Interview with John Vissers
A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. This article is from Christian Week, January 10, 1989, and is reprinted here by permission. Harold Jantz, the editor of Christian Week, conducts the interview.
The Renewal Fellowship within the Presbyterian Church in Canada is a rather loosely-knit group of people. What unites them is an eager desire to work for a widespread awakening of biblical faith and witness within the church.
A still youngish 31-year old Dr. John Vissers is halfway through his second full year as a professor of theology at Ontario Theological Seminary. His story is rich in experience of God’s leading through a variety of people.
Of Dutch immigrant background, beginning in the Christian Reformed Church and then moving on to the Presbyterian Church in Canada, he was led into a lively, deeply meaningful encounter with Christ and biblical truth through the teaching of a godly pastor, Dr. Alex McCombie of St. Andrew’s, Islington Church in Toronto, who was, as Vissers says, “a good friend, close advisor and confidante” to the young, eager Christian student.
McCombie, now the director of evangelism for his denomination, encouraged Vissers into Christian ministries, especially camp work, and then into studies.
Vissers began to head for the Presbyterian ministry while in high school and university, his theology nurtured by his evangelical Reformed mentors. At the University of Toronto he did a degree in history and religious studies, then went on to Knox College for an M.Div degree while serving as youth pastor in his home church. After graduating, he accepted the challenge of planting a new church in Vancouver, staying there for two years till the church had grown to a congregation of 40 to 50. “It was tough but fruitful work,” he says; nevertheless he felt the call to further training and continued on at Princeton and Toronto, graduating with a doctorate last May.
In the past five years he has been increasingly involved with the Renewal Fellowship within the Presbyterian Church, and after the previous chairman, Rev. Don MacLeod, left to take a pastorate in New England, Vissers was asked to become executive director, initially for a two-year period.
He spoke about his concerns and vision for the church in a conversation in his office at the Ontario Theological Seminary.
Jantz: I’m interested to know about the Presbyterian Renewal Fellowship. What is it?
Vissers: The fellowship started in the early 80’s as an attempt to provide a unified evangelical witness within the denomination. Its concern largely was to witness to the need for renewal in a declining denomination and to bear witness to the historic Reformed faith while at the same time being open to the kinds of renewal emphases that God seems to be teaching the church today.
Through publications and conferences and various forms of literature we try to be a witness for renewal. That’s essentially what we’re about. We’re very much concerned to work within the structures of the denomination.
Jantz: Is it largely lay or is it pastor initiated?
Vissers: That’s difficult to answer. At first it was largely lay initiated. A lot of key people were concerned about the direction of the church. At the same time there were also key clergy – and lay people realized that the bottleneck to renewal in a lot of churches is the pastor. So there has been a sort of recognition that we have to get pastors on board if we’re going to be effective.
A significant amount of our leadership has always been clergy, but most of our meetings emphasize that this is a lay movement. I think the fellowship is seen as a lay movement within the denomination.
Jantz: Do you have members in most congregations in the denomination?
Vissers: A good percentage have members. There are pockets of churches that have larger groups of members. Our denomination is such that 70% of Canadian Presbyterians live within a hundred miles of Toronto. The strength of the fellowship, therefore, is in southern Ontario.
But we’ve been very conscious to try to move beyond. We have a chapter on the west coast, and our magazine (Channels) is published there, which is very significant for us. We also have a lot of people involved on the east coast and we’ve been involved with the francophone ministry and the Institut Farel in Quebec.
Jantz: How are you seen within the church?
Vissers: Well, that’s interesting. When the fellowship first started it was seen as divisive and people were suspicious for a couple of reasons. One concerned the ordination of women – some saw our group as a lobby against it. But we’ve moved far beyond that and our fellowship has tried to be far more comprehensive and, in fact, embrace evangelicals who are quite diverse on issues like the role of women.
There is less suspicion now because we’ve tried to show we are not a divisive group, although we intend to address issues within the denomination. Our intent is to be a positive, winsome witness to historic Reformed evangelicalism.
But the very fact we exist is a threat in the minds of some people. They feel it’s inappropriate to have a body like this within the church. We continue to struggle with that.
Jantz: What are the issues you struggle with within the church?
Vissers: We understand renewal in a threefold way. Here we follow Richard Lovelace’s definition in his book, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, that renewal is first spiritual revitalization, then theological reformation, and thirdly structural reformation.
What that means in terms of spiritual renewal is that our main emphasis is a call to prayer. We publish a prayer calendar and have concerts of prayer and prayer events. So we attempt to call the church to prayer for renewal and revival.
In terms of theological renewal, we’re committed to articulating the historic reformed faith of the Westminster Confession which our church holds to as the subordinate standard. We try to uphold that not simply to hark back to an old confessional orthodoxy, but to try to articulate a Reformed faith that is intelligible to the world today. That means we address a variety of issues in an ongoing manner. We have an issues committee that works at that.
For example, recently we looked at inclusive language in reference to God. We’ve also looked at homosexuality in the church. We try to address some of those issues and produce papers. There’s much more that we can and should be doing, but we’re working at it.
The third is structural renewal. We’re concerned that our denomination come to terms with its own structures and some of the renewal that needs to go on.
When we say “structural,” we mean such things as worship, and the renewal that needs to go on if it’s to be a living experience for people. Another would be to emphasize the need for evangelism and missions. Another is equipping the laity for ministry and freeing the laity, because our denomination is quite clergy dominated.
Jantz: Describe to me how you see the condition of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
Vissers: I see two things, negatively and positively. Negatively, I think we are in a very serious situation in terms of declining membership – it now is about 160,000. In that sense we are a minor denomination in Canada.
Jantz: Has it dropped over a period of time?
Vissers: From the early ’60s to the present it dropped from something like over 200,000 to where it is today. We reached our peak in the ’50s when there was a lot of church growth in Canada. Part of our problem historically has been that since 1925 we’ve been a smaller denomination because of the formation of the United Church. About two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church went into the United Church.
For the first 25 years or so after church union we were just coming to terms with our continuing existence. Then in the ’50s we saw a period of real growth.
Since the mid ’60s we’ve been affected by the same kind of secularization that has affected all churches. So we’ve closed a lot of churches. We’ve lost a lot of urban churches in Montreal and Toronto and we’re going to lose a lot more yet.
We have, according to sociologist Reginald Bibby, one of the oldest median ages of any denomination. The average age of our membership is in the high 50s. That indicates a declining membership. That’s a pretty gloomy scenario when you look at where we might be in another 10 or 15 years.
On the positive side, I would say that in the midst of all this there are pockets of renewal. There are congregations across our country that are very dynamic and exciting. They are winning people to Christ and growing. When you see that you are encouraged and you know there is hope.
Another curious phenomenon is that at a time when we are declining we are producing more candidates for the ministry than at any other time in our history. We’re not sure what to make of that.
Jantz: Where are they studying?
Vissers: They are at two main colleges, Knox, affiliated with the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology, and the Presbyterian College in Montreal. Others are at the Vancouver School of Theology, with which our denomination has an association. Then there is a large contingent here at Ontario Theological Seminary and some are at Regent College. A few students also always go south to seminaries there.
Jantz: Do many of the student share an evangelical conviction?
Vissers: We’re encouraged by the number of evangelical students. Some of them are coming from these dynamic congregations and going into the ministry with an evangelical commitment. But it would be overstating it to say they are the majority. There is still a fairly wide diversity among our students.
I should say that one of the growing edges of our church is the Korean Presbyterian churches. There are numerous Korean churches, particularly in the Toronto area, and they are also producing a lot of candidates for the ministry.
Jantz: To what extent do the tensions within the church come down to very basic theological differences?
Vissers: Well we certainly have a pluralism in theology within our denomination, as most mainline churches do. One of the things that mediates our pluralism is the fact that we are a confessional church. We have the Westminister Confession as our subordinate standard still. That means the pendulum doesn’t swing as far to the left or right, and those who are conservative are so in a particular way. We have diversity, but not as wide as in the United church, because of the confession.
But there still is a struggle within our denomination, as in others, on the key question of the authority of Scripture: what does it mean to believe in the authority of Scripture for the life of the church?
Jantz: Can you talk to one another on questions like that?
Vissers: Thus far we have, and in two ways. All the people in the Renewal Fellowship are committed to the life in the church. We are all involved in the courts of the church, in the presbyteries, general assemblies and committees. For example, I’m a member of the National Church Doctrine Committee. We don’t separate within the church and then dialogue. We try to be involved as responsible members, ministers and elders and have our dialogue in that way.
Furthermore, in the last five years we have also organized conferences where we brought together leaders who could represent various positions to address specific questions. We’ve found that to be very fruitful. This is something the former chairman, Don MacLeod, a former associate minister at Knox Church (Spadina, Toronto), organized and led. That broke down a lot of walls of suspicion and enabled dialogue to take place.