Canada’s Fragmented Evangelicals

Oliver wendell holmes in one of his more flippant moments urged his friends to be sure to wear a good hat: “The secret of your looks lives with the beaver in Canadian brooks.” Fortunately, good hats are easy to obtain in Canada. But other desirable things are not. Take evangelical unity, for example. You travel far in Canada before you find any evangelicals making a good effort to cooperate with their fellows. The bitterness of evangelical unity above the forty-ninth parallel is tragic and inglorious.

For some years now an effort has been under way to form an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada similar to the National Association of Evangelicals in the United States. So far progress has been practically nil. Perhaps one of the mistakes was to start in Ontario—this always evokes the suspicions of the Maritimers and the provinces to the west. Whatever the reason, there is still no coordinated impact of evangelical Christianity upon the Canadian scene.

A tenuous unity has been created by movements like Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, which has brought together many who would otherwise be totally separated by the fences that divide the common ground of biblical faith. And the results of the IVCF work in raising up ministerial candidates in many churches have been heartening. But this is just a slight whisper of response to the clamant need of the hour. Evangelicals need desperately to reach wholehearted agreement on statements of their common biblical faith and to discover some organizational form for general cooperation in fellowship and service; but the response to all such appeals has been nugatory.

Canada is a land of vast distances. And the population is scant—a mere 20 million, of which nearly a third are French-speaking and Roman Catholic. Yet there are undoubtedly a most significantly number of evangelicals in all the provinces outside Quebec; witness the unusually large number of Bible schools found across the prairies. The pietistic movement of the late nineteenth century left large residual deposits of Bible-believing Christians in many parts of the country, particularly in the west, and the testimony of these groups today is still very strong. It cannot be overemphasized however, that evangelical distinctives are often blurred by sheer distance even when they are not nullified by indifference, apathy, and ignorance of the urgent issues that face our generation.

No Gallup Poll has been taken to determine the size of the evangelical constituency. But I do not hesitate to say, that, if it were united, its influence would be impressive, uplifting, and challenging both to government and to the Church as a whole. Evangelicals can be found wherever you look—among Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites, Anglicans, and Baptists of every shape and form, in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, United Church, Associated Gospel Church, and Salvation Army, as well as in a host of independent congregations. And during evangelistic crusades, all such people join hands naturally—they meet and pray and sing and work together. The tragedy is that when the campaign ends they all troop back to their own places and scarcely see one another again.

One result of all this is that there is no united voice of evangelicals in the council chambers of Canada. Lobbying is out, for there are no united objectives for which to lobby. Meanwhile, the historic communions—through their carefully articulated reports, their press conferences, and their penchant for creating the impression that they and they alone rightly represent the people of Canada on the religious level—are making yardage all the time. And though the advances they make often seem to the evangelical to be in fact dire losses (for example, the Anglican proposal that a general break-up of marriage be grounds for divorce), yet evangelicals as a group have nobody who can speak on their behalf.

The attempt to create an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has not been abandoned. Dr. J. Harry Faught, a gifted Pentecostal preacher, heads the committee. More than two hundred ministers attended the annual meetings held in Toronto in the spring, and their common concern was evident. But the right kind of idea man has not yet appeared, and we must continue to pray and work for a great united testimony to the glory of the Gospel and the incomparable excellencies of Jesus Christ.

Possibly one of the greatest barriers to an organizational form of cooperation is the reluctance of evangelicals to become involved in anything other than the preaching of the Word and the saving of souls. But how long can we continue in this kind of isolation? Surely there is an urgent need for evangelicals to involve themselves in social issues, in the communications media, in the arts, in government. Or is it really true that the evangelical does not accept such things as live options? Must they all be handed over to the devil? Or must we depend entirely on those of the ecumenical-liberal persuasion to voice concern over slums and slum landlords, ghettos, victimization of every kind? Surely not!

Attempts to foster evangelical unity in Canada must rise from among us Canadians. We are a proud people, and contentious, too. We have resolutely turned our back on all bondage to British parliaments and are natively antagonistic to outside suggestions about what we ought to do.

One of the factors that may yet force Canadian evangelicals to strike out for a corporate identity is the only thinly concealed determination of Anglicanism to sit in the driver’s seat in every form of church merger. On this, Ian Henderson has some very pertinent things to say to Canadians in Power Without Glory. “Scotland and Canada have important positions in the Anglican power drive,” he says. “They represent the soft underbelly of Protestantism.”

The prospect of developing mergers in Canada between the United Church and the Anglican Church should serve as a warning signal to all who are concerned for a strong and united evangelical faith in this great dominion. The day may not be too far distant when our choices will be reduced to two: identification with an ecumenically oriented, theologically liberal church, or identification with all who own an overriding allegiance to Jesus Christ and the biblical revelation.

For those who receive the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the authoritative and sole revelation of the mind and plans of God and who confess Jesus Christ as Son of God and Saviour of the world, there surely can be only one choice: to stand with all of like precious faith and join hands across denominational lines to attain evangelical goals.

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