“Good-bye” is Never Easy

A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article, with a picture of Donald MacLeod speaking, appears below. 

After twenty-four years as a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Rev. A. Donald MacLeod has accepted a call to be Senior Minister of the Newton Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Boston. Mr. MacLeod served as President of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada from 1973 to 1975. He was also National Director of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of Canada for a five-year term from 1975 to 1980. He founded the Bridlewood Presbyterian Church in 1967, and more recently has been the founding Chairperson of the Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada from 1982- 1987. Newton Church, to which Mr. MacLeod goes, is the largest Presbyterian Church in New England, dates from 1730, and has a large number of members from Canada’s Atlantic Provinces. It is located in the centre of urban Boston.

Saying “Good-bye” is never easy and a double farewell is particularly difficult. I was first asked to reminisce in Channels about my time as Chairperson of the Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada at the time of the Annual Meeting. Handing over the reins to Nick Nicolle and John Vissers was comparatively easy as I knew our organization was in safe hands.

Since then I have been called to a church in the United States. On August 31 twenty-four years of service as a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada will have been concluded. A retrospective review is perhaps not out of order, a chance to pause long enough for reflection and recall. Two chapters of one’s life are ending at the same time, or perhaps a volume and a chapter have now been concluded together.

I have in front of me a tattered bulletin from my Presbytery of Pictou ordination service on a warm summer’s evening in 1963. I recall a packed church, windows stuck firmly shut after a recent effort by the Board of Managers. It was the best sendoff into ministry anyone could want: a sturdy, faith-full gathering of Nova Scotians anxious to support their inexperienced minister.

It was a different world and a different church in those pre-Kennedy assassination and pre-Vietnam years. Churches were busy adding members, constructing gymnasia and Sunday School rooms for burgeoning youth programmes. Protestantism — and Presbyterianism with it — in Canada, was on a roll.

1963, as we know now, was the tail-end of that church renaissance, the Indian summer of a religious Canada dominated by the mainline churches. While the tide of secularism has not as quickly engulfed the rural church in which I was ordained, it has completely altered the fabric of urban church life in central Canada — “upper Canada” we used to call it with a peculiarly Maritime snarl.

The “uncomfortable pew” and the Honest to God phenomena took us through uncharted waters; “relevance” became the cry of the church in the late sixties. And I suppose to be called to a church planting enterprise in the fall of 1967 in Scarborough, suburban Toronto, was the height of foolhardiness. As one knocked on doors, handed out brochures, and announced the presence of “a new Presbyterian Church for Bridlewood”, there were stifled yawns and shrugged shoulders. It was the Age of Aquarius, who needed the church?

One can see now that the Assembly of 1966 was a key watershed for the Presbyterian Church in Canada. I can remember, with the fervour of the youthful and naive,coming down from Nova Scotia to the first of only two Assemblies I attended in all my years in the Canadian Church to right the balance. I fought the pro-Vietcong statements of Ted Johnson and Eoin MacKay, speaking out of my childhood China experiences where I had learned that Communists were no mere agrarian reformers, and defending the indefensible — American involvement in Vietnam. One blushes at one’s early enthusiasms.

It was the women’s ordination issue that turned out to be a lurking time-bomb that in a kind of delayed action detonation was to blast the Evangelicals out of their complacency and their brash assumptions about taking over the Canadian Church. It was unfortunate that the document Putting Women In Their Place — prepared as a study of certain biblical passages so that the church could think through the issue — was very short on exegesis and the normative authority of Scripture. It set the tone for subsequent debate and left us with the idea that the issue was one not so much of the interpretation of Scripture but of its authority. We Evangelicals lined up at the clerk’s desk at the front of St. Andrew’s Church to sign our dissents and wave our banners.

Leaving that Assembly our immediate concern was not so much the issue of women’s ordination but the Draft Statement of Faith, sent down to presbyteries by the 1966 Assembly. That fall, at the Skyline Motel close to Toronto’s Malton Airport, Evangelicals from seven of our eight synods gathered to discuss strategy. Summoned by Rennie, Fitch and MacLeod, we learned something of the difficulty of coming together to address any issue cohesively, of our fear of organizing, and of our “crisis” mentality. We scattered with signs of hope, new insight, but little action. As self-styled defenders of the faith we could be defensive but not very defensible. Lethargy set in particularly as Joe McLelland’s attempt to help the Canadian Church think theologically — an attempt one could only praise if not agree with some of its results — was shelved by subsequent Assemblies.

It was in the Assembly of 1980, at Windsor, that all of these issues came to a head. What were we as Evangelicals to do with that large number within our ranks who could see no biblical basis for the ordination of women when the church now, as a result of the action of a General Assembly, gave them ten years to shape up or ship out? 1990 loomed before us much as 1997 does in Hong Kong — the time of “the takeover.”

During those fourteen years, from 1966 and the initial decision about women’s ordination, to 1980 when its implications  became apparent, the church — and Evangelicals with it — had gone through some cataclysmic changes. An older leadership comprised of people like E.A. Thomson, Lou Fowler, Dean Johnson and even the much younger Al Farris were no longer there. They had either come out of an Evangelical background, or were aware of its existence. They had perpetrated that pax ecclesia that had kept within the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada an (occasionally uneasy) coalition of anti-temperance Church of Scotland residuaries,  dispensational fundamentalists, and the orthodox Reformed that had maintained the denominational after 1925.

Now the question a subsequent generation was asking was: how much were we prepared to live and let live? The dream of the fathers of 1925 was that a national Presbyterian Church, with congregations maintained as bank branch offices in every centre across Canada, would recoup its losses and reemerge as a great national free church alternative to the United Church. With declining membership that vision became impracticable even if we had had the continuing will to pursue it.

There was another unspoken aspect of the post-1925 compact that held the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Because of our weakened state, our need of each other, issues would never be spelled out to their logical conclusion, the lines would never be drawn too clearly, principles would always be a little blurred. The church had suffered enough from an attempt to foist organic union on disparate traditions, it was argued. A coalition was possible only with compromise, a blurring of distinctives.

The women’s ordination issue raised the much wider issue of what it meant to be an inclusivist church — when did tolerance become intolerable? We Evangelicals found it difficult to relate to the feelings of women — either elders of the clergy — who saw our intransigence on the issue not as a matter of principle so much as one of culture that thereby reduced them to second class status. But wider issues loomed ahead; how far would Evangelicals be prepared to go to defend their rights; was schism over a matter of order ever defensible, and indeed was such schism possible given the fact that much of the debate focussed on clergymen who would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to take their congregations into the ecclesiastical wilderness?

It was in that atmosphere that Evangelicals were summoned to gather as “A Committee of Concern” in the fall of 1980 in Toronto’s Knox Church. We discussed the options, engaged in the occasional bout of self-pity (“After all we have done for the church how could they treat us this way?”) and were in danger of repeating the fiasco of 1966: going our separate ways and (as one person actually did the Sunday he returned home after attending our meetings) splitting congregations and polarizing presbyteries.

It was in the mercy of God that, somewhere along the way, we started to look at “us” rather than “them.” What we saw was a weakened Evangelicalism, where many of our congregations had atrophied into a conservatism and a Congregationalism that could not win the world — let alone the church — for Christ or our theological position. Unless there was a winsome, positive Dynamic operating in our churches there would be little possibility of our summoning the rest of the Church to faithfulness or even of our own survival.

The birth of the Renewal Fellowship on May 8, 1982, in Willowdale Church, Toronto, was a reflection of these perceived needs. We were a Renewal movement, not a group of stalwarts insisting on a reversion to a past, many aspects of which we had glamorized or suppressed. We were a Fellowship, bringing together not only the likeminded — a miracle in itself as so often we as Evangelicals would devour our young amid suspicion and innuendo — but we also wished to include others as we reached out in understanding and compassion, listening and hearing others, often for the first time. We were therefore Within the Presbyterian Church in Canada, not outside of it but a part of it — sharing its defeats as well as its triumphs. And we were Presbyterians — committed to a vigorous, objective Reformed heritage, theologically informed — anxious to be what Evangelicalism had often failed to be — a sturdy stock of indigenous growth. Much as we prize the British and American roots and resources of our theological orientation we nonetheless long to see ourselves as Canadian not only in our leadership but also in our awareness of national and contemporary social needs.

These five years have then been a testing of that vision. They have seen, by God’s grace alone, a consolidation of concern that has no longer been “issue’’ or “crisis” initiated but sustained and consistent. They have witnessed our achieving a new credibility for our message — Channels being a medium that was the message. They have been spent developing joint enterprises with the church at large — ministry conferences, renewal seminars co-sponsored by Presbyteries — which involve us not in confrontation but in contribution to the work of the church, positive and constructive.

God has been good. But the vision still remains unachieved: for the vision is one of churches, of presbyteries, of a General Assembly, in which the Spirit of God so moves in bringing repentance and faith that there is a great surge of life and vitality so that believers are restored to their first love, community is established in a heightened appreciation for sisters and brothers, irrespective of where she or he stands in the theological spectrum, and above all where God is glorified.

Is it too much to hope that that can happen in the Presbyterian Church in Canada? What I have witnessed in these years as Chairperson of the Renewal Fellowship suggests that it is not. A beginning was made. We need now the personnel full-time, the involvement and participation of both clergy and laity as membership increases, and the personal intercession of all our family to make it happen.

Thank you for the privilege of twenty-four years of ministry in a church like the Presbyterian in Canada, and of the trust you showed in me as your Chairperson for the last five. Much has been done, much remains!