry by one of Canada’s premier story-tellers, Ralph Connor, a son of the Kirkhill manse. The minister used by God at this time was Daniel McVicar, and in 1867 he became the principal of Montreal’s newly founded Presbyterian College, which was a direct outgrowth of the evangelistic effectiveness of those days. The outstanding evangelistic venture among the Anglicans occurred in 1877 when the Rev. W. H. Rainsford of England conducted a preaching mission in St. James’ Cathedral, Toronto. Thousands were won to Christ, and Wycliffe College was founded to train converts offering themselves for the ministry.

To meet the challenge of the cities, the professional evangelists appeared on the scene. D. L. Moody came to Toronto in 1884. Soon after, the various Methodist conferences were appointing full-time evangelists, the best known of whom were the team of Crossley and Hunter. This movement continued until about the First World War but then lost its impetus among the major denominations. Evangelism was by no means dead, however; it was pressed forward in strategic independent congregations in the major cities. The story has yet to be written of The Metropolitan Tabernacle of Ottawa, The People’s Church of Toronto, The Philpott Tabernacle of Hamilton, Elim Chapel of Winnipeg, and the Metropolitan Tabernacle of Vancouver. When it is, their evangelistic ministry during the 1920s and ’30s will be seen to have had a significant effect upon Canadian Christianity. The surge of evangelism that covered much of Alberta and western Saskatchewan in the mid-thirties, at the height of drought and depression, and that threw up the remarkable phenomena of the prairie Bible schools, best exemplified by those at Three Hills and Briarcrest, sent hundreds and even thousands of young people to the mission field. These missionaries naturally carried the torch of evangelism with them. This prairie movement may yet be seen to be one of the most significant Canadian contributions to the world church.

In the post World War era, Youth for Christ again made evangelism a live option. Many who were repelled by this organization nonetheless began to rethink the question of evangelism. And soon preaching evangelism, visitation evangelism, friendship evangelism, and so on were fully in vogue. Often this was a pragmatic movement in which any form of evangelism was used as long as it could get people related to the church.

But popular evangelism seems to have had its day in non-evangelical circles, and now men with theologically non-evangelical convictions and sociological expertise are charting the course. Interestingly, however, it is the Pentecostals, with their kerygmatic evangelism, who are increasing fastest in Canada, even though they have had almost no help from the thing that has contributed greatly to the growth of other communions: immigration. A sign that the older evangelism still has a wide appeal is the entrance into the ranks of the evangelists of three greatly gifted young ministers: Leighton Ford, a Presbyterian; Meryle Dolan, a Baptist; and Marwood Patterson, an Anglican.

A word should be said about social and political issues. Canadians generally do not share the pietistic fear of their evangelical brethren in the United States about a positive relation between the churches and the government. Separation of church and state has never been a widely held Canadian dogma, at least within the churches; rather, cooperation has been the motto. With the increasing complexities of bureaucratic society, this essential Canadian tradition naturally turns to the problem of the social and economic structures themselves. Where biblical moorings are well-nigh lost, this, of course, is considered to be evangelism, or at least a satisfactory substitute. But where the faith is strong, evangelism and social responsibility go hand in hand.

Finally, a word about the picture of Protestant church life in Canada today. Among the smaller denominations, which are usually strongly evangelical, there seems to be some moderation in the spirit of separatistic exclusiveness. Among the ethnic churches, which again often have a strong evangelical testimony, there is a movement to have increased contact with his fellow Christians of other backgrounds. This is particularly true of sections of the Lutheran Church, the Mennonites, and the Baptist groups of European origin.

And what of the non-evangelical sections of the churches? The continual comment that one seems to here is: “Where are their young people?” This inability of a culturally accommodating Christian to challenge the young is borne out by the theological college statistics, which have shown a drastic slump in recent years. In contrast is the crowded conditions of Toronto Bible College and other similar institutions. It is easy to dismiss the drawing power of such schools by speaking of their simplex approach to complex issues, but this by no means deals with the whole matter. And the inadequacy of this answer is substantiated by the number of well-trained university graduates who are heading to the United States for an academically respectable and consistently evangelical theological training, which they do not feel they can get at home.

Then there are the evangelicals in the major denominations. In the Maritime provinces, Baptists—the great bulk of whom are evangelical—are seeking to exert pressure to bring their educational institutions into more sympathetic alignment with the church as a whole. In the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, the same spirit was at work when a proposal to endorse the United Church’s New Curriculum was thrown out by an overwhelming majority. Among the Presbyterians, it is interesting to see that the evangelicals have their strength among the younger men, a situation that can in considerable measure be attributed to the work of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. A national branch of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion has been gaining encouraging support. And in the United Church there are younger evangelicals who are making their voices heard.

Evangelicals in the larger denominations are subject to pressures that are often intense and will in all probability increase. Yet they hold fast to their desire to walk the razor’s edge of faithfulness to the Lord and obedience to his word, while avoiding the pitfalls of a sub-biblical gospel and an introverted sectarianism.

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