Pilgrims in Lotus Land: Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917-1981 9780773565296

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Map: Regions and Selected Urban Centres of British Columbia
Introduction
1 Protestantism in British Columbia before 1917
2 Polarization in Vancouver, 1917
3 Mainline Conservatives, 1917–1927
4 The Separatist Solution: Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917–1928
5 The Supernatural Solution: The Pentecostals, 1917–1928
6 The Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928–1941
7 Period of Transition, 1941–1961: Developments among the Original Conservative Groups
8 Period of Transition, 1941–1961: Immigrant Groups
9 The Worshipping Majority in Protestantism, 1961–1981
10 Components of Growth
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, igij-iySi

Pilgrims in Lotus Land explores the remarkable growth of evangelicalism in an intensely secular province during the twentieth century. Robert Burkinshaw explains why evangelicalism held such appeal, paying particular attention to the distinctive characteristics of both the evangelical constituency and BC society that contributed to this anomalous trend. Burkinshaw traces the growth of conservative Protestantism in British Columbia from its clashes with liberal Protestantism in the early twentieth century; through the post-World War II years when a bewildering variety of smaller groups, including Baptist and Pentecostal denominations as well as Mennonite, Reformed, and Evangelical Free churches became important; to the 19705 when the majority of worshipping Protestants belonged to evangelical groups. He examines the factors that made evangelicalism more adaptable to changes in the geographic, ethnic, and social distribution of the province's population, and argues that, while the evangelical movement in BC was influenced by American fundamentalism, it was not simply an extension of the American campaign. He also examines the impact of evangelicals on provincial politics, most particularly their role in the rise of the Social Credit party. Burkinshaw provides a wealth of new information on the phenomenon of twentieth-century evangelicalism and challenges us to rethink the nature of religious conservatism. ROBERT K. BURKINSHAW is chair and associate professor of history and political science, Trinity Western University.

McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion G.A. Rawlyk, Editor Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, l8 39-i9l8 Marguerite Van Die

4 The Devotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasant's War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independance Canadian Methodist Women Missionnaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

10 God's Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, iVBO-iQS0 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850-1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Beyond George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John Mclntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal's Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man's Land Chaplains of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917-1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia 1917-1981 ROBERT K. B U R K I N S H A W

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1995 ISBN 0-7735-1286-1 Legal deposit second quarter 1995 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press is grateful to the Canada Council for support of its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Burkinshaw, Robert K. (Robert Kenneth), 1954Pilgrims in lotus land: conservative protestantism in British Columbia, 1917-1981 (McGill-Queen's studies in the history of religion; 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1286-1 i. Evangelicalism - British Columbia - History - 2Oth century. 2. Protestant churches - British Columbia History - 2Oth century. 3. British Columbia - Church history - 2Oth century. I. Tide. II. Series. 6111642.03887 1995 2 80'.4^97110904 095-900099-2 Typeset in Baskerville 10/12 by Durer et al., Montreal.

To Sheila

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Contents

Tables / ix Abbreviations / xi Acknowledgments / xiii Map: Regions and Selected Urban Centres of British Columbia / xvi Introduction / 3 1 Protestantism in British Columbia before 1917 / 22 2 Polarization in Vancouver, 1917 / 41 3 Mainline Conservatives, 1917-1927 / 5 4 The Separatist Solution: Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928 / 76 5 The Supernatural Solution: The Pentecostals, 1917-1928 / 100 6 The Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928-1941 / 121 7 Period of Transition, 1941-1961: Developments among the Original Conservative Groups / 149 8 Period of Transition, 1941-1961: Immigrant Groups / 177

viii

Contents

9 The Worshipping Majority in Protestantism, 1961-1981 / 198 10 Components of Growth / 226 Epilogue / 261 Notes / 271 Bibliography / 323 Index / 345

Tables

1 Gallup Poll (28 June 1980): "Did you attend a church or synagogue in the past seven days?" / 202 2 Population of British Columbia by Religious Preference, Census of Canada / 204 3 British Columbia, Protestantism: Congregations and Membership, 1961 and 1981 / 206 4 Sunday School Enrolment, 1961 and 1981, and Average Sunday Morning Worship Attendance, 1981 / 208 5 Financial Contributions, Selected Protestant Denominations / 210 6 Educational Attainment and Participation Rates of Selected Religious Groups (Population over 15 "fears Old) 1981 / 244 7 Proportion of British Columbia's Population under 15 Years Old, by Denomination, 1941, 1961, 1981 / 249

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Abbreviations

ACTS BCEM BCSSM BCG CIM CMA EFC FEBC GVMA IVCF MB PAOC FBI RCA SCM TWC TWU UBC uc VBI VBTS VEM

Associated Canadian Theological Schools British Columbia Evangelical Mission British Columbia Sunday School Mission Baptist General Conference China Inland Mission Church and Missionary Alliance Evangelical Free Church Fellowship of Evangelical Baptists in Canada Greater Vancouver Ministerial Association Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship Mennonite Brethren Pentecostal Assemblies Prairie Bible Institute Reformed Church of America Student Christian Movement Trinity Western College Trinity Western University University of British Columbia United Church Archives Vancouver Bible Institute Vancouver Bible Training School Vancouver Evangelistic Movement

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Acknowledgments

My indebtedness has grown in proportion to the amount of time spent on this undertaking. It began over a decade ago as I commenced research for my doctoral dissertation, and through those years a variety of people have provided indispensable help and support. While the notes and bibliography indicate something of the breadth of the help received, I would like to single out a number of individuals for particular acknowledgment and thanks. Even though the dissertation has been transformed by a great deal of new material and even a revised thesis, my gratitude remains for the cooperation and help received from the members of my doctoral committee at the University of British Columbia. The now deceased N. Keith Clifford took an interest in my work from my undergraduate days and continually assured me of its importance, even when I began to express doubts. His early death was a personal loss as well as a loss to the discipline nationwide. Margarent Prang graciously agreed to continue as my adviser after her retirement and lent her wide knowledge of Canadian social and religious history, her probing questions, timely encouragement, and practical advice throughout the years of the dissertation process. Robert A.J. McDonald initially confessed to little knowledge of the topic, but he did me a great service by continually pressing me to keep the work firmly rooted in the social and economic contexts of BC history and by a most diligent and helpful critique of my writing style. Joel Carpenter, external examiner, went beyond the call of duty in his thorough critique of the dissertation. The impressive stack of notes and questions

xiv

Acknowledgments

he sent me proved indispensable time and again as I undertook the rewriting process. I am glad to join the host of historians who sing the praises of the archivists and librarians who make our research possible. Bob Stewart of the United Church Archives in Vancouver served up stimulating discussion and coffee along with a great array of documents. His congeniality and enthusiasm for all aspects of Canadian religious history always made it a pleasure to visit the archives. Bill Badke of the Northwest Baptist Theological College Library uncovered for me a wealth of useful material. Ted Goshulak of the Trinity Western University Library has given steady assistance over the years, quickly responding to requests for help and frequently bringing new publications to my attention. His wide knowledge of the literature and his friendship and encouragement have meant a great deal to me. I hope that both Sharon Sawatsky and Cathy White, faculty secretaries at Trinity Western University, realize how crucial their work was in the preparation of the final manuscript. I did not need them to type for me, but both of them graciously put up with my frequent bafflement over the intricacies of my computer program and the printer, and they knew, or quickly learned, how to make my endnotes, pagination, etc., conform to the required form. I thank them for their frequent and timely assistance. My teaching and research assistants over several years, David Forsyth, Tara Middleton, Cameron Janzen, Jonathan Boone, and Graham Wright deserve public thanks for their assistance in combing through periodicals or spending many hours in searching through my manuscript for errors. The administration of Trinity Western University has supported this project by providing staff assistance, course relief time, and research grants. On one occasion during my undergraduate days in the mid-igyos, when I expressed interest in researching the history of Canadian evangelicalism, I was informed that probably no one else at a Canadian university was interested in such a thing. Fortunately this proved not to be that case, but sometimes it did seem to me to be uncomfortably close to the truth. In more recent years this has changed remarkably, and George Rawlyk, editor of the series in which this volume appears, has been a catalyst for so much of the recent surge of work on evangelicalism in Canada. I am personally grateful for his enthusiastic support of a book on British Columbia evangelicalism, for the suggestions he has made for improving the end product, and for his patience when the duties of teaching and administration in a busy department delayed my completion of the drafts. I am also grateful for the fellowship and insight of a growing network of historians

xv

Acknowledgments

with like interests, among whom are John Stackhouse Jr, David Elliot, Mark Noll, Marguerite Van Die, Phyllis Airhart, and Bruce Guenther. Like numerous other historians of evangelicalism, I found that Ian Rennie's warm enthusiasm and vast store of knowlege provided vital early encouragement, essential direction, and ongoing support. My family members, fortunately, have not been too keenly interested in the intricacies of historiographical interpretation, but they have always been most encouraging and supportive. Grandmother Evelyn Burkinshaw was always my most enthusiastic and vocal cheerleader. I wish she had lived a little longer to see the final product. The broad range of commitments and involvements of parents Ken and Elaine Burkinshaw introduced me to a significant spectrum of BC evangelicalism. Mother-in-law Freda Riddle generously made possible the purchase of the necessary personal computer hardware. Sons Jonathan and Andrew, now both teenagers, have grown up with this project and have always shown it a healthy respect and have directed very little criticism towards its time-consuming nature. Finally, I gratefully dedicate this volume to Sheila. She has shown extraordinary patience for something that has been part of our lives for over a decade, and she has given me something that I have needed all along the way: the encouragement and freedom to complete the project, combined with frequent reminders that there are, after all, other, very important things in life.

Region names based on census areas as adapted by Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West, map i and table 14. Cartography by Todd Haines.

Introduction

Many modern observers of British Columbia are struck by two seemingly contradictory facets of its religious life. It is an intensely secular province, yet evangelical Protestantism has come to flourish during the twentieth century in the midst of this pervasive secularism. This study arose primarily out of a desire to provide some answers about why this should be the case. Why did evangelicals grow in numbers on the West Coast from 1921 to 1981 while, according to Reginald Bibby in his landmark book Fragmented Gods, they declined elsewhere in Canada during this century as a proportion of the population? Are there any distinctive characteristics of BC society that contributed to this trend? Why did evangelicals increase in numbers to become the "worshipping majority" of Protestants by the 19705 while the formerly dominant lir> eral mainstream of Protestantism declined? Did any particular characteristics of evangelicalism enable that conservative form of Protestantism to adapt relatively successfully to British Columbia's secular society? Secondarily, this study seeks to offer some descriptions and explanations of the wide variety of evangelical denominations and organizations in the province. Even though this is not intended to be primarily an institutional history, the very complexity and variety of such groups bewilders most observers and calls for some explanation. In addition, some attention will be paid to the question of the impact the evangelicals had on the province's political life. What role did the evangelicals' rise to numerical significance play in the Social Credit party's rise to power in 1952 and its successful retention of provincial power in succeeding decades?

4 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

The long-standing secular character of British Columbia is not difficult to document. Roman Catholicism never gained a strong hold on the non-native population, and it remained much weaker in British Columbia than in any other province of Canada throughout the twentieth century. Methodist missionaries from the 18508 to at least the turn of the century frequently complained about the unresponsive character of the white settlers, who were described by one as "a reckless class of godless whites."1 The missionaries blamed alcohol, gambling, religiously apathetic "magistrates and public officers," and the fact that "all seemed caught up with this world's affairs."2 The Church of England and the Presbyterian Church were somewhat more succesful, but both relied largely on British immigration for most of their adherents. A young woman, visiting British Columbia from Ontario in the late nineteenth century, well summed up the religious situation when she noted that "people don't seem to worry very much about churches out here."3 Much of the explanation rests on the fact that British Columbians have long been a transient people. Throughout the twentieth century a majority of the population has consisted of people born elsewhere.4 In Vancouver, the proportion of those born in British Columbia was only 15.4 per cent in 1911 and 24.3 per cent in igai. 5 By 1981, the proportion was still only 42.8 per cent. Between 1956 and 1976, the province's population as a whole was less stable than that of any other province in Canada; less than one-half of the population (between 42.3 and 47.4 per cent) remained in the same location within the province in any five-year period.6 There is little doubt that the vast majority of the province's population did not immigrate for religious reasons. Other factors, such as the pursuit of material gain, motivatived many immigrants. The periodic "boom" cycles experienced by an economy based on forestry, fishing, and mining created the illusion of prosperity and lured people into the province. Edwin Black notes that a spirit of materialism pervaded the whole province and that people of both the coast and the interior were "isolated, parochial, money-seeking, and all were recent immigrants."7 Other British Columbians came west "in order to escape history and all the monuments that commemorate it."8 They were drawn to the province as "almost the farthest place from anywhere in the world."9 For many such people, a religious upbringing was one of the vestiges of their former life which they determined to leave behind. In the words of Peter C. Newman, British Columbians are "pioneers, not pilgrims."10 In the 19605 the secularism of British Columbia became even more

5 Introduction

pronounced. During these years, membership and attendance in its mainline Protestant churches began falling earlier and much more steeply than in other provinces. The combined Sunday school enrolments of the historically dominant mainline Protestant denominations - United, Anglican, and Presbyterian - plunged from 129,000 in 1961 to less than a quarter of that in 1981, just 30,000. In the two decades from 1961 to 1981, these three denominations collectively closed 140 churches more than they opened and lost a total of 32,000 members, despite an increase of over i million in the provincial population. By 1981 their combined average weekly worship attendance was just 56,000, or only 2 per cent of the population." The 1981 census reported that the largest single religious group in the province was composed of those claiming "no religion." The 20.9 per cent of the BC population describing themselves this way was proportionately nearly three times larger than the 7.2 per cent in Canada as a whole who made the same claim.12 Similarly, a 1980 Gallup poll found that only 21 per cent of the BC population had attended a church or synagogue in the previous seven days. This was far less than the national average of 35 per cent and was less than one-half of the attendance rate recorded in the Atlantic provinces and Quebec, which stood at 43 and 44 per cent, respectively.13 In contrast to this secularity, and to a national trend as identified by Reginald Bibby, evangelical denominations in British Columbia grew as a proportion of the population from 1921 onward. While Bibby's figures indicate that the conservative Protestant denominations' proportion of the Canadian population as a whole declined from 8 per cent in 1921 to approximately 7 per cent in 1981, the opposite occurred in British Columbia, where the very same conservative groups nearly doubled, from 4.5 per cent of the provincial population in 1921 to 8.1 per cent in 1981.14 In the process, British Columbia became a leading stronghold of a number of the nation's more significant evangelical groups. The Salvation Army and Christian (Plymouth) Brethren were already comparatively significant in the province in 1921 and remained so throughout the period. The first formal denominational schism in Baptist ranks in all of North America over the modernist/fundamentalist issue took place in 1927 in British Columbia, and subsequent Baptist growth in the province was more vigorous than elsewhere in Canada, particularly among the homogeneously conservative Regular (Fellowship) Baptist churches. Pentecostalism, one of the most dynamic elements of worldwide Protestantism in the twentieth century, spread more rapidly on the West Coast than in any province of Canada west of the Maritimes after 1924. The immigration of European

6 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

evangelicals significantly augmented and altered the predominantly British evangelical population from the late 19205 well into the postwar period. By the 19505, the largest concentration in North America of the strongly evangelical Mennonite Brethren, the most significant of such groups, resided in the province, and a strong contingent of the conservative Christian Reformed churches had also become established. Important groups that had earlier become strong on the prairies, such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Evangelical Free Church, developed very rapidly in British Columbia in the years following World War II, when a vast flood of people from Alberta and Saskatchewan entered the province. Finally, during the late 19605 and early 19705, British Columbia became the leading centre in Canada of the charismatic movement, which made some inroads into the youth culture, and it became the home of a strong concentration of sizable independent charismatic congregations. By 1981, census and denominational and congregational figures indicated that British Columbia's evangelical population, estimated to number over 200,000, was proportionately at least as numerous as that of Alberta, often referred to as western Canada's "Bible Belt."'5 Against the backdrop of the most secular society in Canada and a dramatically declining Protestant mainstream, the previously less visible evangelicalism began standing out more sharply and its numerical significance became increasingly apparent. In addition, important developments in institutions of higher education enhanced the numerical significance of BC evangelicals. Trinity Western College, founded in the Fraser Valley in 1962 (and since renamed Trinity Western University), developed to become Canada's only autonomous, evangelical, degree-granting liberal arts college in the late 19705. Regent College, founded in Vancouver in 1968, was the first evangelical graduate school in the world to specialize in offering advanced biblical training to the laity, and by the mid-ig8os it had become the largest of any graduate school of theology in Canada. Despite the fact that the decline of the Protestant mainstream and the growth of evangelicalism wrought a very significant alteration of the religious landscape of the province, very little historical literature documenting it exists. Indeed, relatively little exists on twentieth-century evangelicalism in Canada as a whole. The situation is improving, however, undoubtedly influenced and assisted by the ground-breaking work on American evangelicalism undertaken by historians such as Timothy L. Smith, Ernest R. Sandeen, Nathan O. Hatch, George M. Marsden, and Mark A. Noll. In the past few years some very significant work has been done on aspects of the Canadian evangelical tradition.'6 Several competent scholars deal with aspects of the massive

7 Introduction changes that took place in Canadian evangelical Protestantism between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Ramsay Cook, Marguerite Van Die, Michael Gauvreau, and Phyllis Airhart all provide important glimpses into early-twentieth-century evangelicalism, but all focus primarily on central Canada and end their accounts only several decades into the twentieth century.'7 The story is extended further into the century by George Rawlyk, John Stackhouse Jr, and David Elliot, but each is able only to deal with certain aspects of it. Rawlyk restricts himself to the study of Maritime Baptists and the influence of fundamentalism upon them, largely in the 19205 and 19305. Both Stackhouse and Elliot virtually ignore the Maritimes but include western Canada in their picture. Stackhouse restricts his work to a select number of institutions, albeit very significant and representative ones, and Elliot focuses more narrowly on the militant, authoritarian, and sectarian extreme of conservative Protestantism rather than on larger and more representative evangelical groups and institutions. Most recently, the impressive focus on Canada in the two volumes of papers emerging from a conference on transatlantic evangelicalism augurs well for the future.'8 While very significant gaps still remain in the historiography of twentieth-century Canadian evangelicalism, the situation is much worse in British Columbia as historical work on the province's evangelicals is virtually nonexistent. Indeed, nearly all aspects of British Columbia's religious history have been poorly served by academic historians. The earlier historians focused on the province's geography, its material progress, and its place in the empire, on the continent, and in the nation. More recent historians, mostly since the 19608, have dealt primarily with divisions based on class, ethnicity, race, and gender.'9 The province's history of conflict between labour and capital and between Europeans and native Indians and orientals has absorbed the attention and energies of large numbers of its historians. Until recently, historical overviews of British Columbia almost completely ignored religion as a category for consideration; but, in a promising development, Jean Barman's The West beyond the West makes use of the limited literature available and, where possible, weaves the religious component into her story. Except for several denominational histories (which focus primarily on earlier developments) and studies dealing with the work of missionaries to the native people, few specialized studies have been devoted to the province's unique religious development.20 Only Bob Stewart's perceptive short pieces have attempted to deal with the rise of secularism and the decline of the Protestant mainstream in the province.21 The few academic studies on evangelicals, largely unpub-

8 Pilgrims in Lotus Land lished, have been limited to the Baptists, with special attention to their controversies of the 19205, and to the Pentecostals and their spread throughout the province.22 The neglect of religion is partially due to the lack of burning religio-political issues of the type that did much to shape the development of other parts Canada. During its formative period, British Columbia had no clergy reserves controversy and no significant Catholic-Protestant polarization. Instead, people who were defined by economic functions - such as fur trading, mining, foresty, fishing, management, railroad development, and land and resource speculation - had a much more obvious influence on the province's history. The neglect can thus be seen simply as a reflection of the low priority assigned to religion over the decades on the secular west coast. In addition, it doubtless reflects a bias on the part of modern professional Canadian scholars against explanations that take seriously the religious dimensions of the experience of Canadians. As Noll points out, the whole "intellectual climate of Canadian higher education since World War II has been heavily influenced by materialist or neo-Marxist assumptions and so overwhelmingly biased against full treatment of religion as a prime mover of human action."23 Such a bias, while perhaps understandable in the light of modern preoccupations, is inexcusable in view of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of people in the province during the twentieth century. Although many British Columbians over the decades did not regard themselves as religiously committed, tens of thousands of others did deeply involve themselves in churches and religious organizations, and interpreted reality and based their behaviour, to a large degree, according to religious categories and precepts. To ignore such people and their commitments is to ignore one important aspect of BC history. The writing of the history of evangelicalism in British Columbia has faced a further impediment in that the province's evangelicals for so long lacked respectability in the eyes of mainstream society. At least since World War II, the majority of conservatives belonged to small denominations, described as "fringe sects" or "tiny fundamentalist groups," which lacked the prestige and dignity often associated with mainline denominations. Many, though by no means all, conservatives also lacked the social and economic standing that is so often equated with respectability. Relatively few held positions of political authority, and when some did enter politics, it was usually as members of the Social Credit party. At least until the mid-19705, this party was composed largely of rural and small-town people from the province's interior and the Fraser Valley, and it functioned as a populist protest movement against the urban elites in Vancouver and Victoria.24 Fur-

9 Introduction thermore, on a range of religious, moral, and social questions, which increased in number after the 19605, most conservative Protestants tenaciously held to positions that appeared hopelessly outdated to many modern minds. Finally, the propensity of many Canadians to link evangelicals in their own country with vaguely held notions of the militancy and obstinancy of American fundamentalists in the 19208, coupled with a fear of a resurgent American fundamentalist movement since the 19705, has further engendered a lack of respectability. As a consequence, few scholars have been willing to associate themselves, even by way of research and writing, with evangelicalism. For their part, many evangelicals have not provided a great deal of encouragement for the historical enterprise. Their overall youthfulness, their activism, and the future orientation of the numerous dispensationalists among them have militated against careful historical scholarship. Most evangelicals have been too involved with evangelism, missions, and other activities to reflect carefully on their past. Thus, even though attitudes have been changing in recent years, few evangelical denominations in the province possess carefully kept historical records from their earliest years, and archivists and historians are a rare breed among them. DEFINITIONS

Evangelicalism has been defined in various ways.25 Any of these can provide helpful insights, but British scholar David Bebbington's list of four characteristics, which captures both the beliefs and the priorities common to evangelicalism since its origins in the awakenings of the eighteenth century, is perhaps the most useful. He lists conversionism, activisim, biblicism, and crucicentrism as the chief characteristics of evangelicalism. Even though the exact stress placed on each of these varied between different groups of evangelicals and even though these characteristics fluctuated through various periods, they nonetheless "form a quadilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism. "z6 By conversionism Bebbington denotes "the belief that lives need to be changed." To evangelicals, the turning of the individual "away from sins in repentance and to Christ in faith" was, in the words of a nineteenth-century Baptist preacher, "far above, and of greater importance than, any denominational differences of whatever kind."27 Evangelicals believed that activism, "the expression of the gospel in effort," generally followed the conversion experience. Jonathan Edwards noted that "persons after their own conversion, have commonly expressed an exceeding great desire for the conversion of

io Pilgrims in Lotus Land others."28 They expressed this through strenuous witnessing and preaching efforts and through the formation of countless evangelistic and mission organizations and many philanthropic societies. Bebbington's term biblicism refers to evangelicals' "devotion to the Bible," resulting from their belief that it is inspired by God and that "all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages." By the early nineteenth century, somewhat different views had surfaced among evangelicals regarding the exact implications of the Bible's inspiration, and by the early twentieth century, differences on its infallibility and its authority had widened to become a major cause for serious division between conservative and liberal evangelicals. Crudcentrism, or a belief in the death of Christ on the cross as a substitution for sinful humanity as a sacrifice for our sins, which makes reconciliation with God possible - has long disinguished evangelicals from others. John Wesley argued that nothing "is of greater consequence than the doctrine of the Atonement. It is properly the distinguishing point between Deism and Christianity."29 Over the centuries, these characteristics helped shape an ambivalent response among evangelicals towards the religious and social changes occurring in the world around them. In various periods, depending on the particular issues at stake, they could appear either as conservative, in their attempts to preserve what were to them essential elements of the faith, or as progressive and flexible as they challenged certain traditional notions and hierarchies and as they pragmatically adapted their methods so that they could best reach individual men and women with their message of liberation from sin. In a comment with much applicability to evangelicalism in the English-speaking world as a whole, George Marsden wrote of American fundamentalism: "Sometimes its advocates were backward looking and reactionary, at other times they were imaginative innovators ... At times they seemed ready to forsake the whole world over a point of doctrine; at other times they appeared heedless of tradition in their zeal to win converts."30 In twentieth-century British Columbia, both responses to modernity characterized evangelicalism, and indeed they help explain its relative success in the province. The conservative response enabled evangelicals to retain their key characteristics more or less intact in the face of significant challenges from modernity, and thus to retain a strong sense of mission and purpose. At the same time, their relative flexibility in terms of style, method, and audience, sometimes resulting from fragmentation and diversity as much as from careful design, provided them with a measure of success in the diverse and transient population.

11 Introduction

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, we are most familiar with the conservative side of evangelicalism and frequently refer to evangelicals simply as "conservatives" or "conservative Protestants." This is not unreasonable or inaccurate, considering the enormous energy evangelicals exerted throughout most of the century in attempting to preserve evangelical concepts of the Bible and of salvation. Adaptations of the traditional evangelical message to modern modes of thought by more liberal evangelicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raised considerable fears among other, more conservative, evangelicals and led to considerable efforts to conserve what they felt to be essentials of the faith. Most serious in the minds of many conservatives was the liberal revision of the traditional view of the Bible. Evolutionary and Hegelian concepts of the development of human culture and religion, which were usually associated with the higher critical methods of biblical studies, and a distaste in the Late Romantic period for what was seen as dogma, all wrought very significant changes in the way in which the Bible was viewed. Largely because of a new understanding of the Bible, with an emphasis on its human, culturally conditioned nature, liberals found it difficult to agree with conservatives that it was God's divinely inspired, authoritative, and eternal message to humankind. Instead, they regarded it as an important source of God's revelation of Himself, but not a unique or unquestioned authority in the traditional sense. Partially as a result, then, doctrines traditionally held as biblical by evangelicals could no longer be regarded as timeless truths; they were viewed more as human statements, the result of historical development, and amenable to change according to the developing views and assumptions of the times. The evangelical emphases on crucicentrism and conversionism, doctrines already under attack from certain quarters, were two of the central evangelical tenets that underwent significant change in conjunction with changing views of the Bible. The emphasis on Christ's atoning death as the necessary sacrifice for sins was fading from many formerly evangelical pulpits early in the twentieth century, and the conversion of the individual was at least partially replaced by the social gospel emphasis upon changing society as a whole.3' To many evangelicals, the liberal innovations put the very essentials of evangelical Christianity at serious risk, and thus the struggles between the liberals and conservatives took on momentous importance. The nature and intensity of the controversies varied immensely in different parts of the English-speaking world, but many conservatives, whether American, British, or Canadian, would have agreed with the estimation of American historian Sydney Ahlstrom

12 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

that the liberal-conservative differences amounted to "the most fundamental controversy to wrack the churches since the age of the Reformation."32 Similarly, Canadian historian Goldwin French described the emerging split as a veritable chasm when compared with the differences that had existed between Protestants in the mid-nineteenth century.33 The Christian Century, the leading mouthpiece of North American liberalism, declared that the issues went far deeper than mere differences over interpretations and emphases. Its editor wrote in the mid-iggos: "The presence of the fundamentalist and the modernist in the same institution is the most outstanding phenomenon of the present day. They differ so radically as to appear incapable of living in the same intellectual world. It is not too much to say that they can only be classified with accuracy as representing two different religions."34 Because the settlement of British Columbia came relatively late after the turn of the century and thus after the point at which conservative evangelicals throughout the English-speaking world had begun to maintain a more defensive posture - the history of evangelicals in the province has been shaped to a very large degree by this conservativism. Evangelicals very frequently felt alienated from the religious and social mainstream. The immigrant analogy drawn by Marsden to describe the experience of American conservatives also applies, with some important qualifications, to the BC situation. He writes: "In some respects America after 1918 was a new world as compared with America at the end of the nineteenth century. People who had retained the dominant beliefs of the culture in which they were raised now found themselves living in a society where those same beliefs were widely considered out-dated, or even bizarre."35 Marsden argues that American Protestants were similar to most immigrant groups in that they suffered division among themselves over how to deal with the new society. The modernists, who much more readily adapted Christian beliefs and practices to the changing culture, were analogous to those immigrants who more readily accommodated to, and in many cases welcomed, the new way of life. But fundamentalists, "on the other hand, may be considered the white, Anglo-Saxon equivalent to those immigrant elements who resist the assimilation of the melting pot and build rather their own subculture and institutions, mores, and social connections that provide fullfledged alternatives to the dominant cultural ethos."36 Because the changes experienced by the fundamentalists came involuntarily, unlike those of the immigrants who normally came to a new land on their own volition, they felt called to defend the old order militantly. "So the metaphor may be extended to picture fundamentalists shel-

13 Introduction

tered behind their ideological ghetto wall, with the wall itself as heavily fortified as the very wall of Zion."37 Although Marsden writes of American conservatives, his analogy provides some useful insights into understanding Canadian conservatives. British Columbia's conservative Protestant population - which was largely of the dominant British stock, at least until the 19605 certainly experienced a degree of alienation from the major religious trends around it. In later years, many evangelicals were non-British immigrants, and thus they often experienced a heightened sense of alienation from the surrounding culture. However, because evangelicals had never been a dominant majority in nineteenth-century British society (but only a significant and respectable minority), they experienced less of a loss than their American counterparts, who saw their position of cultural dominance slip away. Consequently, they did not normally express their alienation nor defend their values with the same degree of militancy as American fundamentalists did. Nevertheless, BC evangelicals did erect, with varying degrees of intensity, defensive walls to hold back the inroads of modernism and secularism. In the first decade after World War I , the evangelistic and educational organizations of the mainline conservatives, the creedally defined, separatistic Convention of Regular Baptist Churches, and the more experientially defined networks of Pentecostal churches all expressed alienation to these forces and attempted to build defensive bulwarks against the inroads of modernism. Subsequent developments, on a broad range of evangelical fronts, represented different manifestations of the same alienation. While many of the conservatives in British Columbia could be called "fundamentalist" in the broad and original sense that they sought to promote aggressive evangelism and to defend the faith, only a small number could be called "fundamentalist" according to the narrower definition favoured by Marsden. This more restrictive definition reserves the term for those whose defence of the faith was characterized by a high degree of militancy.38 The term "conservative Protestant," which highlights the desire to conserve traditional doctrines and a strong evangelist thrust, but not necessarily with a high degree of militancy and separatism, is a more suitable term for most evangelicals in British Columbia.39 On a related and important question, one might legitimately ask whether one can speak of a conservative Protestant or evangelical movement, given the extremely wide range of traditions, denominations, styles, and emphases often included in the term.40 Even in a relatively small part of North America such as British Columbia, the diversity is striking and bewildering. How does one find enough commonality

14 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

among the conservative population to speak of it as one movement when it includes such variety: tongues-speaking Pentecostals and antitongues-speaking Baptists; revivalistic Mennonite Brethren and confessional Christian Reformed churches; separatist Baptists and mainline Baptists; expressive and innovative charismatics and solemn "exclusive" Plymouth Brethren; Southern Baptists and the nationalist Baptist Union; the populist Christian and Missionary Alliance and the tightly knit Canadian Reformed Church; Presbyterian conservatives and Evangelical Free pietists; fashionable west-side Vancouver evangelical churches and dilapidated east-side storefront churches; fiercely independent Baptists and evangelical members of the hierarchical Anglican Church; and Anglo-saxon Plymouth Brethren and Chinese Mennonite Brethren? Nevertheless, one can distinguish two senses in which evangelicalism may be considered a unity in British Columbia.4' First, in a conceptual sense, the core characteristics of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism accurately define a very broad grouping known as evangelicals. Even though they display great diversity among themselves over the details of these characteristics and may divide over such differences or simply have little to do with one another, these common beliefs and commitments do denote a real, albeit somewhat abstract, grouping. Secondly and more concretely, most evangelicals in twentieth-century British Columbia, despite the great differences among them, have actually demonstrated enough commonality in terms of linkages and activities to warrant being called a movement. Very little deliberate, broad-scale organizational unity developed until the mid-ig6os, when the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, based in Toronto, was established. The founding documents of the new organization made clear its opposition to theological liberalism and stated its commitment to unity among evangelicals.42 The organization did not become large until the i g8os, but by then its membership included the vast majority of evangelical denominations in British Columbia (representing over three-quarters of the adult evangelical membership in the province), most of its significant evangelical institutions and agencies, and many individual congregations and individual members from denominations, often mainline, that were not members themselves.43 Long before the Evangelical Fellowship became a large organization, however, conservatives demonstrated, in a variety of less formal ways, their common opposition to liberalism and their commitment to evangelical essentials. Indeed, as this study attempts to reveal, a kind of evangelical ecumenism had been operating at least since 1917. It manifested itself in very broad bases of support for mass evangelists ranging from

15 Introduction

French E. Oliver in 1917 to Billy Graham in the 19805, for educational institutions such as the Vancouver Bible Training School, Trinity Western College, and Regent College, and for early foreign mission organizations such as the China Inland Mission, as well as for home missions such as the British Columbia Evangelical Mission. Pentecostals manifested, at critical junctures in their history, great affinity with other evangelicals, even with fundamentalists. The evangelical commonality manifested itself most concretely, perhaps, in the willingness of many, perhaps the majority, of evangelicals to disregard denominational loyalties at least once in their lifetime and transfer their membership into other evangelical denominations.44 Only a relatively few groups in British Columbia whose beliefs might define them as evangelical, most notably confessional Lutherans, remained largely outside this active circle defined by various informal linkages and cooperative efforts among evangelicals.45 Most evangelical groups, however, even if they had formerly been isolated because of ethnic or denominational particularities, became increasingly involved with other evangelicals in the post-World War II period. Although evangelicalism's conservative stance has been its most apparent posture in British Columbia, this should not be allowed to mask the impulse towards innovation and adaptation that also shaped its response to modern society on the West Coast of Canada. A number of historians have commented on the enormously adaptive capacity of the wider Anglo-American evangelicalism. For instance, Bebbington has convincingly argued that evangelicalism in the Englishspeaking world demonstrated a great capacity to adapt to important aspects of various movements, such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and cultural modernism. He shows how the evangelical movement was born during the Enlightenment as its Calvinist predecessor absorbed activism, pragmatism, and optimism from the spirit of the era. In the nineteenth century, he writes, the sentiments of the Romantic movement heightened the evangelicals' sense of the supernatural and led to a greater stress on experiential faith. Further, in the late twentieth century, the development of a significant branch of evangelicals, the charismatics, represented a partial adaptation to cultural modernism. By sharing cultural modernism's ethos, particularly its emphasis on spontaneity, expression, insight, experience, and community, this branch of evangelicalism succesfully appealed to a sizable portion of the youth culture of the 19505 and 19605. Bebbington stresses that in each of these periods in which significant cultural adaptation occurred, the essential core of evangelical characteristics remained largely unchanged, even though the cultural expressions of them were significantly altered.46

16 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Similarity - and strikingly - Martin Marty has argued that evangelicalism "is the characteristic Protestant ... way of relating to modernity," that "there has been a symbiosis between unfolding modernity and developing Evangelicalism."47 The evangelical emphasis on worldly success, free-church polity, and domesticity helped ease the transitions caused by the Industrial Revolution; and in the post-World War II era, the evangelicals' ability to create cohesive groups, their establishment of firm psychological boundaries, their use of the media and evangelical celebrities, and their acceptance of the comfortable suburban lifestyle all helped them succesfully adapt to the mobility and affluence of postwar American life.48 In a more strictly religious sense, some evangelicals adopted other innovations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to augment their defensive bulwarks against liberalism. Dispensationalist eschatology - a highly literalistic and pessimistic variety of premillennialism developed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain - became popular among many conservatives in North America. Part of its appeal lay in its doctrine of the inevitable decline of Christendom in the last days. This helped explain to many beleagured and bewildered conservatives the "apostacy" that had become rampant since the widespread adoption of liberal theology.49 At the same time, this new doctrine did much to curb some of the optimism that had been characteristic of earlier evangelicalism, and it contributed to the decline of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, designed to bring moral improvements to society.50 The twentieth-century Pentecostal movement may also be seen as a recent innovation within evangelicalism. Claiming much earlier antecedents but originating in its modern form around the turn of the century, it stressed the supernatural works of the Holy Spirit in the present age and was seen by some conservatives as a powerful refutation of modern scepticism concerning the supernatural events recorded in the Bible. In the developing society of twentieth-century British Columbia, some of the traits acquired in earlier eras served the cause of evangelicalism well in aiding its expansion. Its activism and pragmatism proved especially useful in enabling it to respond to the needs of a rapidly growing and far-flung populace. Compared with the liberal mainstream, the evangelicals displayed considerable flexibility in adapting to the tremendous geographic and ethnic shifts in the provincial population, to changing demands for postsecondary education, to new technologies and techniques, and to new styles of musical and cultural expression. Subsequent chapters in this study will attempt to demonstrate that it was the symbiotic combination of its conservative impulse along

17 Introduction

with its adaptability and flexibility that accounts for much of evangelicalism's relative success in the BC setting. Without a strong element of conservatism, evangelicals could easily have lost their distinctiveness; but without a strong element of adaptibility, they could just as easily have become a dwindling remnant huddling behind defensive barriers. Although expressed as a negative stance, the evangelicals' conservatism and even alienation contributed positively to their persistence and growth in British Columbia. Martin Marty's observations of the religious situation in post-1950 America are relevant to the secular province of British Columbia. He describes conservative Protestantism as an "antimodern" religion, which successfully resisted the "sway" of secularism. He asks, "If a good deal of religiosity dissolves in to the culture, why does this [conservative] variety remain lumpish, unwilling to be filtered?" His response uses Cuddihy's idea that when modernity is carried too far, it leads to a "wholeness-hunger" that only antimodernity can address. Antimodern religion appealed to those "discontented with the chaos of pluralism" and its "moral anomie." It addressed the need for authority and religious experience which, in the case of conservative Protestantism, was found in an infallible Bible, in the conversion experience, and, frequently, in subsequent experiences.5' So although the conservatives' unambiguous and authoritative answers to life's questions may have been ignored by the majority of people in British Columbia, they nevertheless did appeal to some seeking "refuge from a world of relative values."52 Some of the difficulties of the liberal mainline Protestant churches in successfully adapting and surviving in the province have been attributed to their loss of a distinctive core and to their relativism and individualism in beliefs. The great waves of immigration in the early years of the century coincided with a period of questioning and hesitancy on their part. The revivalistic enthusiasm of an earlier Methodism, for example, which had made such great headway in the Maritimes in the 17908 and in Ontario in the 18305, had become greatly weakened by the first decade of the twentieth century. The old certainties preached on the frontiers had largely disappeared from a Canadian Methodism transformed by a number of influences, including urbanization, a Romantic era distaste for dogma, biblical criticism, the social gospel, and an increasing willingness to identify with the beliefs of a modern Canadian society.53 Theological consensus in the mainline denominations was further eroded in the interwar period, and western Canadians found it difficult to appreciate the new theological currents that were taking hold in seminaries and colleges in central Canada.54 By the 19605 and 19705, observers from inside the

i8 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

mainline churches highlighted the uncertainty and difficulty created by their open, accommodating approach. They noted among their own churches "increasing problems of maintaining distinct religious purpose and identity"55 and the existence of "no internal consensus, no basic vision upon which to build their future."56 By contrast, the stubborn refusal to relinquish their distinctive beliefs furnished the evangelical churches with a clearer sense of identity and mission. Because of their very high regard for the authority of the Bible, consensus on core beliefs was less of a problem for them than it was among liberals. The acceptance of the Bible's authority also provided a basis on which to call the members of evangelical churches to a greater commitment to evangelism and missions. As statistics on rates of attendance, financial contributions, and other measures indicate, they experienced considerably less difficulty than the mainline churches in gaining the commitment of their members to their program and mission. In particular, their conversionism provided these churches with a sharp focus for their activities. In contrast to the mainline churches, which increasingly directed their resources to ecumenical and social causes as well as to evangelism, most evangelical churches spent far more of their proportionally larger (per member) resources on evangelism and on the planting of new churches throughout the province. Paradoxically, the evangelistic impulse stood out as one of the most important features of evangelicalism that conservatives fought to defend, but at the same time it compelled them, more than any other feature, to adapt their style and methods to the changing circumstances in the province. Because the conversion of men and women to Christ was far more important to them than almost any aspect of religious and social life, evangelicals often expressed more willingness than others to adapt or even jettison older practices, traditions, and structures that were considered to be standing in the way of effective evangelism. British Columbia provides numerous examples of cases in which the commitment to fervent evangelism contributed to such significant changes. These include the establishment of numerous new organizations and institutions that assisted in the rise of youthful new leadership; the deliberate down-playing of cultural and social traits based on ethnicity; the transfer of denominational and congregational loyalties; the rapid planting of new churches, which often replaced older, less flexible ones as centres of influence in the denomination; the use of innovative new techniques and technologies in evangelism; and the adoption of newer styles of worship, preaching, and music. Their commitment to evangelism by means of the planting of new churches allowed evangelical denominations to respond with

ig Introduction considerable flexibility to the rapid geographic shifts in the province's population. They thus became far better represented in the newer suburbs of Vancouver and Victoria and in the expanding regions of the province's interior than the much less flexible mainline denominations. This church-planting effort, often coupled with the results of earlier overseas missionary efforts, also brought the evangelical churches considerable success in adapting to aspects of the new racial mix in the province by penetrating some of the newer immigrant groups, especially those from Asia. Interestingly, the call to conversion was often most heeded by the evangelicals' own children, a fact that helped them keep up their numbers of young people. As a consequence, the evangelicals retained a quite youthful demographic profile, one that was considerably closer to the general population than that of the mainline denominations, which were aging more rapidly than the population as a whole. The importance of conserving doctrinal beliefs did much to contribute to the decentralized, even fragmentary, nature of evangelicalism in the province. Along with a strong attachment to congregational polity, the priority given to correct doctrine was a factor leading to schisms in some bodies. Even though evangelicals recognized and demonstrated considerable unity at one level, the number of different groups in the province grew considerably in every decade of the twentieth century. Of course, most of the denominational divisions preceded immigration; but frequent schisms, both large and small scale, occurred in the province from the 19205 onwards, particularly among Baptists, Pentecostals, and new charismatics. Because various beliefs and practices were deemed so important among these groups, and because the congregational polity provided considerable freedom to do so, on occasion they split and formed new groups rather than compromising. Somewhat surprisingly, rather than weakening evangelicalism overall, the fragmentation in British Columbia contributed to its ability to adapt to the rapidly changing and growing society. The very fact that members and leaders felt strongly enough about issues to consider a schism indicated at least some kind of vitality. The opposite movement in the mainline denominations towards ecumenicism was unquestionably more laudable from the standpoint of Christian charity and unity, but according to sociologist Bryan Wilson, it was frequently an indication of a lack of vitality and it represented "compromise and amendment of commitment."57 Among the evangelicals, however, the smaller units resulting from schism absolutely required the pursuit of new followers if they were to survive; thus, even for purely pragmatic reasons, recruitment programs were pursued with far more vigour than

2O Pilgrims in Lotus Land in the larger, well-established denominations. Furthermore, the various decentralized groups, each with its own style and leadership structure, frequently proved more able than the centrally controlled groups to penetrate various segments of the provincial population.58 A focus on the evangelicals' symbiotic response to modernity characterized both by conservativism and by adaptability and flexibility - does not preclude the consideration of other factors in their growth in British Columbia. Certainly, one can point to factors such as the significant role of American influences and the effect of social and economic marginality in encouraging religious protest. Although the impact of these factors has perhaps been exaggerated by some observers of Canadian evangelicalism, their influence cannot be denied. At the same time, both factors - the willingness to use American assistance on a number of occasions, and the success of evangelicals among those not of the province's elite and sometimes among those actually marginalized - point to the adaptability and pragmatism of evangelicals and their sense of alienation from many dominant religious and social trends in their own province. In addition, one could perhaps explain the growth of evangelicalism in British Columbia as nothing more than the result of the particular mix of the groups that immigrated to the West Coast during the century. So many Mennonite Brethren, Christian Reformed members, and other ethnic-based evangelical groups, as well as converts resulting from revivals on the Canadian prairies, moved west from the 19205 onwards that it seems inevitable that the conservative wing of Protestantism in the province would grow. Undeniably, such an explanation contains a great deal of truth, but it does not take into account the equally important developments that took place within these groups after they arrived in the province. The Mennonite Brethren denomination, in particular, contributed thousands of members to other evangelical churches while undergoing very significant changes itself by expanding beyond its own ethnic group as it actively evangelized members of the wider society and also welcomed other evangelicals into its membership. Such significant changes, along with the emergence of other ethnically based groups among the most important evangelical denominations in the province, indicate that one must look far beyond the mere fact of immigration. One must examine how and why these evangelicals were willing to change and how their primary commitment to core evangelical beliefs and characteristics, especially to conversionism and activism, made them willing to relinquish cherished cultural distinctives. In examining the relative success of evangelicalism on the West Coast, it must be recognized that the story of its development is not

21 Introduction one of unmitigated triumph. It is also a story of divisions and failure. Even though evangelicals comprised the "worshipping majority" of Protestants by the 19705, they were still only a small minority of the provincial population, and the vast majority did not heed their message. Their strength was a far cry from that of their counterparts in the United States. In some ways their position became even more difficult after the cultural upheavals of the i g6os added new issues changes in views of sexual morals, the traditional family, public schools, and so on - on which they appeared out of step with the mainstream of contemporary society. Nevertheless, the very fact that they continued to hold their own and even increased numerically while the more accommodating churches fell into decline stands out as a significant development and one that needs to be understood more fully.

i Protestantism in British Columbia before 1917

British Columbia differed markedly from other parts of Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century in a number of respects. Its population growth outstripped that of all provinces except the two newly created prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. After disappointingly slow development in the first quarter of a century after it joined the Canadian confederation in 1871, British Columbia experienced fifteen years of extremely rapid growth, from the closing few years of the nineteenth century almost until the outbreak of World War I. A flood of immigrants entered the province and its population more than doubled in the 1901-11 decade, reaching 392,000. In the same period the population of Vancouver - the terminus of the transcontinental railway and, as of the 18905, the province's largest city - quadrupled to 100,000.' In 1901 British Columbia's population was very low, even compared with the geographically small Maritime provinces; the population of this large West Coast province was just 39 and 54 per cent, respectively, of that of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. By 1921, however, it had surpassed both these Maritime provinces, exceeding New Brunswick's population by more than one-third.2 It also became the most British of provinces. The process of Canadianizing its population through immigration from older areas in central and eastern Canada, greatly boosted by the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, was reversed to a very considerable degree around the turn of the century, and once again the character of the province became markedly British.3 In both 1911 and

23 Protestantism before 1917

1921, just under one-third (31.3 and 31.6 per cent) of the entire nonnative population had been born in Britain or in its overseas empire.4 By comparison, in Canada as a whole, those born in Britain and its empire stood at only 11.6 and 12.1 per cent - about one-third of the corresponding BC figures.5 Moreover, British Columbia was a strong contrast to its nearest western Canadian neighbours, Saskatchewan and Alberta, in terms of the ethnic origin of its immigrants. In 1921, just over one-third (33.4 and 36.1 per cent, respectively) of the immigrants in these two prairie provinces hailed from Britain or its possessions, whereas 60.9 per cent of the immigrants in British Columbia had done so.6 Religously, the province also differed significantly from some other parts of the nation, and even more so from the United States. The Protestant majority of its population until 1917 appeared relatively unperturbed by theological divisions between liberals and conservatives. Although social questions such as corruption in provincial politics, prohibition, and women's suffrage consumed considerable amounts of time and energy, theologically conservative voices of protest, as heard elsewhere in the continent over the gains of liberalism, were generally quiet in the mainline denominations in British Columbia, and only several thousand people belonged to the exclusively conservative sect-like groups. By contrast, conservatives began protesting and organizing much earlier in other parts of the continent. Many areas of North America were experiencing at least "tremors of controversy" well before 1917. Between 1908 and 1910 Toronto conservatives, led by an evangelical Anglican, protested the liberal theological views being taught at the provincially controlled University of Toronto.7 As early as 1891, and then in 1907 and 1909, Canadian conservative Methodists - largely in Ontario cities, but also in rural Ontario and in Winnipeg - protested the allegedly liberal views in the denomination's educational institutions.8 A long series of controversies among the Baptists of Ontario and Quebec over theological views expressed at McMaster University began in 1910. Similarly, the major Baptist and Presbyterian denominations centred in the northeastern parts of the United States experienced numerous "tremors of controversy." Meanwhile, in the geographically closer western United States, conservative evangelical Protestants organized to counter threats of liberalism. William B. Riley founded his Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School in Minneapolis in 1902, and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles was founded in 1908. In nearby Seattle, Mark Matthews of First Presbyterian Church waged a conservative campaign against the Union Theological Seminary for years prior to World War I.9

24 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

But in British Columbia, Protestant denominations did not experience major dissension over the issue of theological liberalism. Certainly some smaller, homogeneously conservative groups such as the Salvation Army and the Plymouth Brethren existed as alternatives to the mainline denominations. However, most conservative Protestants in the mainline denominations coexisted - quietly, if not comfortably - with members of various theological stripes, including liberals. There was little open controversy at the denominational level, and there is no evidence of explicit antimodernist organizations of any type in the province. The Methodist Church of Canada was the major Protestant denomination in British Columbia that was most accommodative of, and least divided by, theological changes. Never a creedally oriented body, it abandoned in 1910 any attempt to prevent the teaching of liberal theological views in its theological institutions. At its General Conference, held in Victoria that year, a motion to censure the liberal evangelical views of the Rev. George Jackson, professor of English Bible at Victoria College, Toronto, was decisively defeated.10 We do not know how the British Columbia delegates to that conference voted, but there is no evidence to suggest that the province's Methodists rallied around the venerable superintendent, the Rev. Albert Carman, in his unsuccessful effort to check the rising tide of theological innovation. But there is evidence of support for the conference's refusal to censure Jackson. The Rev. John Hicks, editor of the Western Methodist Recorder, a paper published in Victoria, "authorized by the Conference but never subsidized,"11 expressed delight at the decision. He rejoiced in this clear signal that "the church is no longer primarily concerned in dogmatic definitions and creedal distinctions; it conceives its mission, first of all, to apply to the actual elevation of humanity than to the distinction of belief."12 Indeed, it appears that most Methodists in British Columbia either supported liberal theological views or at least were not concerned enough to oppose them outspokenly. A liberal tenor pervaded the pages of the Western Methodist Recorder, and editor Hicks provided positive coverage of views that challenged traditional orthodoxy. For example, in 1908 he commented favourably on the evolutionary views of human nature expounded by Dr Ernest Hall of Victoria in an address to the 1908 BC Methodist conference. Hall's presentation included the decidedly nontraditional statement that "sin ... looked at from a scientific standpoint, was an abnormal thing in a child and in its real analysis was selfishness."13 Later that same year, Hicks strongly endorsed the evolutionary assertion of G.W. Dean that "the race is moving up into the light" and also supported Dean's call to "get rid

25 Protestantism before 1917

of the sixteenth century Theology and tradition." Dean argued the relativistic view in his address that any definition of truth was inspired "only as it may apply to its own day and generation." He concluded by openly scorning the traditional concept and practices of evangelism that had characterized Methodism in a previous generation: "Fisherman like he may stand on the river's brim and casting his theological line and bait shout 'bite or be damned,' but the results are not satisfactory. He is certainly not securing much of a basket in these days. How can a man who is honestly moved by the terror of such a concept be of practical help to the world? ... Humanity will be helped by those who have a faith in humanity. The race is moving up into the light."'4 The Western Methodist Recorder was certainly not the only proponent of liberal theology in this period. The pulpit of Wesley Church in Vancouver, the province's largest Methodist church, was a sounding board for liberalism and the social gospel. The Rev. Robert Milliken was the first of its several unapologetic spokesmen for the new theology, and the Rev. Ernest Thomas, the radical exponent of the social gospel, held forth from that pulpit during the war years.'5 Several historians have noted that traditional Methodist evangelicalism had never rooted itself deeply in the westernmost province and that such as did exist was clearly on the wane by the turn of the century.'6 The 1914 appointment of the Rev. Hugh Dobson as western field secretary of the denomination's Department of Social Service and Evangelism highlighted and accentuated the trend away from traditional evangelistic efforts. Dobson's much greater stress on social rather than individual regeneration meant that the department would not give a great deal of leadership in encouraging vigorous traditional evangelistic outreach in the West.'7 By the end of World War I, the BC Methodist conference was one of the most liberal in the country. Richard Allen found that "both the leadership of the conference, the Revs. RJ. Mclntyre and Ernest Thomas, for instance, as well as its monthly paper were overt exponents of the social gospel ... The British Columbia Conference ... at that time was preparing radical resolutions and a strong contingent for the General Conference of the Methodist Church the following October."'8 Certainly there were some Methodist ministers in British Columbia who were more conservative. For example, the Rev. WJ. Sipprell (who from 1898 to 1911 was principal of Columbia College in New Westminster and from 1913 to 1920 was minister of Mount Pleasant Church, Vancouver's second-largest Methodist congregation) continued to favour some of the more traditional Methodist emphases.'9 However, he did not use his prominence in the BC conference to

26 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

confront liberalism openly. In 1917, when he did appear in public to lend support for a highly conservative evangelist, he did so in an irenic, noncombative fashion.20 Although not plagued with public theological divisions, Methodism in British Columbia did suffer from numerical weakness and a steady drop in its share of the provincial population. From 14.9 per cent of the population in 1891, it dropped to 12.4 per cent in 1921, a full 5 per cent below its proportion in the rest of English-speaking Canada and only about half the proportion in Ontario. By contrast, the number of Presbyterians in British Columbia increased by nearly 8 per cent in the same period, to 23.5 per cent of the province's population, nearly double the Methodist total, while the number of Anglicans grew to a very strong 30.8 per cent.21 Several explanations have been offered to account for Methodism's difficulty in winning as large a proportion of the population as it had in many other parts of the nation. The vast influx of British immigrants into the province in the pre-World War I era brought fewer Methodists than either Anglicans or Presbyterians. Compounding this disadvantage was the fact that it was a very different Methodism which faced this new and far-flung frontier from that which had faced the Maritimes in the 17905 or Upper Canada in the 18305. Apart from the fervour of a few missionaries preaching largely to the native population, the revivalistic enthusiasm of the Methodism that had succeeded against great odds on those earlier frontiers was significantly absent in British Columbia. The old message preached with an appealing certainty and enthusiasm had largely disappeared from a Canadian Methodism that had been transformed by a number of influences, including urbanization, upward mobility, biblical criticism, the social gospel, and an increasing willingness to identify with the beliefs of modern Canadian society.22 Perhaps, as has been suggested, the people on this new frontier would not have responded as favourably to a revivalistic Methodism as their counterparts had in earlier, different frontiers.23 Regardless, without a strong evangelistic thrust, Methodism was largely deprived of what had once been its chief source of growth - new converts. On the other hand, Presbyterians were in a strong numerical position in British Columbia by the turn of the century, and they continued to grow rapidly in the next two decades, reaching 123,000, or nearly one-quarter of the population, by 1921. The increase is attributed to the aggressive evangelistic and church-planting work of the superintendent of missions, Dr James Robertson, and to the heavy waves of British immigration before World War I.24 Among the Presbyterians in British Columbia, as in Canada as a

27 Protestantism before 1917 whole, theological divisions between liberals and conservatives were simply one aspect of the larger question of organic union with the Methodists and Congregationalists. A number of factors were involved in the disruption over the union issue, but it is clear that theological issues were an important element. Much of the motivation for union came from the liberal idea that both creeds and denominations were simply expressions of a particular age and that neither were essential for the church of the future.25 Consequently, one important reason for the resistance to union by many theologically conservative Presbyterians was their antipathy towards the liberalism of the unionist movement. Methodists were theologically suspect in the eyes of some Presbyterians, and it was openly charged that some in the Methodist leadership in British Columbia were "modernists."26 However, conservatives were apparently not in the majority among BC Presbyterians. Despite the caution engendered by the shadow of the Westminster Confession, most ministers shared the liberal and social reform outlook of their Methodist brethren. One strong indicator of this was the weaker resistance to church union in British Columbia than in central and eastern Canada. In 1925 only 17 of the 133 Presbyterian ministers in the province remained out of the United Church, along with 21 of 142 congregations and 4,325 members (23 per cent of pre-union membership).27 In a unique manner, the Presbyterian college in the province, Westminster Hall, contributed to this theological climate. Founded in Vancouver in 1907, the college exerted an unusually strong influence on many smaller and newer congregations because of the format of its academic year. All its classes were held during the summer, allowing students to work full-time on the many and widely scattered home mission fields during the rest of the year. During the summer months, these small congregations were supplied from theological colleges in other parts of the country. It is noteworthy that only five congregations in the outlying areas of the province, where the student ministers were most often used, voted to remain outside the union. Dissident sentiment was largely confined to Victoria, New Westminster, and Vancouver, where churches, usually larger and financially stable, were able to secure ministers trained in a different, often more conservative, theological climate.28 A liberal climate prevailed at Westminster Hall. Dr John MacKay, its principal from 1908 to 1919, ranked among the Presbyterian liberal evangelicals, or progressives.29 He classified himself for the popular press in 1917 as "among those who are seeking for a modern interpretation of the great fundamental truths of the gospel." He rejected what he described as attempts "to stereotype the religious experience

28 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

of one age and impress it upon another age," and he expressed complete sympathy with the higher critical method of biblical studies, disassociating it from the "wild statements of irresponsible agnostics and rationalists."30 MacKay's own writing indicates that he used the higher critical method in a forthright but fairly restrained manner.3' Among those serving with him on the regular faculty were the Rev. George C. Pidgeon, a prominent liberal evangelical who was active in the social gospel movement,32 and John T. McNeill, a church historian whose writings express warm appreciation for the progress of liberal theological thought in the church.33 The various faculty members who visited Westminster Hall for its summer courses were especially important in contributing to a liberal theological climate.34 They included the liberal spokesman Principal Daniel J. Fraser of Presbyterian College, Montreal,35the liberal British scholars Alfred E. Garvie of New College, London, and James Denney and George Adam Smith of United Free College, Glasgow,36 and the frankly modernist Shailer Matthews of the University of Chicago.37 Congregationalism was never particularly strong in British Columbia, having only one church in Victoria and three in Vancouver. However, because of its emphasis on the independence of local congregations and its rejection of creedal subscription, its ministers were free to exercise considerable influence in their locale. Most noteworthy in this regard was the Rev. A.E. Cooke, who preached at First Congregational Church in Vancouver's west end from 1915 to 1924. Cooke played a significant role in Vancouver's social and political life and twice was president of the Greater Vancouver Ministerial Association. He was an outspoken social gospeller and a liberal who seemed to delight in debate and controversy.38 He inaugurated at First Congregational Church the Sunday afternoon lecture and discussion meeting known as the "Open Forum." Among the many topics covered in the forum were the nature and authority of the Bible. Cooke took strong exception to conservative views of the authority and infallibility of the Scriptures and pointed out to his audiences what he viewed as the many factual inaccuracies and moral inadequacies of both the Old and New Testaments. He saw the Bible as an extremely valuable but time-bound book which, on many issues, "simply presents the ancient world-view of the age in which it was written."39 In addition, for a time during late World War I, the Rev. Charles Croucher conducted pointed attacks on theological conservatism from the pulpit of Victoria's Congregational Church.40 Among the numerically strong and growing Anglican population of the province, distinctions between theological liberals and conservatives were considerably obscured by the long-standing controversy

29 Protestantism before 1917

between high-church and low-church factions. This division had led to a stormy rupture in Victoria in the 18705 known as the "Cridge affair," when many of the city's leading Anglicans seceded with their low-church rector, the Rev. E. Cridge, and founded the Church of Our Lord, a congregation of the Reformed Episcopal Church.4' In 1888, in the newly founded city of Vancouver, low-church Anglicans, led by some prominent citizens, established Christ Church as an evangelical alternative to the earlier-established St James, which was high church.42 In 1910 leading evangelical Anglicans established a theological college, Bishop Latimer Hall, in Vancouver's west end. The college was to train evangelical missionaries to the native people of British Columbia and the Yukon, as well as training evangelical Anglican clergymen to minister to the flood of British immigrants who were entering the province. Financial support was received from the Colonial and Continental Missionary Society in London, and strong moral encouragement came from W.H. Griffith Thomas, the renowned conservative theologian at Toronto's low-church Wycliffe College.43 Two years later, the moderately high-church St Mark's Hall was founded and moved into quarters in close proximity to Bishop Latimer Hall. The evangelicals felt that St Mark's Hall was more influenced by liberalism than Bishop Latimer Hall was. Principal Vance of the latter objected to the suggestion of F.H. DuVernet, Bishop of Caledonia, that in the interests of wartime efficiency, the college should increase the number of courses they taught in common. He argued, "Twice we had to protest against the exclusively advanced critical position adopted by Prof. Keeling [of St Marks] and to insist that both sides of critical questions should be placed before the students."44 Actually, both Anglican parties were affected by the modernist impulse; it served to mitigate long-standing differences by blurring some of the distinctions between them, and led to their increasing cooperation between the two parties. Aiding the process were practical considerations such as financial constraints in a thinly populated province. One consequence of increased cooperation between high and low church Anglicans was the merger of the two colleges shortly after World War I. Another was the designation of the formerly low-church Christ Church as the Cathedral of the Diocese in igsg.45 Conservative evangelicals within Canada's Baptist churches did not face a liberal challenge of quite the same magnitude as that of their counterparts in the Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Anglican churches. Prior to 1925, conservatives in the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec were able to muster majority support

30 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

when the issue of liberalism was under discussion. It is clear, however, that there were modernist elements in this denomination and in its theological school at McMaster University which continued to worry conservatives.46 The Baptist Convention of British Columbia has been described as containing a wide diversity of theological views before the 19208. Its historian, G.H. Pousett, describes it as a home to denominational loyalists, militant conservatives, extreme sectarians, dispensationalists, and liberals.47 In view of this diversity and the tumultuous divisions to come in the 19205, it is somewhat surprising that the convention was unperturbed at the denominational level by theological division prior to 1917, even though there was some evidence of growing liberal trends. The frankly liberal and social gospel sermons of the Rev. A.E. Shaw of Winnipeg delivered to the 1908 Baptist Convention of Western Canada, held in Vancouver, apparently did not spark any public negative reactions. There was no open controversy over doctrinal teaching at the denominational liberal arts colleges in Brandon, Manitoba, and in Summerland, British Columbia, in the pre-war period. The 1915 closure of the eight-year-old Okanagan College in Summerland was due to enrolment and financial difficulties and does not appear to have reflected any lack of confidence over the orthodoxy of its teaching.48 At the local level, however, attempts to introduce modernist teachings did cause a stormy division in at least one congregation in igi5. 49 Some concern was also expressed that although "a large proportion" of BC Baptists seemed interested in "a better citizenship and social justice," more than half the churches reported "no deep concern among the members for the salvation of the lost."50 The latter comment expressed clear concern for the loss of the earlier revivalistic vigour of the Baptists, but it may also have been a pragmatic expression of concern over their inability to keep pace numerically with the growing provincial population. The number of Baptists had grown from just i per cent of the provincial population to over 4 per cent in the thirty years between 1881 and 1911. The growth rate then slowed, however, and the proportion of Baptists began falling in the next ten years to below 4 per cent.5' Some of British Columbia's unique features help to account for the lack of organized conservative resistance to liberalism in the province before 1917. One important factor was the relatively small population, which reduced the likelihood of institutional growth and organization. The entire population of the province was only 178,000 in 1901 -

31 Protestantism before 1917

one-twelfth of the 2,183,000 in Ontario that same year, one-third of Washington State's 518,000 in 1900, and less than one-thirteenth of the 2,400,000 in the three American Pacific Coast states.52 British Columbia's largest city, Vancouver, contained only 27,000 people in 1901 - one third of Seattle's population and a small fraction of that of Toronto.53 New residents were pouring in, however, and as the population of Vancouver quadrupled in the first decade of the twentieth century, there was an incredible 56 per cent of its residents who had been born outside Canada - twice the proportion of foreign-born in nearby Seattle and nearly three times the 20 per cent foreign-born in Ontario.54 The effort and time required from the new settlers to establish themselves and become familiar with their social and religious surroundings, coupled with the enormous amount of energy and resources expended by the various denominations simply to keep up with such a staggering influx of newcomers, diverted much attention from the rumblings of discontent that were heard elsewhere in North America. Furthermore, evangelicals constituted only a small proportion of the population in British Columbia, compared with that in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Ontario. Certainly, the heavy immigration from Britain, where evangelicals were a minority, helped to account for this smaller proportion.55 The Anglican Church, which gained the most from the British immigration, was the largest in the province. The influence of conservative Anglican theologian W.H. Griffith Thomas of Wycliffe College, Toronto, was felt in the establishment of the low-church Anglican theological college in Vancouver in 1910, but the nonevangelical wing within the province clearly dominated to a much greater extent than it did in important centres of Ontario.56 Large numbers of the Presbyterian Church, the province's second-largest Protestant body, also were newcomers from the British Isles. The generally liberal orientation of Presbyterianism was indicated in 1925 when 77 per cent of its membership joined the United Church.57 Unlike much of the rest of Canada, where, "during the course of the nineteenth century, revivalism had fired the growth of Methodism,"58 revivalistic evangelicalism had never been an important component of Methodism in British Columbia, and liberalism was clearly the pervasive tone.59 Baptists, who were theologically mixed but mostly conservative, constituted only approximately 4 per cent of the provincial population in 1911.6o For the most part, the prevalent liberalism was not extremely radical, but sympathy with the new methods of biblical study and the social gospel was very widespread.6' Because of their minority position in BC society, and in the British society from which so many had come, evangelicals were not used to

32

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

playing the same dominant role that Marsden notes American evangelicals played in shaping their culture. Therefore, they did not as readily experience the sense of loss of respectability and influence that was felt by their American counterparts when nonevangelical values came to dominate the American culture. Nor did they respond with the same urgency, born of "insider aspirations," as a number of American fundamentalists did.62 Certainly, a somewhat different set of dynamics operated in Ontario than in the United States, but evangelicalism had earlier played a prominent enough role in that society to make the numerous conservative protests that had occurred in Ontario by 1910 understandable. Although conservatives within British Columbia's mainline Protestant churches were relatively slow to respond vigorously to the threat of liberalism, a number of smaller, homogeneously conservative denominations had established themselves in the province by 1917. These were quite small; the two largest at the time, the Plymouth Brethren and the Salvation Army, together accounted for less than i per cent of the population as recorded by the 1921 census.63 Undoubtedly, far more conservatives resided within the mainline denominations than in the smaller, sectarian groups, yet members of the latter, particularly of the Plymouth Brethren, exerted considerable influence at various junctures. Eventually - certainly by the post-World War II period - the majority of evangelicals belonged to one of the formerly smaller groups. Several of the newer, smaller denominations - the Salvation Army, the Free Methodist Church, and the Church of the Nazarene - belonged to the holiness, or Wesleyan-Arminian, movement that had emerged in the English-speaking world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Adherents stressed the experience of "sanctification": a second work of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life, subsequent to the conversion experience, which culminated in holiness of heart and life. Methodists tended to be most involved in the holiness movement, since many of them reacted against the increasing formalism, urbanity, permissiveness, and acceptance of higher criticism and evolution in their church in Britain and North America. Such people longed and agitated for a return to the emphasis on sanctification and holy living that had characterized the teachings of Wesley, and a return to the fervency of his early followers. They ran into stiff opposition within the major Methodist bodies, and consequently thousands of holiness adherents joined the ranks of the new holiness groups that sprang up to carry the holiness banner.64

33 Protestantism before 1917

The first and most strongly established of these groups in British Columbia was the Salvation Army. Despite its more widespread reputation as a religious social-service agency, the Salvation Army was founded as a holiness denomination during the early stages of a revival of holiness teaching in England. William Booth left the ministry of the Wesleyan New Connexion in 1862 to join the holiness crusade and embark on unrestricted evangelism in the slums of the East End of London. His new organization, the Salvation Army, "claimed holiness as its distinguishing doctrine and social work as its public manifestation."65 In Canada, the Salvation Army spread dramatically - much more so than in the United States. From its beginnings in 1882 in London (Ontario) and Toronto, it spread to both coasts within five years and claimed an average Sunday attendance of 60,000 in 1890. The process was undoubtedly speeded up by the increasing respectability of the national Methodist Church, which had been created by the unions of 1874 and 1884. The Salvation Army's blend of the enthusiasms of revivalistic Methodism along with Booth's military innovations attracted many Methodists who were disillusioned with the modern changes in their church. In addition, immigration from the British Isles brought many to Canada who were already familiar with Booth's work. The rapid growth of urban centres, in which the Salvation Army had the most appeal, also played a key role in its expansion in Canada.66 British Columbia quickly became one of the main Canadian strongholds of the Salvation Army. Victoria was "invaded" by singing, exhorting officers in June 1887, and six months later four women officers known as "the Hallelujah lassies" launched a successful campaign in the new city of Vancouver.67 The province's smaller regional centres were entered next. "Corps" were established in New Westminster and Nanaimo in 1888, and in Kamloops in 1889. Within two years of its entry into the province, the Salvation Army in British Columbia was constituted a division in its own right, with headquarters in Vancouver. Missionaries on horseback, the "Mountaineer Brigade," were sent into the isolated interior regions but were not successful in establishing any corps. Mining and railroad towns in the Kootenay region became the next to be successfully entered, with corps appearing in Rossland, Nelson, Revelstoke, and Fernie between 1896 and 1900. Over the next two decades further expansion resulted in corps being established in most other centres.68 The 1911 census indicated that nearly 2,000 people in the province identified themselves as Salvationists, a proportion higher than anywhere else in Canada.69 The relative strength of the Salvation Army in British Columbia was due to several factors. Its fervency and unorthodox style were well

34 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

suited to the rough new urban environment in which most of the inhabitants lived. In Vancouver, hundreds of converts, mostly single men, were gained in the first few years, as large crowds of curious onlookers followed the singing, drum-beating officers to the primitive opera house to join services that were characterized by boisterous enthusiasm and spontaneity. This typical Salvation Army method did not, however, work well among the more scattered rural population of the prairie provinces.70 Moreover, the army always retained strong traits of its English origins, and while not holding much appeal for the large numbers of non-British immigrants in the rest of western Canada, it was attractive to many of the British immigrants of British Columbia.7' In addition, the already noted weakness of revivalistic enthusiasm in BC Methodism created some dissidents who turned to the Salvation Army to fill the void they felt. Two other holiness groups were established in the province before 1917 - the Free Methodist Church and the Church of the Nazarene. However, without the same aggressive evangelistic and organizational thrust of the Salvation Army and without its appeal to British immigrants, they did not experience the same rapid growth and never became as firmly rooted. The Free Methodist Church had begun in western New York State in 1860 and claimed to be the first distinctively holiness denomination in North America. Organized by dissident Methodist ministers and laymen who had been expelled from their denomination, it sought to retain revivalistic Methodist characteristics such as class and camp meetings. The designation "Free" indicated freedom of the spirit in meetings, free seats in the churches, freedom from slavery, and freedom from domination by secret societies.72 In 1876 discontent with the condition of Methodism in Ontario, together with immigration from New York State, led to the entry of the Free Methodist Church into Canada. Soon after the turn of the century, Canadian membership neared the two-thousand mark. Immigration from other parts of Canada brought Free Methodism to the West Coast, and meetings were begun in New Westminster in 1907, in Kamloops in 1913, and in Vancouver in 1914. However, the Kamloops meetings failed to result in the organization of a continuing congregation, and growth in the rest of the province was negligible for several decades.73 The Church of the Nazarene was formed in 1907-08 with the merger of three holiness groups in eastern North America. This denomination closely resembled the Methodist Church in structure and fervently stressed entire sanctification and the work of the Holy Spirit. It had originally called itself the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene,

35 Protestantism before 1917 in order to link itself with the initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, but in 1919 it dropped "Pentecostal" in order to disassociate itself from the burgeoning "tongues-speaking" Pentecostal movement.74 Included in the 1907—08 merger were two congregations in Nova Scotia that provided some key leadership for the fledgling denomination. From this beginning in Canada, the Church of the Nazarene gradually spread to the other Maritime provinces, and in 1911 a group of Nazarene members from Nova Scotia migrated westward and founded a church in Calgary. As evangelists fanned out into the surrounding areas and as immigration from the Midwestern United States further augmented the numbers, the prairie provinces, and especially Alberta, became the new centre of the church in Canada.75 In 1912, a small independent holiness mission in Victoria, which had experienced recent growth during holiness revival meetings conducted by a visiting revivalist, affiliated with the Alberta district of the Church of the Nazarene. A similar holiness mission began in Vancouver in 1913, but although closely associated with the Church of the Nazarene, it did not officially affiliate until 1926. Further expansion of the church did not occur in British Columbia until after World War I.76 Pentecostalism, which is related to but distinct from the holiness movement, has developed since the 19208 into one of the largest of the conservative Protestant groups in the province. In fact, by 1980, more British Columbians regularly attended services of one of the several varieties of Pentecostalism than those of any other Protestant denomination.77 However, before 1917 it was not well established in the province. Until the 19208, Ontario and Manitoba were the only significant centres of Pentecostalism in Canada. The twentieth-century Pentecostal movement is, in a sense, a culmination of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century holiness movements. The stress that holiness advocates place on climatic spiritual experiences and on the infilling of the Holy Spirit helped prepare the way for Pentecostalism's emphases. The immediate origins of Pentecostalism are usually traced to the 1906 revival at the Azuza Street Mission in Los Angeles. In response to word of the revival, people from different parts of the world converged upon the meetings conducted by the black holiness evangelist WJ. Seymour. The feature that distinguished this revival from traditional holiness revivalism was the outbreak of "speaking in tongues," which was taken to be the evidence of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Many of those coming to Los Angeles to participate in the revival meetings experienced this phenomenon and then spread the Pentecostal message upon returning home.78

36 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

In some parts of Canada the ground had been well prepared for Pentecostalism by a number of different holiness churches. In Ontario, Methodist roots were common to the Salvation Army, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), and the German-speaking Evangelical United Brethren.79 A version of holiness teaching, influenced by the Keswick movement, was propagated by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It was founded in the i88os in the United States by a Canadian Presbyterian, A.B. Simpson,80 and it had established churches in Montreal and in the major centres of Ontario by the turn of the century.81 Revivalism, climactic conversion, and individual piety characterized the Mennonite Brethren in Christ, who had broken with the more traditional Mennonites and organized as a separate denomination in Ontario in i883.8a Consequently, when news of the Pentecostal revival in Los Angeles spread, many in Canada were eager for its emphases. Robert McCallister, an evangelist with Horner's Holiness Movement Church, travelled to Los Angeles in 1906 and was initiated into the Pentecostal experience. Soon after his return to Ontario, the new emphasis of his preaching sparked revivals in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. Because the holiness denominations rejected the new Pentecostal view that "tongues speaking" was the only genuine evidence of the filling of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal churches were quickly formed in these and other centres. The Mennonite Brethren in Christ were greatly affected, and by 1908 five of their churches had shifted out of the denomination and become Pentecostal. The new movement reached Winnipeg in 1907, when A.H. Argue, a holiness lay preacher who had experienced the Pentecostal baptism of the spirit while visiting Chicago, began meetings that soon developed into Canada's largest Pentecostal church.83 Unlike the situation in Ontario and Manitoba, holiness groups, apart from the Salvation Army, were not well-established in British Columbia in 1907. Consequently, there were not large numbers of people predisposed towards the emphases of Pentecostalism, and it did not grow with the spontaneity evident further east. The census of 1921, taken fourteen years after the introduction of Pentecostalism into the province, counted only. 247 Pentecostals in British Columbia, compared with 1,229 m Manitoba and 2,717 in Ontario.84 Several more

years were to pass before conditions favoured significant expansion. The first Pentecostal organization in the province, the Apostolic Faith Mission, began in rented quarters in downtown Vancouver in 1907, and until 1940 it remained a small, downtown mission catering mainly to transient single men. A second mission was begun in

37 Protestantism before 1917

Vancouver several years later, and by means of active evangelistic outreach it gradually began developing into a fully fledged congregation. From 1912 to 1918 the group met in various downtown locations - rented storefronts, upstairs halls, a theatre, the auditorium of Central City Mission, and a large evangelistic tent. According to a study by Donald Klan, the background of its early membership can be divided into three roughly equal categories. Of fifty members, approximately one-third had belonged to the Salvation Army or to Pentecostal churches before moving to Vancouver from outside the province; another one-third were converted "down and outs" or were of unknown religious background; and the other one-third had withdrawn from mainline Protestant denominations while in Vancouver.85 Those in the last group were the predecessors of a much greater number who were to leave the larger Protestant denominations in the 19205. An example in this earlier period was the Joseph Haskett family, which had arrived in Vancouver from the north of England in 1911. The Hasketts had become strong, active members of Robson Memorial Methodist Church in Vancouver, but Haskett, who had been strongly influenced by Keswick holiness teaching while still in England, was dissatisfied with the formality of worship and the place given to higher criticism in the Methodist Church. After trying for several years to find satisfaction in a Congregational church, the family made a complete break with mainline Protestantism and joined the Pentecostal congregation downtown.86 The Plymouth Brethren, a very different type of conservative Protestant group, were making considerable headway in the province by World War I, especially in the coastal urban areas. By 1917, the Plymouth Brethren (more recently known as the Christian Brethren) had established at least twelve congregations, known as assemblies, and their adherents numbered well over one thousand.87 Probably more significant to the conservative Protestant cause than their numbers was their uncompromising theological conservatism, their generally middle-class respectability, and their role in popularizing dispensationalist eschatology and nondenominational ecclesiology. The Plymouth Brethren originated in England and Ireland in the 18205 as a result of discontent over conditions within the Church of England. A number of clergy and laity abandoned the established church in protest against its formalized styles of worship, the rigid division between clergy and laity, and the close connection between church and state. Often joined by members of other denominations, they began meetings, called "assemblies," for informal worship and study. They stressed simplicity in the organization of their assemblies

38 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

and did not recognize any special clerical status among their leadership. Although they refused a denominational label, members of the growing network of assemblies came to be known as the "brethren from Plymouth," because the assembly there became most prominent. Fearing the advance of theological and social liberalism, the Brethren erected the barriers of strict Calvinism and the verbal inspiration of the Bible. In addition, John Nelson Darby, founder of the first assembly, popularized dispensationalism among many, but not all, Brethren. This doctrine heightened its adherents' sense of alienation by teaching that apostasy within Christian denominations could only worsen in the present age. In 1848 the Brethren movement divided into two major groupings of assemblies, which came to be known by the terms "Exclusive" and "Open." The Exclusives, led by Darby, restricted fellowship and cooperation to members of a specific group of assemblies that were considered to be correct in doctrine and practice. The Open Brethren, led by George Mueller of Bristol, held to the autonomy of local assemblies and practised fellowship and cooperation with all whom they believed to be true Christians, regardless of whether such people belonged to an assembly considered to be in error on some doctrinal or ecclesiastical issue. This openness led to considerable cooperation with other evangelical Christians, regardless of denomination.88 Immigration from England and Ireland, as well as extensive preaching tours by Darby, led to the establishment of a number of Plymouth Brethren assemblies in eastern North America soon after the middle of the nineteenth century. Ernest Sandeen has noted that Darby was more successful in spreading his dispensationalist views, particularly among Baptists and Presbyterians, than in persuading North Americans to abandon their "apostate" denominations.89 Nevertheless, as the result of the efforts of Darby and other evangelists and teachers, the number of assemblies was not inconsiderable. Darby spent a great deal of time in Ontario, as did later evangelists such as Alexander Marshall, and a fairly heavy concentration of assemblies developed in that province. Although converts came from a variety of social classes, a certain amount of prestige was lent to the assemblies by some of the self-supporting, well-educated preachers from Britain, including Lord Adelbert P. Cecil.90 As early as the i86os, the Plymouth Brethren in Ontario exerted an influence beyond the number of their adherents. Their evangelists' dispensational views of eschatology and their more Calvinist view of conversion appealed to a wide variety of Protestants, especially the Calvinistic Presbyterians and Baptists, most of whom remained within their own denominations. Phyllis D. Airhart has shown how Methodist leaders, concerned over the consequent decline

39 Protestantism before 1917

in the Arminian view of conversion, found themselves forced to respond to Brethren teaching.9' Plymouth Brethrenism entered Victoria and Vancouver comparatively late, but the two cities began to develop as one of the movement's greatest growth areas worldwide. Small assemblies formed in the coastal urban centres among new arrivals from Ontario and the British Isles. A group in Victoria began meeting in a private home in 1887 and soon became a sizable and influential assembly, which included mercantile and medical people. A group that formed in Vancouver in 1891 used a range of accommodation, including a room over a tea store on Cordova Street, a room over a butcher shop, the YMCA hall, and a storefront. By 1905 this assembly numbered more than one hundred and met in its own hall. Among its members were people with some status in the city. Some years earlier, in 1898, an assembly in New Westminster had erected its own "gospel hall," the first building owned by a Plymouth Brethren assembly in the province.92 JJ. Rouse, an Ontario-born evangelist, found six assemblies in the province when he arrived in 1908 to begin fourteen years of itinerant evangelistic preaching. In addition to the strong and growing groups in Victoria, Vancouver, and New Westminster, there were small assemblies in Nanaimo, Ladysmith, and Alberni. Continued immigration and extensive tent and open-air evangelism, often led by Rouse, resulted by World War I in the formation of further assemblies in Victoria and Vancouver and in its suburb North Vancouver, in the rural Fraser Valley town of Langley, and in the small northern communities of Prince George and Prince Rupert.93 The Plymouth Brethren's negative view of denominational identification and organization and their humble "gospel halls" led to a lower profile in Vancouver and Victoria than their numbers and status might have warranted. Yet their potential influence was great, because some had considerable financial means and many tended towards open Brethren views and thus were willing to cooperate with other conservatives in evangelistic projects and in opposing liberal theology. Relatively small in number, absorbed in the monumental task of organizing churches, and quite used to existing as a minority, conservatives in British Columbia did not join their counterparts in much of North America in their earlier efforts, within and without the denominations, in attempts to arrest the spread of liberalism and the decline of evangelicalism. It was only at the height of World War I that BC evan gelicals began to respond in a large numbers to charges of modernist influence. A range of factors came together in 1917 to galvanize BC

40 Pilgrims in Lotus Land conservative Protestants into opposing changes wrought in the major denominations by liberal trends and to begin the process of founding alternative institutions.

2 Polarization in Vancouver, 1917

Significant public theological polarization among Protestants in British Columbia did not occur until 1917. In that year, French E. Oliver's evangelistic campaigns in Victoria, and especially in Vancouver, provoked sharp controversy. The evangelist's attacks on religious liberalism before crowds of thousands - and the ensuing pulpit and press controversy — dramatically brought the theological issue to the attention of the public. In fact, the Oliver meetings, intended originally as evangelistic services, took on the appearance of massive protest rallies against liberal tendencies in mainline Protestant denominations. Uppermost in the minds of many of these conservatives was the decline of traditional evangelism in city churches and a strong social gospel emphasis. In the heated atmosphere of wartime Vancouver during the conscription crisis, the militancy of the intensely pro-British public was matched by the militancy of religious debates. The importance of these campaigns, especially in Vancouver, stemmed from their role in developing a very public polarization of Protestantism into conservative and liberal camps. The conservatives' perception of the great gulf between themselves and liberalism was heightened to the extent that in the immediate aftermath of the campaigns they began laying the foundations of their own network of evangelistic missions and Bible-training organizations, outside the control of the mainline denominations. It is significant, in terms of their impact on the province, that it was Oliver's Vancouver campaign, rather than the one in Victoria, that

42 Pilgrims in Lotus Land sparked the more extensive controversy and polarization. By the turn of the century, just fifteen years after the city became the terminus of Canadian Pacific's transcontinental railway line, Vancouver's population had surpassed that of Victoria, the provincial capital. A mere decade later, in 1911, nearly half the province's population of 392,000 resided in Vancouver and environs - known as the Lower Mainland region. In comparison, barely 10 per cent of the total population lived in Victoria and the adjacent Saanich Peninsula. By then, Vancouver had virtually completed the process of becoming the dominant metropolitan centre of the province. Every region of the province, with the exception of the Kootenays and the Peace River district, was part of its economic hinterland.1 Religiously, too, the city had the greatest influence on the rest of the province. Not only was it the centre of the greatest concentration of population, but it was the centre of the limited transportation links with the vast interior region. The chain of events touched off in 1917 had widespread repercussions, for many of the organizations established by conservatives after the Oliver campaign were able to use the developing transportation network to extend their reach from Vancouver to other parts of the province. Dr French E. Oliver was an ordained Presbyterian minister attached to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He was most frequently likened to Reuben A. Torrey, who came closest to being Dwight L. Moody's successor and was one of the principal architects of fundamentalist thought.2 He had a more popular speaking style than Torrey's scholarly lecture-hall approach but was just as ruthless in exposing and denouncing evidences of liberal theology. His chief associate in Vancouver was singer and song leader Raymond Hemminger, who had toured Britain with the Torrey evangelistic team. Oliver's nine-week Vancouver campaign ran from 20 May to 22 July 1917. He and his team of associates came to the city under the sponsorship of the Vancouver Evangelistic Movement (VEM), an interdenominational group composed of businessmen, professionals, and clergy. Denominationally, the VEM executive of ten was composed of Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, Plymouth Brethren and a Methodist.3 Originally, Oliver had sought the sponsorship of the Greater Vancouver Ministerial Association, but that body had refused to bring him to the city. The reason, according to its president, the Rev. A.E. Cooke, was that Cooke and others expected it to be a divisive campaign: "The primary purpose of the whole campaign is to carry on a peculiar religious propaganda, to discredit all modern thought in the pulpit and to cause dissension in the Christian churches of this city."4 Another member of the ministerial association wrote, "I did not need

43

Polarization in Vancouver, 1917

to be told that evangelism was the minor object of the campaign. Anyone in touch with the thought of today recognizes it at once as propaganda of a certain specific brand ... Locally we might call it Oliverism. More widely it is Torreyism."5 In response, conservatives formed the VEM to sponsor a large-scale campaign with Oliver. Despite a later denial that it intended to "create a cleavage" in the city, there is no question that one of its main purposes was to counter the trend towards the social gospel and the growth of liberal theology in its churches, and to revive an emphasis on evangelism of the individual. Its invitation to city ministers stated its desire to enlist the support of "only those who are sound in the faith once delivered to the saints, and who want to reach the unconverted on straight gospel lines, and teaching a whole Bible."6 A widely distributed statement of faith began with the firm declaration, "We believe that the Bible is the Word of God and therefore our only authority," and proceeded to list nine other items of conservative evangelical beliefs. These included a stress on crucicentrism ("the Son of God bore 'our sins in His own body on the tree'"), on conversionism ("Salvation by Grace ... only by regeneration through the Holy Spirit and faith in Jesus Christ"), and activism ("the great commission to evangelize the world ... is the great mission of the Church"). Although Oliver was a dispensationalist, the VEM statement was broader, simply expressing a belief in "the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."7 The VEM raised in advance all the required finances and constructed a temporary wooden "tabernacle" capable of seating 5,000. The unusual-looking structure covered the sloping piece of ground on the east side of downtown, between Hastings and Fender streets, known as the old courdiouse site.8 Despite the ministerial association's opposition to Oliver's coming and his blunt announcement on the opening night that he intended "not to use a feather duster in defense of the faith and in criticism of higher criticism,"9 no public controversy broke out during the first six weeks of the crusade. Indeed, the extensive newspaper coverage stressed the eloquence and handsome appearance of the six-foot, four-inch Oliver and the attentiveness and size of the crowds, which averaged several thousand on week nights and completely filled the tabernacle on weekends. Also featured in the reports was the singing of Oliver's associate, J.R. Hemminger, and that of the mass choir, which swelled to nearly a thousand members from forty city churches on the weekends. The uneasy silence between Oliver and his critics was broken by a letter to the editor of the Vancouver Daily World from a New Westminster woman taking issue with his vivid portrayal of a literal hell.10 Oliver

44 Pilgrims in Lotus Land then defended his views from the platform, attacking the "sickly sentimentalism" that was threatening to destroy a "sense of reason" on the issue.11 This proved to be the turning point in the campaign. At a luncheon meeting for businessmen, Oliver launched his assault, scathingly criticizing the ministerial association for its lack of support for evangelism. The next evening at the tabernacle, the frontal attack continued. One of his chief backers, Dr J.L. Campbell of First Baptist Church, declared to the applause of the crowd that "any theology not 1900 years old is not good." During an address on "The Bible and Science," Oliver took aim at modernism in general and higher criticism in particular, hurling at its practitioners a volley of epithets such as "pegged-legged infidels," "scholastic infidels," "theological degenerates," "little puppets in the pulpit," and "ecclesiastical buzzards."12 A number of prominent city ministers returned the fire by publicizing their criticisms of Oliver. The ensuing exchange quickly grew into a full-blown controversy, which was described in a local newspaper as "the biggest sensation of recent years in Vancouver religious circles."13 The first minister to enter the fray was the Rev. O.M. Sanford of Grandview Methodist, who declared that the time had come for an open discussion of the matter. In a letter to the editor of the Vancouver Daily World, he charged that Oliver's teaching was similar to that of Russellism (so labelled after that founder of the Jehovah Witnesses). The drawing of such a comparison was a particularly barbed shot because of the odiousness of that cult to conservatives. Indeed, a unified ministerial association had recently presented a common front against Russellism and had distributed thousands of pamphlets attacking its teachings. Sanford listed five similarities he found between Oliverism and Russellism: (i) their "narrow and intense" literalism; (2) their "sweeping condemnation of scholarship and especially anything that savours of "modern thought"; (3) their attack upon the ministers of the church for their failure to present the "full gospel"; (4) their aim to divide the churches (Oliver's was "a separatist movement, whether inside or outside the church"); and (5) their adventism. "Both systems are absolutely pessimistic regarding the present order," stated Sanford, and neither offered "much encouragement to moral and social reform movements." However, Sanford noted one major doctrinal issue on which the two were different - the future of the soul - and he found Russellism's teaching on annihilation preferable to Oliver's oldfashioned presentation of a literal hell.14 The following evening Oliver responded from his platform with a more vigorous defence of his preaching. He argued that it was not he who had changed the Christian message, for he "preached the same gospel as John Wesley preached in his day; the same hell as John

45

Polarization in Vancouver, 1917

Wesley preached in his day; he preached about the same Christ, the same atonement, the same virgin birth of Christ as was preached by Whitfeld [sic], Moody, Knox, Calvin and Paul and Peter and James and John and Christ." Then Oliver went on a renewed offensive, charging that it was his opponents who were guilty of changing the traditional message of Christianity: "Direct efforts were being made to lead men and women away from the direct authority of the Bible."'5 The ministerial association soon recognized the serious and public nature of the rift that was developing and met to decide on a course of action. It announced its intention to hold an evangelistic campaign of its own, in part to counter charges that its members were not interested in evangelism.'6 Dr John Mackay of the Presbyterian's Westminster Hall spoke to the press as a representative of the association. He stated that "the Tabernacle campaign carries its own comment and it is the only justification necessary for the action of the majority of the Christian ministers of this community in standing aloof from it." Calling Oliver's presentations "gross caricatures of modern thought," he protested that "anyone who is evidently utterly out of touch with modern thought should presume to pass sweeping judgement upon it." The effect of the current campaign, he said, was that "some of the worst phases of various periods of the church's life and thought" were given prominence while "the great verities of the Christian faith" were allowed to drift into the background.'7 The Rev. A.E. Cooke, president of the ministerial association, followed with a stinging letter to the editor, which he sent to all three of the city's daily papers. In a detailed account of his association's relationship with Oliver and the VEM, he charged that Oliver had been brought to Vancouver by those disappointed with the refusal of the ministerial association to sponsor him. The purpose of such people, stated Cooke, was to discredit the more liberal ministers of the city. The organization of the current campaign was but the "culmination of a lengthy and insidious campaign of misrepresentation and opposition directed against many of the pulpits of this city." Thus, Oliver's statements before thousands at the tabernacle were in reality a continuation of a "submarine campaign" that had been carried on privately since the previous November.'8 That Sunday (15 July), loud notes of controversy continued to sound from city pulpits. The Rev. J.G. Brown of Kitsilano Methodist Church went to the defence of critical scholarship, arguing that it did not lead to the denial of any 'Vital doctrines of the Christian faith." Instead, it magnified "the life of God in the Soul," "made more of the life we ought to live" rather than "the dogma we may teach," and changed the view of the Bible so that it "ceased to be a text book in

46 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

science and history and became more our authority in things spiritual." Brown attacked Oliver's dispensationalism and his criticism of the social service movement as a "gospel of hopelessness predicting that society should grow worse and worse and even the church should degenerate." Modern scholarship, he maintained, preached that "society too can be saved, for the redemption of human society was also part of Christ's program." In fact, the object of social service was the "regeneration of heart and life for individuals and society.'"9 Dr Ernest Thomas's analysis of the motives of Oliver contained even more scathing criticism. Preaching from the pulpit of Wesley Methodist Church, the largest Methodist church in the province, Thomas reported that the provincial Methodist conference had condemned any such "movement cloaked in the name of evangelism which was carried on in hostility to social reform, religious education and modern scholarship." The Oliver campaign had been launched, he observed, "with the most defiant boasts of what would be done to drive out the ministers who spoke for the perplexed and troubled." It was supported by "those who resist the application of [the] Christian life to finance and commerce and industrial organization" and who seek to "turn the great prophetic message of justice into a time table assuring us that the kingdom of God is not due for a long time yet." However, the campaign was a failure, Thomas declared: "The recent events have proved that once and for all Vancouver has chosen its path of advance and insists on the Christian pulpit being free to speak the great word of social justice and to recognize as revelations of God the discoveries of the scientist." He rejoiced that "the effort to dominate the pulpit of Vancouver by brow-beating and high finance has come to naught."20 While Thomas was certainly correct in his assertion that Oliver and the VEM had failed to silence the more liberal pulpits in Vancouver, the evangelist was resoundingly successful in making the issue of theological liberalism a point of division among the city's Protestants. As he did so, a solid flank of supporters rallied to his side. Even as some of the leading pulpits of the city denounced him in no uncertain terms, attendance at the tabernacle meetings increased and the number of penitents responding to the altar call also increased. The response was large enough to warrant extending the campaign by a week, even though Oliver had other commitments elsewhere.21 In addition, some prominent ministers came to his defence. Dr J.L. Campbell of First Baptist Church made some of the strongest declarations of support from the tabernacle platform. Further, every Sunday morning during the crusade, he delivered to his flock - the largest Baptist congregation in the province - his own series of vigorous

47

Polarization in Vancouver, 1917

attacks on modernism. Dr WJ. Sipprell of Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, which rivalled the downtown Wesley church in size, appeared on Oliver's platform to give a "strong voice of support" for the campaign. In typical Methodist fashion, he stated that he was not concerned about any man's theology but that he endorsed the evangelist's preaching because it had "the cross of Jesus in the centre."22 In a letter to the editor, the Rev. D.G. MacDonald of Broadway West Baptist Church took issue with a remark by Ernest Thomas that all but three or four of the ministers in the city supported the stand of the ministerial association against Oliver. He reported that fifteen of the nineteen ordained Baptist ministers in the city were "in full accord with the movement." In response to another of Thomas's assertions, that the "younger, brainy" Baptist ministers were opposed to Oliver, he argued that a good number of the younger ministers were included in the fifteen supporters.23 A week earlier, his own congregation had "unanimously and enthusiastically" passed a resolution endorsing the tabernacle campaign.24 Finally, the evangelistic success of Oliver in Vancouver so impressed "Professor" Edward Odium, a former Methodist teacher and missionary who was currently acting manager of the Clapp, Anderson, and Odium insurance agency, that he made a public offer to Oliver of $ i ,000 per year for five years if he would carry on his work in Canada.25 Thomas' was only partially correct in his statement that social and economic motivations were behind the campaign. It was supported, he declared, by the city's elite "high finance," which was opposed to the strong social gospel movement in many of the city's churches. In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that Oliver gained much support from the city's elite; but neither is there much evidence to back the suggestion, made by some historians and sociologists, that such an expression of fundamentalism is best explained as a protest of the lower socio-economic levels of society against the liberal theological directions taken by the social and economic mainstream.26 An analysis of the limited evidence available suggests that no socio-economic thesis adequately explains the Vancouver controversy. The evangelist's supporters can not be accurately described either as economically dominant or as marginalized. Oliver did hold a luncheon for businessmen in the city, but he also held one of his "men only" Sunday afternoon rallies for labouring men.27 An observer of another of his Sunday afternoon audiences of several thousand men was impressed that it was "representative of the city's inumerable [sic] interests."28 The members of the sponsoring Vancouver Evangelistic Movement's central committee appear to have come from the broad category known as "middle class." Of the ten identifiable men, four were from

48 Pilgrims in Lotus Land the business community: an accountant of a lumber firm, a salesman for a logging-equipment firm, the manager-owner of an insurance agency, and the owner and operator of a box-manufacturing plant. Two others, an osteopath and a physician's radiographer, were in the medical profession, and four worked full-time in religious institutions: an Anglican rector, the financial secretary of the YMCA, the local director of the China Inland Mission, and a professor at Bishop Latimer Hall, the evangelical Anglican theological college.29 Churches in support of and in opposition to the campaign were to be found in all the socio-economic areas of the city. Support was very strong from those in the working- and middle-class Mount Pleasant district (Methodist, Baptist, and Plymouth Brethren), but it also came from the more fashionable First Baptist Church downtown. In workingclass East and South Vancouver, support came from several Baptist and Anglican churches. Meanwhile, opposition was not restricted to the prestigious downtown churches but was strong among the Methodist and Presbyterian ministers in the working-class east side. In a very real sense, however, Thomas's analysis did accurately highlight a key motivation behind the evangelistic campaign. A great deal of antipathy towards the social gospel emphasis of many city churches was expressed throughout the campaign. This antipathy, which was felt strongly by Oliver supporters, appears to have been related to recent political events in the province and to the Protestant churches' extraordinary involvement in them. Several years earlier, in response to reports of widespread corruption in the Conservative provincial government of Richard McBride, the Ministerial Union of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia had launched an investigation. The resulting pamphlet, The Crisis in British Columbia: An Appeal for Investigation, published in April of 1915, lambasted the government for its complicity in the alienation of much of the province's resources and public land by "greedy speculators." The pamphlet's publication and the provincewide speaking tour undertaken by the Rev. A.E. Cooke on behalf of the ministerial union created something of a political sensation.30 In the provincial election of the following year, these charges of corruption and the prohibition referendum dominated the campaign, united most of the Protestant churches in opposition to McBride, and helped sweep the Liberals, under H.C. Brewster, to power. Politics and social reform had thus been an especially important focus of Protestant church life in Vancouver for several years. There is no evidence to suggest that most conservative Protestants were totally opposed to the reform movement. Indeed, indications are that they gave strong support to both prohibition and women's suffrage and to

49 Polarization in Vancouver, 1917 the new Liberal premier, Brewster, a Baptist layman.3' The Rev. Gabriel Maguire, later a leader of conservative Baptists in Vancouver, played a leading role in the prohibition campaign.32 In the summer of 1916, vast prohibition rallies, attracting 7,000 in Victoria and 11,500 in Vancouver ("the largest audience ever assembled under one roof in the Dominion of Canada"), featured the American conservative evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday.33 On i October 1917, the first day both of Oliver's Victoria campaign and of provincewide prohibition, the evangelist and his audience enthusiastically greeted the end of the days of the saloon keeper.34 Despite such evidence of sympathy with certain aspects of the reform movement, conservative Protestants expressed very different priorities from those of the social gospellers. While the social gospellers spoke of the need for "social regeneration," conservatives saw real limits to the usefulness of the reform movement, especially when compared to the all-important work of individual conversion. Oliver's view was that the "noble work of saving souls" was a greater fulfilment of religious duty than the pervasive "social service methods," which could not "save man."35 It is not surprising, then, that a common element of all the ministerial condemnation of Oliver's preaching was his lack of sympathy for social reform. Indeed, the "soul-winning" versus "social regeneration" tension between conservatives and liberals figured at least as largely in the polarization over the Oliver campaign as did the issues surrounding the accuracy and authority of the Bible. It almost appeared that effectiveness in the conversion of individuals was the criterion by which a theology should be tested. According to Dr J.L. Campbell of First Baptist Church, the reason "any theology not 1900 years old is not good" was that the "only way to win souls was to bring them to the old and only gospel in the Blessed Book."36 Oliver pointed to the nearly two thousand converts gained in the campaign's first six weeks as proof of his claim that the traditional message was more effective and more relevant to modern man than the liberal message preached by many ministers in the city.37 Towards the end of the campaign, Broadway West Baptist Church in Kitsilano passed a motion of support for Oliver which showed how closely related were its members' concepts of biblical authority and traditional evangelism. The congregation expressed the hope that the evangelist would hold similar campaigns in other Canadian cities in order "to stem the tide of infidelity that under the guise of modern scholarship is undermining the faith of the people in the Divine inspiration and authority of the Blessed Bible, including its clear and definite teaching on the foundation truth of our eternal salvation."38

50 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Several days later, an Oliver supporter explained in a letter to the editor why he felt it had been necessary to organize the campaign despite the ministerial association's opposition: "The need of 'regeneration' or better still the old-fashioned term, 'conversion,' was seldom heard ... Very few urged the people with all the powers at their command 'Be reconciled to God.' Therefore it was time for the rank and file to move."39 Oliver's critics responded that they also were interested in personal evangelism, and they stressed that the ministerial association was planning an evangelistic campaign of its own - though this campaign did not in fact materialize for several years. Not until the fall of 1919 did Gypsy Smith, the noted and less pugnacious evangelist, hold meetings in the city.40 These same critics, however, did not have a ready response to what was probably Oliver's most effective means of gaining public support - his charge that their theology had originated in Germany. The campaign's setting in the latter part of World War I, as the propaganda war against Germany was reaching new heights, was a major factor in its success in polarizing Protestantism in the city. Marsden notes that the modernist-fundamentalist controversy across North America reached a peak of intensity against the backdrop of wartime tensions and passions. At first it seemed that the modernists were able to use the situation to their advantage. Liberal theologians at the University of Chicago began accusing American dispensationalist conservatives of receiving German funding because dispensationalists did not share their own idealistic, crusading spirit against the Kaiser. Their argument followed the lines that the pessimism of many premillennialists regarding the future of the world and the value of social reform caused them to lack patriotism and fervour for the war effort.41 While it did indeed take many premillennialist conservatives some time to develop a great enthusiasm for the war effort, they were easily able to refute the charges that they received money from German sources. In return, they countered that a strong link existed between liberalism's assault on traditional Christianity and the decline of morals in Germany. Some of the earliest and strongest statements of this view came from W.H. Griffith Thomas of the evangelical Anglican Wycliffe College in Toronto. He argued that higher biblical criticism, which had originated in Germany and was most advanced there, had been influential long enough in that country for the devastating results to be clearly evident. It had weakened Christian morality to the extent that German militarism, with its reported atrocities, could develop unhindered by the voice of the church. Increasingly, conservatives followed Griffith Thomas's lead and came to view "corrupt

51

Polarization in Vancouver, 1917

German Biblical scholarship" and the evolutionary "might-is-right" philosophy as being responsible for "German barbarism." They thus threw themselves into the fight against religious liberalism with a passion akin to the fight against Germany.42 Similar views were circulating in British Columbia in 1917. Early in his Vancouver campaign, Oliver had to lay to rest charges that he and his team had come to Canada to spread pro-German propaganda.43 Soon, however, he and his supporters were able to gain considerable ground over their opponents by utilizing their own and the public's intense anti-German sentiments. His sermons were generously sprinkled with patriotic, anti-German comments, which usually drew applause from his audiences. In fact, so well known became his views on the war that he was singled out for criticism at an anticonscription rally in Vancouver.44 A few weeks into the campaign, one of Oliver's staunchest supporters, the Rev. J.L. Campbell of First Baptist Church, highlighted the "German connection" of liberal theology in a prominently advertised sermon entitled "German Infidelity and German Sympathizers." He charged that "nine-tenths" of the "false teaching" regarding the Bible originated in Germany and had "destroyed" the Bible for the Germans: "Behold the land of Luther ... now practically Bibleless and paganized, wallowing in degradation and bestiality." Campbell warned that these "pernicious" teachings had infiltrated and now threatened the English-speaking world: "A large placard with the words 'Made in Germany' printed upon it might be hung over the door of some of our colleges and seminaries and churches ... If [these teachings] could prevail among us a night of moral darkness and desolation such as we have never seen would envelop the land."45 As Oliver found himself being engulfed in controversy, he began to make the charge that modernist theology was at the heart of Germany's war effort. He claimed that "this modern theology had percolated down through German scholarship, and the crux of the whole matter was the effort of Germany to dislodge faith in God Almighty from the hearts of the people ... It all had a cumulative effect, a definite goal, to rob God of His Deity and to put in its place science and force, brute force at that."46 Several days into the Victoria campaign, Oliver again drew the connection between liberal theology and the war effort: "What makes me sickest is for preachers to swallow David Strauss and his war-soaked theology, the same theology which forced war upon the world."47 This type of attempt to link the object of one's criticism with the German enemy was not unique to Oliver and his allies. The Ministerial Union of the Lower Mainland's pamphlet, The Crisis in British

52

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Columbia: An Appeal for Investigation (1915), included headings such as "Germans Capture Ocean Falls" and "How These Germans Dictate British Columbia Laws."48 Similarly, the huge Vancouver and Victoria audiences attending the 1916 prohibition rallies featuring Billy Sunday were whipped into a patriotic frenzy by the evangelist's likening of the war against booze to the war against Germany.49 War-related events in the spring and summer of 1917 were particularly conducive to the creation of a furore by charges that liberalism had German origins. The tension surrounding the conscription crisis was at a fever pitch throughout the duration of Oliver's stay in the province. Scrutiny of a number of sources, including the results of the December 1917 federal election in Vancouver and Victoria, the war news coverage of major urban newspapers, and the advertisements of sermon titles of Protestant ministers, both liberal and conservative, indicates that a large majority of the population was passionately in favour of conscription.50 In this setting, it is not surprising that the linking of a theological position with German militarism would lend great significance to the religious controversy in the minds of many ordinary citizens. Even after the war ended, war-related passions help to explain the continuation of theological polarization in Vancouver. The BC public's anti-German sentiments remained at a high pitch for several years after the war. As Charles W. Humphries has pointed out, public opinion was still so inflamed in 1920 that a Canadian history textbook was removed from the province's classrooms on the unsubstantiated charge that, among other things, it expressed pro-German sentiments.5' The theological realm also continued to be affected by such sentiments after the war. Some conservatives, especially those embroiled in the Baptist controversy in Vancouver from 1919 onward, continued to attack liberalism by pointing out "The Menace of German Theology."52 Although the conservatives' effective use of the German origins of higher criticism now appears to have been so propagandist, it was rooted in more than simply an insincere desire to score theological points. Certainly, it was based on exaggerated reports of German atrocities and was devoid of a consideration of other pertinent factors, such as the Lutheran concept of the Church's role in the state; but it was deeply rooted in a strong conviction that nothing less than society's stability was at stake. Social stability was seen as dependent upon a firm moral foundation, with the Bible being the chief source of morality in Western culture.53 Any shaking of confidence, real or imagined, in the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible was therefore an attack on the foundations of the very society that was being defended in the war.

53 Polarization in Vancouver, 1917 Finally, the nature and intensity of the opposition experienced during the Vancouver campaign contributed greatly to the effect these meetings had in polarizing the city's Protestants and galvanizing the conservatives into ongoing opposition. Although many similar factors influenced both the Vancouver and Victoria campaigns, including the evangelism versus social-reform tension and the wartime suspicion of anything with a German connection, the Vancouver campaign experienced much more intense opposition than its Victoria counterpart; and rather than persuading Oliver's conservative followers, his critics' arguments in defence of liberal theology gave many people reason to believe that there was something behind the evangelist's charges. There was more than a little truth to Oliver's quip that he "thanked God for his enemies; they were a mighty fine asset."54 Plans for the campaign in Victoria which was intended to last four weeks, began to develop towards the end of the Vancouver campaign. As in Vancouver, the city's ministerial association voted not to sponsor Oliver. Instead, the Victoria Evangelistic Movement was formed to organize the campaign. Lumber from the Vancouver tabernacle was shipped across the Straits of Georgia, and a temporary 3,ooo-seat structure was erected in downtown Victoria at the corner of Cook and Pandora streets.55 The Victoria meetings, beginning on i October, got off to a slow start but drew increasingly large and responsive crowds, and interest was deemed sufficient to prolong the campaign several times before bringing it to a close three weeks after the date originally scheduled.5*3 It is significant that the Victoria campaign did not provoke the same level of public controversy as the Vancouver campaign, despite Oliver's blunt and open attacks on modernism and the social gospel. Certainly, the ranks and morale of conservative churches were boosted by the hundreds who were converted during the campaign, and few conservatives could have remained unalerted to the "dangers" of liberalism.57 But apart from frequent and extreme criticisms from the Rev. Charles Croucher of the city's Congregationalist Church, no note of discord was noted in the newspapers' extensive coverage.58 Whereas in Vancouver prominent ministers had attacked the evangelist publicly, key ministers in Victoria either supported the campaign or were silent. For example, Dr H.N. Maclean of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, who was president of the Victoria Ministerial Association until 1917, was actively supportive, as were the Rev. A.D.B. Owen of the historic Reformed Episcopal Church and the Rev. J.G. Inkster of First Presbyterian Church. Several Baptist and Methodist churches also identified themselves with the campaign, as did the Plymouth Brethren assemblies and the Salvation Army.59 While the

54 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

widespread respectable support was evidently not enough to sway the decision of the Victoria Ministerial Association, it may have inhibited criticism of the campaign of the type levelled in Vancouver. Morever, it appears likely that some Victoria ministers were also influenced not to come out publicly against Oliver by their observation of the experience in Vancouver, where the controversy served largely to publicize and add fuel to the campaign against liberalism. In addition, the criticisms of Croucher, the only outspoken opponent in Victoria, were so extremely radical and caustic that other, more moderate, liberal ministers may have been reluctant to criticize Oliver publicly for fear that they would be identified with Croucher's extremism. Few liberal ministers would have wanted to be even remotely associated with Croucher's widely reported remarks that a person's beliefs did not matter at all in Christianity, that a person could believe nothing whatsoever about Christ and yet still be a Christian, and that the preaching and doctrines of revivalism were as "out of date as relics from the medieval period."60 Consequently, an important ingredient for a polarized atmosphere - significant opposition - was present in Vancouver but was largely lacking in Victoria. The sustained public opposition of leading members of the Protestant community in Vancouver led many conservatives in that city to a heightened distrust of, and alienation from, the leadership of the mainline denominations. The opposition contributed to the development of a "siege mentality" among Vancouver conservatives which stimulated them to erect barriers against the further inroads of liberalism. It is not surprising, then, that Vancouver was the centre of most of the ongoing conservative activity in the province aimed at opposing and creating alternatives to liberalism in the major Protestant denominations. Some of this activity began in the aftermath of the Oliver meetings as an immediate consequence of the new polarization. It is conceivable, even probable, that some of the polarization and subsequent conservative Protestant organizational activity might have occurred without Oliver's combative presence in the city and the response he generated. However, the timing, location, and personnel involved in the ongoing conservative resistance all point to the crucial importance of the 1917 Oliver campaign in Vancouver as a catalyst for the early development of a "two-party" Protestant system in the province.

3 Mainline Conservatives, 1917-1927

Stimulated by the polarization resulting from the Oliver campaign, conservative evangelicals began the process of laying the institutional foundations of their own, separate, version of Protestantism. The stiff opposition of most of the mainline Protestant ministers to the campaign convinced many conservatives that they could no longer rely on the leadership of the major denominations to defend traditional evangelicalism and to carry on the Church's task of evangelism, missions, and biblical training. Instead, they felt they had to organize alternatives to the dominant institutions. Considerable activity took place in the decade after the Oliver campaign and by 1927 a rudimentary institutional foundation had been laid. Just as Vancouver was the centre of controversy during the evangelist's visit to the province, it was the centre of most of the conservative organizational activity. Significantly, in 1921 the city was more dominant than ever in the province. Its population had grown to 117,000, that of its metropolitan area to 194,000, and that of the whole Lower Mainland region, which included the lower Fraser Valley, to 256,000, or virtually one-half the entire provincial population.1 Despite a common opposition to liberal inroads and some common core convictions, conservatives did not erect a common wall of defence against the opposition. In the decade following 1917, three discernable conservative strands emerged: "mainline" conservatives; "separatist" Baptists; and Pentecostalism. While identifiable as separate strands, largely due to differences of strategy, emphases, and ecclesiology, they were not always completely separate. A core of

56 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

common beliefs and some overlap in constituency and activities evidenced that all three were part of a larger conservative Protestant movement. Furthermore, because each appealed to a somewhat different constituency, marked by some differences in socio-economic levels and religious background, the overall appeal of the three strands was wider than would have been possible had only one strand emerged. The first two groups began developing in the immediate aftermath of the Oliver campaigns, and the third began growing very rapidly about six years later, largely in response to the ongoing tensions. In addition, the Plymouth Brethren, the Salvation Army, and the other smaller groups previously described continued to provide their own alternatives. The Plymouth Brethren, in particular, were stimulated by the Oliver campaign and grew significantly thereafter.2 The mainline conservatives were the most inclusive of the evangelicals. Unlike the separatistic Baptists and the Pentecostals, they did not form new denominations but remained within the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominations. They did experience, however, a sense of alienation from much of the leadership and program of the denominations, and they clearly expressed this alienation through the formation of a network of separate institutions. Instead of spending a great deal of time directly challenging perceived liberal trends in their denominations, they focused on providing what they felt was lacking or was negatively affected by the pervasive liberal approach. Areas of greatest concern to the mainline conservatives were vital religious experience and piety (generally of the Keswick variety), premillennialism, home and foreign mission efforts seeking the conversion of individuals, and biblical training that imparted traditional certainties in the training of evangelistic workers. The nondenominational institutions they founded reflected these concerns and their general approach, which focused more on reaching and influencing new converts and the younger generation than on denouncing the losses to liberalism. Not surprisingly, the mainline evangelicals formed the largest of the three conservative groups for several decades. Most conservatives in the province were found in the major Protestant denominations before 1917, and most did not abandon them, even though they were not fully happy with the directions in which they were heading. Large numbers, perhaps most, never did leave their historical denominations for a variety of reasons: loyalty, inertia, a dislike for ecclesiastical schism, or a hope that their denomination could still be steered back onto a straight course. The case of British Columbia confirms John Stackhouse's argument that the most significant evangelical institu-

57 Mainline Conservatives, 1917-1927 tions were more closely connected with conservatives in the mainline denominations before mid-century than with those in the smaller, "sectarian" or separatist churches.3 The BC mainline conservatives established between 1917 and the late igaos an important network of institutions, including a Bible institute, foreign missions, church planting and home missions - city, rural and frontier - child evangelism, and university student work.4 In the first few decades the Vancouver Bible Training School and the China Inland Mission were the most important of these. Later, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and, after 1968, Regent College, played more central roles for these mainline conservatives. There never existed a complete separation between the mainline conservatives and those in more sectarian groups. Many of the latter were involved in some way in supporting the various mainlineoriented organizations, especially in the first years before there were virtually any other alternatives. In particular, some of the most "open" of Vancouver's large number of Plymouth Brethren cooperated in the Bible institute, in various evangelistic endeavours, and in the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. Nevertheless, even though many such conservatives of more'sectarian leanings cooperated, the early network of organizations founded in Vancouver relied most heavily on the mainline conservatives. The mainline conservatives were the most respectable of the evangelicals. The majority of the Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Baptists comprising the constituency of the organizations founded were of the "respectable," British-oriented middle class, living on the west side of Vancouver. But in addition, their retention of ties with the historic churches lent these conservatives, at least in the minds of many, an aura of respectability not usually accorded the newer, more sectarian evangelical groups. At the same time, it must be noted that the mainline conservatives were in many senses "practical sectarians" because their primary commitments often lay with their evangelical institutions outside of denominational control. The Rev. Sanford's charge, levelled during the heat of the Oliver controversy, that such people belonged to "a separatist movement, whether inside or outside the church,"3 was proved accurate, in a sense, by their founding of institutions that functioned as alternatives to those of the denominations. Furthermore, the efforts of the mainline conservatives ultimately proved highly beneficial to the more explicitly sectarian strands of conservatives. In many cases, the institutional foundations they laid were utilized by the latter groups, serving their needs until they were able to develop institutions of their own. After World War II, when the priorities of the mainline conservatives changed, some of

58 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

the institutions and congregations they had founded earlier were actually transferred over to several of the newer, smaller groups, greatly enabling them to gain a greater presence in the province. The central figure for nearly three decades in the province's mainline conservative community was the Rev. Walter Ellis. He was instrumental in the founding of institutions that provided clear alternatives to the programs and institutions of the major denominations, and he represented the differences between mainline evangelicals and their counterparts in the smaller, separate denominations. He made his bestknown contribution while serving in the dual capacity as principal of the Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS), from its founding in 1918 until his death in 1944, and as minister of Fairview Presbyterian Church from 1926 until 1944. In addition, he taught for five years before 1918 at Bishop Latimer Hall; he was a prime mover behind the Vancouver Evangelistic Movement (VEM), which sponsored Oliver's evangelistic campaign; and he lent his active and influential support to a number of interdenominational organizations that developed in the decade following. Born in Derbyshire, England, in 1883, Ellis had come to Canada at the age of twenty in 1903 as assistant to the Rev. George Lloyd, the Anglican chaplain to the Barr Colony in Saskatchewan. He spent the next nine years studying in Toronto in the winter and preaching at prairie mission points in the summer. By 1912 he had earned his BA (honours) and MA in Semitics from the University of Toronto and had completed the academic requirements for his BD from Wycliffe College. After ordination he served for a year as a curate in Toronto and then moved west to Vancouver to serve a one-year locum at St Mark's Church in Kitsilano.6 Upon completion of his term there in 1914, he joined the faculty of Bishop Latimer Hall. He taught church history in that institution and the Old Testament and Apologetics courses offered in common with St Mark's Hall, the moderately high-church college founded in 1912.7 In 1916-17 Ellis became a key figure in the VEM and played a significant role in bringing Oliver to Vancouver. He was strongly committed to evangelism and believed the organization and the evangelistic campaign were important to stem both the growing secularism in the city and the spreading influence of the liberal social gospel in its churches. Commitments in Toronto made it impossible, however, for him to be in Vancouver during the campaign. He was distressed to learn of the vituperative nature of the controversy surrounding it and the role that Oliver and some members of the committee had played in the controversy.8 It is impossible to know if Ellis's presence in the city would have

59 Mainline Conservatives, 1917-1927

made a difference to the campaign, but it is conceivable that he might have been able to play a conciliatory role. Not only was he one of the leading members of the VEM, but he had the respect of the ministerial association, having recently been well received when he presented to one of its meetings a paper on one of the minor prophets.9 As it was, in the heated atmosphere after the campaign, he was clearly identified with the conservatives in their defence of traditional evangelism and their protests against further inroads of liberal theology. But at the same time, his concern that a strong stand for conservative theology should not be associated with invective marked the beginning of a gradually growing rift between himself and Vancouver's more militant conservatives, or fundamentalists.10 He sometimes referred to his position as "being caught between two fires," with liberalism on the left and militant conservatives on the right." Despite some differences in approach, Ellis maintained his association with the VEM for a while after the Oliver campaign. The campaign had given the VEM sufficient momentum to continue as an ongoing organization with headquarters downtown on West Hastings Street. During its operation over nearly a decade, it held Bible classes for the new converts from the evangelistic meetings, employed an evangelistic agent, and operated a religious literature depot. Ellis led the Bible classes and helped develop them in the first two years into an independent organization, the Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS). Subsequently, this new institution came to play a central role in the life of conservative Protestantism in the province, while the operations of the increasingly militant VEM gradually declined before ceasing altogether in the mid-igaos. 12 Ellis was appointed principal of the VBTS, which began classes of its own in the fall of igi8.' 3 The post was to be part-time, and he had no intention whatsoever of leaving the Anglican Church or his teaching position at Latimer Hall. Consequently, he was stunned upon returning from his honeymoon in the summer of 1918 to find himself replaced at Latimer Hall. Ellis always believed that his dismissal was due to his firm conservative theological position and his leadership in a nondenominational cause which some considered a rival institution.'4 The college records are not revealing on this point, since financial exigencies and the consequent need for merger with St Mark's college dominated the council's discussions.'5 It is likely, however, that Ellis's theological position and his interdenominational activities were considered a liability as the college moved towards a merger with its nonevangelical counterpart. Making matters worse for Ellis, the Most Rev. A.U. de Pencier, the high-church bishop of the diocese, repeatedly refused to renew his ministerial licence. Ellis was convinced that

6o Pilgrims in Lotus Land

this too was because of his extensive involvement in an interdenominational organization.16 For the next seven years he remained within the Anglican Church but was limited to the role of a layman. Meanwhile, he worked full-time to develop the new Bible school. In addition, Ellis's passion for evangelism and missions led him to play key roles in the establishment of a number of other interdenominational organizations in Vancouver. Both before emigrating to Canada and after his graduation, he had seriously considered going to China as a missionary. Although unable to do so, he maintained a strong interest in foreign missions in general, and China in particular. Understandably, then, he was eager to help establish, along with other members of the VEM, the China Inland Mission's regional headquarters in Vancouver in 1917. He sat on its local council for many years and strongly encouraged his students to serve in China with it.17 Several organizations engaged in evangelism and home missions also counted on his influential and active support: the Girls' Corner Club, which began after the Oliver campaign as an outreach to young women working downtown; the Shantymen's Christian Association, established in British Columbia in 1919 to work with loggers, fishermen, and miners in outlying areas; the British Columbia Evangelical Mission, organized in the early 19205 to establish Sunday schools and churches in the outlying areas of the Lower Mainland region; and the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, founded in 1925 at the University of British Columbia as an alternative to the liberal Student Christian Movement. More than any other person, Ellis was the key figure in this interlocking (and largely mainline conservative) network of organizations.18 Not only was he an involved and active board member, but he recruited, trained, and provided moral support for many of the necessary workers. On top of all this, Ellis became the minister of Fairview Presbyterian Church in 1926. Its members were nonconcurrents who had seceded from Chalmers Presbyterian Church when it became Chalmers United Church in 1925. Although the continuing Presbyterian Church of Canada was not uniformly conservative in theology, the fear of liberalism in the new United Church was the key factor in the Fairview members' secession.19 They were familiar with Ellis's theology through his public evening lectures at VBTS and were comfortable enough with it, despite his being Anglican, to invite him to be their minister.20 The invitation presented Ellis with a dilemma. On the one hand, he was very reluctant to leave the Anglican Church, even though confined to the role of a layman in it; but at the same time, he was swayed by the needs of the new congregation. He admired the stand of the nonconcurring Presbyterians and was aware of their critical shortage

6i

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

of ministers across the country. It helped greatly that the church's membership was strongly supportive of him continuing with his work at the Bible school and that the school's new building was only one block from the church's west-side location at Fir Street and Tenth Avenue. Other practical considerations also weighed in his decision. To support his family, which at that time included two boys, he needed a larger income than VBTS could provide. He therefore accepted the Presbyterians' invitation and displayed considerable energy in carrying the combined load of teaching, administrative, and pastoral duties."1 Under Ellis's leadership, Fairview Presbyterian Church developed into one of the more influential evangelical congregations in the city. It was never very large, growing from 140 members in 1926 to 250 in 1944. It was not extremely wealthy, though its congregation was largely of the respectable middle class. Two-thirds of the members were employed in professional, managerial, clerical, or business occupations and most owned their own homes in Fairview, Kitsilano, and West Point Grey where housing costs were slightly above average.22 Fairview Presbyterian's influence was far out of proportion to its modest size and wealth. Ellis's emphases helped keep the congregation's human resources and finances strongly focused on evangelism and missions. From its founding in 1926 until 1981, thirty-one of its members became full-time ministers and missionaries, twenty in the Presbyterian Church and the rest in other denominations and independent missions. Twenty of the total received all or part of their training under Ellis.23 Not only did the congregation contribute financially to the Presbyterian mission fund at a higher rate per member than nearly all other Presbyterian churches in the city, but they heavily supported interdenominational causes through a special missions budget and through individual contributions.24 Ellis's personal emphases were representative of, and helped shape, some of the differences between mainline conservatives and their counterparts in the smaller, separate denominations. Unlike some conservatives, he was not at all opposed to higher academic study. Indeed, he was distressed that both sides of the conservative-liberal debate at times pitted scholarship against belief in traditional Christian doctrines in a way that implied the two were necessarily opposed to each other. He had excelled in his graduate work in Semitics at the University of Toronto under James F. McCurdy, the "father of biblical studies in Canada," who had indicated his respect by inviting Ellis to be his associate in the School of Archaeology in Cairo.25 Later, as a young minister, Ellis had quickly acquired a reputation for preaching thoughtful, scholarly sermons, and his love of books was such that

62 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

his personal library contained between five and six thousand volumes at the time of his death. He encouraged scientific study, asking in a sermon, "Investigate every phase of the universe - have you a greater or lesser appreciation of God the more you understand these things?"26 Ellis did, however, criticize the methodology and assumptions of many modern scholars. He belonged to the Scottish Realist school of thought, which firmly believed in Bacon's and Newton's scientific method of observing and classifying facts, and he rejected as speculation the newer modes of explanation that relied upon hypotheses inferred from the facts.27 Biological evolution was thus rejected by him as being mere theory - in reality, little more than guesswork, which could not replace the revealed truths of scripture. Writing for a popular audience, he asked, "What of 'Science?' Many scientists are searching the creation of my God. His works as well as His word will bear the closest investigation. I fear no contradictions. Sometimes in the enthrallment of their investigations scientists formulate hypotheses to explain or coordinate the facts they have discovered. Sometimes these hypotheses conflict with Scripture, but we must always distinguish between the Scientist's facts and his explanations."28 When making such a distinction, Ellis was most critical of explanations that took only natural causes into account. The implications of this approach were dangerous enough when confined to the scientific realm, but such an approach was devastating when consciously applied to biblical and theological studies. Ellis's ability to deal with modernism in a scholarly, uncontentious manner earned him a reputation among many conservatives as an effective and reliable defender against this threat. His style appealed to many respectable and educated people, both within and outside his own congregation. A student from a conservative Presbyterian home who was the daughter of a city physician credited Ellis with helping her rediscover her faith. She described herself as drifting into agnosticism during her university training until she was persuaded by her mother to listen to one of Ellis's public lectures at the Bible school. She was immediately impressed: "Professor Ellis was a cultured, educated Christian gentleman. I liked his quiet, refined manner of speech ... as he went on to give his message, he also very frankly pointed out the liberal interpretation of that passage. Without any belligerent dogmatism, he courteously but deftly refuted their arguments. I saw clearly that here was a scholar who knew both sides of the argument. Here was a real gentleman who would never stoop to nasty remarks about an opponent ... I decided that this was the preacher for me - I would come again." After listening to Ellis weekly for a length of time, the

63 Mainline Conservatives, 1917-1927

young woman reflected, "Professor Ellis' scholarship and his expository preaching combined with his gentle culture had won my full confidence and I was willing to learn from him." After Bible training and a year's work as superintendent of the Girls' Corner Club in downtown Vancouver, she went to China as a missionary under the China Inland Mission.29 Ellis also differed from many conservatives by stressing the need for considerable breadth on contentious questions. There was no possibility of compromise on what he and all conservative evangelicals believed to be doctrines of primary importance, but he was willing to cooperate fully with those who differed with him on points which he viewed as of secondary importance. These secondary matters included most denominational distinctions among Protestants. Questions of church government, baptism, and eschatology, for example, were not deemed of sufficient importance to exclude anyone from full participation with him. He worked particularly hard to keep the Bible school free from the narrowness which he believed characterized many such institutions in North America. The academic calendar of VETS promised that "no sectarian nor merely denominational tenets will be taught in the classes." When the school was under pressure to give up some of this breadth soon after its founding, Ellis argued in his report to its council: "The Bible schools must enlist the sympathy of Christians on the widest lines consistent with the truth. For us this means that we should make friends to ourselves of members of all the Churches who will sympathetically cooperate. So far as possible we should give them a voice in our affairs; at the same time we must zealously guard the matters of our faith which we hold as fundamental."30 Views of eschatology, in particular, threatened to divide evangelicalism and caused Ellis the most difficulty. Many ardent dispensationalists believed their interpretive scheme to be the only acceptable bulwark against liberalism and fervently urged all conservatives to accept that system. Most Bible schools in the United States were strongly dispensationalist and served as "primary" vehicles "for the dissemination of dispensationalism."3' James M. Gray, dean of the influential Moody Bible Institute, attempted in the spring of 1919 to bring about a common creedal subscription, which would include dispensationalist statements, among a group of correlated Bible schools.32 Ellis entered into correspondence with Gray, forcefully arguing against the adoption of a narrow statement, and later that same year he led the VBTS council formally to decline to endorse the statement that was proposed by Gray and was adopted by many American schools.33

64 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Such refusals to adopt dispensationalism made VBTS, and Ellis, suspect in the eyes of some conservatives. In 1930 the council was informed that the Prairie Bible Institute of Three Hills, Alberta, was spreading a rumour that VBTS held a postmillennial position - a view associated in the minds of many conservatives of the period with liberalism.34 Locally, dispensationalists were putting such pressure on the school to give up its broad eschatological stance that Ellis at times felt almost as besieged by fellow conservatives as by modernists.35 His own eschatological view was premillennialist, but he held to the historicist rather than dispensationalist version of premillennialism. He believed that the events foretold in the Book of Revelation were being fulfilled in human history and did not all await future fulfilment. Thus, his view of history was neither as optimistic as the postmillennial view nor as pessimistic as that of dispensationalism. He stressed the figurative rather than literal interpretation of apocalyptical literature and considered that the dispensationalist approach made the Bible into a "grotesque study book."36 He was very concerned, however, that his own strong views should not be divisive, and he was able to work closely and amicably over long periods with some dispensationalist supporters of VBTS.37 Ellis was greatly influenced in his insistence on tolerance of eschatological differences by Drjohn McNicol, principal of Canada's oldest Bible school, Toronto Bible College. Under McNicol, the school gained a reputation very different from that of many American - and, later, Canadian prairie — Bible schools. It was theologically conservative but allowed for considerable breadth in eschatological and ecclesiastical questions, and gained the support of evangelicals in a variety of mainline denominations.38 Ellis was a close friend of McNicol, and he modelled the new Vancouver school on the older Toronto school.39 He was invited by McNicol in 1923 to join the Toronto faculty but turned it down in favour of continuing to develop VBTS along similar lines.40 Like his counterparts in the American Bible schools, Ellis was careful not to meddle in the affairs of denominations that were being rent by controversy.4' He had to be especially sensitive in his relationships with the Baptists, who formed a very important part of the school's constituency. Large numbers of conservative Baptists were very appreciative of his work, and a number of Baptist laymen and ministers had been confirmed in their conservative theology while studying under him.42 Some of these people became part of the Regular Baptists, who chose separation from the more inclusive Baptist Convention of British Columbia and formally seceded in igsy, 43 but other Ellis supporters and former students remained in the theologically mixed,

65 Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927 mainline Baptist Convention. Ellis was careful not to appear to be meddling in Baptist affairs and thus did not make any public remarks about the schism,44 though he did make it plain in another context that he saw in the separatist tendency "an unhealthy assertion of personal independence," which could only lead to more splits and "eventual wreckage."45 After 1927, VBTS began to lose the support of the Regular Baptists. The broad range of part-time faculty engaged at the school - which included Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, and a few from smaller groups - was not appreciated by those who viewed inclusiveness as ultimately leading to compromise with error. Thus, after the 1927 Baptist schism, the school's student body included more members of the mainline Baptist convention than of the new Convention of Regular Baptists. None of the Regular Baptists deprecated Ellis's ability as a scholarly defender of conservative Protestantism or his fervency as a supporter of evangelistic efforts, but they were uncomfortable with his inclusiveness on a number of denominational and theological issues.46 Ellis also had to contend with another major phenomenon in the Vancouver of the 19205. The number of Pentecostals burgeoned after the evangelistic and healing campaigns of Charles S. Price shook the city in 1923 and 1924, and huge numbers of conservatives were attracted to their teachings, at least temporarily. A key feature of Pentecostal teaching was that the manifestations of the miraculous, including physical healings and speaking in tongues, were the best proof of the reliability of the Bible, especially in its emphasis on the supernatural. They argued that the non-Pentecostal conservatives could never hope to overcome modernism by their scholarship unless it was accompanied by the display of God's supernatural power. In addition, they stressed that speaking in tongues was the only genuine evidence in a believer's life that the filling, or "baptism," of the Holy Spirit had taken place.47 Ellis wrestled with ambivalent feelings over the methods and claims of Price and other Pentecostals. He genuinely appreciated the Pentecostal preacher's effectiveness as an evangelist and his stress on conservative Protestant doctrines, but was somewhat dubious of the evangelist's claims of miraculous healings, and he emphatically disagreed that speaking in tongues was the only genuine evidence of the filling of the Holy Spirit. In addition, Ellis could never agree to a denial of the role of scholarship in verifying faith. He was criticized by some for failing to embrace Pentecostalism, but did not lose substantial support among his generally middle-class, respectable constituency.48 Nevertheless, Ellis did share something of the Pentecostal's emphasis on religious experience. Unlike some conservatives, especially of

66 Pilgrims in Lotus Land the Calvinistic, Princeton school, who stressed the intellect and correct doctrine to the point of almost ruling out religious experience,49 he gave a large place to experiential Christianity. Ellis was a strong proponent of Keswick holiness teaching, having been under its influence since his youth. Archdeacon Joynt, one of the speakers at the Keswick conventions, was rector of the church in England at which Ellis had been converted and which he had attended for most of his teenage years.50 In his young adult years in Toronto, at Wycliffe College, he was profoundly influenced by W.H. Griffith Thomas, one of the foremost exponents of Keswick holiness teaching in North America.5' In Vancouver, for nearly twenty years, Ellis, along with representatives of the China Inland Mission, planned "Keswick weeks," aimed at deepening the spiritual life of his students and of other local people.52 Through his work at VBTS, he strove to train "workers" who were not only passionate evangelists but who also had "a full realization of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in their life and service."53 His own teaching constantly bore the Keswick's characteristic traits of a strong emphasis on consecration, personal holiness, daily communion with God, and a life of active service, especially in evangelism and foreign missions. His preaching, like that of the Pentecostals, stressed the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer's life, but he described it as working in a far more gradual, quiet manner than the Pentecostals' cataclysmic and demonstrative "baptism of the Spirit."54 Thus, there were various emphases and characteristics on which Ellis and other mainline conservatives differed from their more sectarian evangelical counterparts. In essence, these differences indicate that the mainline conservatives were not as concerned to build a wall so stringently defined and impregnable between themselves and the prevailing religious ethos as were most other conservatives. However, at the same time, one must not lose sight of the fact that the energy and resources they put into building numerous institutions and organizations as alternatives to the institutions and programs of the mainline denominations clearly indicate that they were motivated by at least a measure of alienation from the more liberal ethos of those denominations. Sandeen argues that in many American cities the functioning of a cluster of such nondenominational conservative institutions was actually very similar to that of a denomination. The interrelationships between organizations, the informal but nevertheless very real structure of boards and conferences, and the commitment shown by participants were all features strikingly similar to that of a denomination. Such a "denomination" claimed the primary loyalty of its membership, while

67

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

their commitment to their mainline denomination was, at best, secondary.55 The analogy is very apt for the situation in Vancouver, where many of the features of a denomination were evident in the organizational network that was founded largely by mainline conservatives. These features included a Bible training school, annual conferences, city-wide Sunday school training sessions, a foreign missions "board," several home mission "boards" (one of which engaged in founding new congregations), and student university work. A closer examination of these organizations and institutions will demonstrate more of the functioning and characteristics of this "denomination." The Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS) quickly emerged as the "headquarters" of the "denomination," or, to use Joel Carpenter's apt expression, its "regional coordinating centre."56 Conferences and public lectures held at the school served a function similar to the annual meeting of a denomination; a large proportion of the workers of the other organizations were trained in its classrooms; and a wide constituency clearly looked to Ellis to provide leadership. As noted above, informal Bible classes began in Vancouver in the fall of 1917 and out of them VBTS was organized in 1918 as one of the earliest Bible schools in Canada. The first such school, Toronto Bible College, founded in 1894, had already been in existence for nearly a quartercentury, but it was not until 1922 - four years after the organization of VBTS - that the now famous Prairie Bible Institute began. The majority of the Bible schools in the prairies provinces were not established until the 1930s.57 The role of VBTS, as the name "training school" implies, was intended to be much like that of similar schools established earlier in Britain and North America.58 But unlike many American schools, which responded to a growing distrust of liberally inclined seminaries by deliberately beginning to train prospective ministers after 1915, the Vancouver school did not intend to train men for ordination.59 Ellis's purpose was to raise a generation of lay evangelists rather than to compete with the theological seminaries in the education of ministers. VBTS, he announced at its beginning, "aims to furnish a thorough and practical use of the English Bible, and to send forth workers with an extreme love of souls."60 The primary role of Bible schools, he stated a year later, was to be "hotbeds of evangelistic action."6' Specifically, the new school was designed to provide biblical instruction for the many young adult converts from the recent Oliver evangelistic campaign and to raise from among them, and many other young people, a supply of lay workers and evangelists who could serve as foreign, city, and rural missionaries, as pastors' assistants, and as Sunday school leaders.62 Consequently, its educational entrance

68 Pilgrims in Lotus Land requirements were lower and more flexible than those of most seminaries; it granted a two-year and then a three-year diploma rather than a theological degree; and it admitted large numbers of women students. The students could take either a full- or part-time course of studies, and great emphasis was given to evening courses. Despite its original intentions, however, some evangelicals began to choose VBTS for all or most of their ministerial education, because mainline seminaries came under increasing suspicion.63 VBTS'S council, its part-time teaching faculty, and its student body indicate something of both the breadth and the interrelatedness of Vancouver's conservative "denomination." The council was presided over in the first years by Robert W. Sharpe, a Baptist businessman originally from London, Ontario. He had become personally acquainted as a young man with Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, and was greatly influenced by him towards enthusiastic involvement in all types of missionary activity. In 1898, at the age of forty-two, Sharpe sold his business in London and worked at his own expense for two years as a lay missionary in northern Ontario, and then for nine years as preacher and schoolteacher on the St Peter's Indian Reserve, beside the Red River, in Manitoba. In 1912 he came to Vancouver and purchased the Pacific Box Company on False Creek. The chauffeur-driven fifty-six-year-old gentleman then flung himself into an enormous range of church and evangelistic concerns. Over the next thirteen years, until his death in 1925, the positions he filled included Sunday school superintendent and teacher of the Young Men's Bible Class at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, president of the Vancouver Evangelistic Movement, member of the North American council of the China Inland Mission, and president of the council of VBTS.64 In addition, he was instrumental in enabling the Shantymen's Christian Association to become established in British Columbia. In the early years of VBTS, he was not only the president of its council but was also its chief financial backer. He personally paid the salaries of the instructors the first year and provided approximately one-third of the finances needed to construct the school's facilities.65 Over the years, the school's council was composed of a fairly even balance of laymen and clergy, with Presbyterians and Baptists predominating. The Rev. J.L. Campbell of First Baptist Church - the outspoken supporter of Oliver the year before - served as the first vicepresident of the council, as well as being a part-time instructor and one of the schools most enthusiastic boosters. He left the city after a year to take another pastorate and was replaced as vice-president of the council by the Rev. Charles Thompson, a Presbyterian, who was

6g

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

director of the China Inland Mission's local operations and a parttime instructor in missions at the school. The Rev. G.H. Wilson, longtime rector of St Michael's Anglican Church on the city's east side, served as a council member for many years and frequently as a parttime instructor. He had been one of the founders of Bishop Latimer Hall and was one of Ellis's warmest sympathizers when he lost both his teaching position there and his Anglican ministerial licence.66 Of the eighteen part-time faculty engaged between 1918 and 1944, eight were Baptist, seven Presbyterian, one Anglican, one Free Methodist, and one Plymouth Brethren.6' The student body came from a similar, though even broader, range of denominations, but Baptists formed the largest single group. Most were residents of Vancouver and its environs, but some came from Victoria, the interior of the province, or Alberta.68 Classes were held the first year in the facilities of the Vancouver Evangelistic Movement on Hastings Street, but as numbers increased and differences with the militantly conservative and dispensationalist members of the VEM developed, the school moved to separate rented quarters on West Broadway, just east of Gamble Street.69 Four years later, a lot was purchased on the corner of West Tenth Avenue and Fir Street, in the west-side Fairview district. A three-storey structure, affectionately known by students as "the Ark" because of its tall, long, and narrow shape, was constructed and was dedicated nearly debt-free in September ig23- 7 ° Compared with several Bible institutes on the Canadian prairies, which went on to develop student bodies of several hundred during the 19305, VBTS was never particularly large. Combined full- and parttime enrolment never quite reached 100 in the 19205 and exceeded that figure only a few times in the 19305 and ig4os.7' However, the school's significance, at least to the local conservative "denomination," was out of all proportion to its size in two respects. A total of 154 of its students between 1918 and 1953 entered some kind of Christian ministry in a full-time capacity or married someone who did. Quite a large proportion of these went overseas as missionaries, particularly with the China Inland Mission, though many worked in the local conservative network of organizations and churches.72 In addition to those engaged in full-time ministry after graduation, there were large numbers of students who spent their summers and other free time volunteering their services in a variety of capacities. They constituted a fairly large, flexible, and low-cost labour force, which was critical to the success of many of the organizations operating in the city and in the outlying regions of the Lower Mainland. Secondly, the importance of VBTS to its constituency was considerably enhanced by

70 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Ellis's regular Thursday evening lectures for Sunday school teachers and leaders in the city. Each Thursday's public lecture presented a conservative interpretation of the lesson of the week in the International Uniform Lesson series. The series was an interdenominational curriculum published in the United States, beginning in the midnineteenth century, and was widely used throughout the Protestant world until the 19505. Upwards of 150 Sunday school teachers and leaders from a broad cross section of city churches regularly crowded into the VBTS auditorium for these popular lectures.73 The China Inland Mission functioned as the most important foreign missions component of the evangelical "denomination" in Vancouver. Not only did the mission receive a great deal of support in Vancouver, but it contributed considerably to the character and strength of interdenominational evangelicalism in the city. Founded by the Englishman J. Hudson Taylor in 1865, it became one of the world's largest and most influential interdenominational missionary societies. It was a forerunner of fervent overseas evangelism and of a very broadly based evangelical cooperation to that end. Yet, while allowing for the greatest breadth possible within the spectrum of evangelicalism, it also played a key role in creating a movement opposed to liberalism. Its missionaries were among the first to detect and expose liberal theology among denominational missionaries, precipitating crises in their respective denominations.74 Vancouver, "the gateway to the Orient," played a vital support role in the China Inland Mission's operations. In the early twentieth century, the mission was maintaining approximately one thousand missionaries in the interior of China, and Vancouver was their Pacific port of entry and embarkation.75 Consequently, each year hundreds of missionaries from Britain, continental Europe and eastern Canada and the United States passed through the city. In 1917 members of the Vancouver Evangelistic Movement helped the mission acquire a large house on West Eleventh Avenue, just west of Fir Street, to accommodate the travellers and to provide facilities for an orientation program for missionary recruits from the western part of the continent.76 The house gave the mission a stronger presence in Vancouver and made it possible for travelling missionaries to remain longer in the city. The missionnaries frequently preached in city churches, and with their strong evangelical commitment and international perspective, they were able to lend considerable support to local conservative Protestants. The common roots of the missionaries and the Vancouver mainline evangelicals in the major British denominations and in Keswick holiness teachings made for a close affinity.77 When constructing its facilities, VBTS chose a site less than a block from the China

yi

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

Inland Mission house. The close cooperation between the two institutions and the steady stream of missionaries as guest lecturers and inspirational speakers was a powerful stimulant to the school and its students. At least one of the home mission agencies developed within the province received its initial inspiration and its operational model from the giant foreign mission.78 In addition, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at the nearby University of British Columbia received crucial encouragement from the missionaries, many of whom were Oxford and Cambridge graduates.79 Several organizations fulfilled the home mission obligations of the conservative "denomination" in Vancouver. The Shantymen's Christian Association began work in the province in the spring of 1919. This mission, a Toronto-based organization, was founded in 1914 to evangelize the isolated logging camps of northern Ontario. As mentioned above, the Baptist businessman R.W. Sharpe was instrumental in its expansion into British Columbia. The first worker in the mission, a man used to hardship and difficult travelling conditions, was taken to his initial assignment, a logging camp in the mountains immediately north of Vancouver, in Sharpe's chauffeur-driven limousine.80 The following year an office was opened in Vancouver, and several years later the mission embarked on sea-going evangelism on the west coast of Vancouver Island. A Victoria committee, based in the Episcopal Church of Our Lord, was formed in 1927 to purchase a boat, and the maritime work became one of the more widely known aspects of the mission's work. Meanwhile, work on the mainland, based in Vancouver, continued to expand, especially into the northern interior.8' The British Columbia Evangelical Mission (BCEM), a Vancouverbased organization, acted much like a denomination's home mission or church extension department. Details of its beginning are obscure, but it is clear that by 1920 it was conducting a vigorous evangelism and church-planting work in the outlying areas of Greater Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.82 The organization coalesced out of the evangelistic concerns and activities of several people, who believed that the mainline denominations were neglecting the need of the newly settled areas for evangelization and churches. One of the key instigators, Mr Fred Berry, a member of Ruth Morton Baptist Church, had publicly supported the Oliver campaign because of what he perceived to be the mainline denominations' neglect of evangelistic preaching. His rationale in 1917 - "It was time for the rank and file to move"83 - was the same rationale that underlay the beginnings of the BCEM. The BCEM worked in newly settled and isolated rural areas within driving range of Vancouver that were not served by evangelical

72

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

churches. The earliest stations were started in South Vancouver and Burnaby, but the mission spread north, south, and east of the city into Horseshoe Bay, Richmond, Surrey, Aldergrove, and as far east as Chilliwack, sixty miles up the Fraser Valley, following the expansion of settlement and roads out from Vancouver and New Westminster. Sunday schools for children were usually begun first, but, when possible, evangelistic and worship services were held for adults. The number of active mission stations peaked at nearly twenty in the late 19305 and early 19405, but in the 19205 about ten were being served at any one time. In some cases, the work would cease if another evangelical church was established in the area, but often the mission station would develop into an ongoing congregation. Some of these, more than one of which had grown quite large, affiliated with one of several newer evangelical denominations in the 19508 when the mission ceased operations. Although Baptists, many of whom eventually separated from the mainline Baptist body, and some Plymouth Brethren predominated on the board of the BCEM, the mission can be considered part of the mainline conservative network of organizations. This is because of the carefully guarded nondenominational nature of the mission congregations that it planted and its very close ties with VBTS, the "regional coordinating centre" of the network. The BCEM and VBTS enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. Several laymen served on the boards of both organizations, and the mission's full-time secretary-treasurer and leader in some of the missions, Miss Ida Bond, was a VBTS graduate. The school's students made up a large number of the mission's volunteer workers, and the mission in turn provided invaluable experience close at hand for the students. Usually a carload of students, frequently accompanied by other volunteers, worked as a team over a period of time at one of the mission stations, taking almost total responsibility for its operation. Many young people, both men and women, thus gained experience in areas of responsibility that would not have been as readily available in larger city churches. Young volunteers, some in their late teens or early twenties, preached sermons, directed Sunday schools, led song services, and conducted home visitation programs. Walter Ellis was keenly supportive of the mission's work, encouraging its workers and even helping some of the beginning preachers write their first sermons. Other volunteers in the mission frequently enrolled in evening classes at VBTS for training in public speaking. The university-student ministry arm of the nondenominational conservative "denomination," the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), developed over the years into one of the most influential

73

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

organizations for British Columbia's evangelicals, especially for those in the mainline denominations. In fact, John Stackhouse Jr, in his study of evangelical institutions nationwide, called the national IVCF one of the "three most important institutions that Canadian evangelicals founded in the first half of the twentieth century."84 By the 19305, the IVCF chapter at the University of British Columbia had grown to be the strongest in western Canada.85 A student-led conservative group began in Vancouver during the 1926—27 academic year, the first year that the university occupied its new Point Grey campus. For several years, conservative Protestant students had been feeling increasingly unhappy about the growing liberal orientation of the Student Christian Movement (SCM). Prayer meetings, Bible studies, and evangelistic outreach had largely been replaced by the nontraditional Sharman approach to the Bible and by discussions of social ethics and world religions.86 For example, the SCM president reported in the 7924-25 Student Annual, "In studying ethics as perceived by that lovable Jewish character, Jesus of Great kindness, the [SCM] conference manifested an absolutely frank sincerity."87 In direct opposition to the SCM'S approach, several conservative students posted a notice on the bulletin board in the fall of 1926: "Everyone wishing to defend the faith once and for all delivered for the saints, please meet in Lecture Room 202 ..." Fifteen students responded and formed the Student Christian Fundamentalist Society. Their numbers grew to about forty, and they defined the group's object in the Totem as "the defence and proclamation of the Gospel. It seeks to stimulate a firm belief in the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and emphasizes the need of a closer relationship with God, which is only possible through the redemption offered by Jesus Christ."88 While mainline conservatives predominated in the student society, separatist Baptists were significantly involved in the early days. The ranks also included quite a growing number of the most "open" segment of the Plymouth Brethren, who increasingly began to associate with mainline evangelicals. The character of the denominationally mixed Vancouver IVCF was very strongly influenced by the early mainline conservative institutions in the city. Walter Ellis consistently offered warm encouragement and frequently visited the campus and spoke at the group's meetings. He and his wife so strongly supported the fledgling student-led group that they purchased a large home near the university gates in order to provide a suitable off-campus meeting place for it.89 Missionaries of the China Inland Mission also frequently visited the campus, providing important encouragement to the group and links to evangelicals in British Columbia.90

74 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

These influences were significantly reflected in its orientation. The UBC society affiliated in 1927 with the League of Evangelical Students which had a very strong chapter at the University of Washington in Seattle. This affiliation soon weakened, however, as the American group was oriented to a more rationalistic, or Princetonian, form of fundamentalism than the Keswick holiness orientation which the Canadian students were receiving in Vancouver. A much more satisfactory relationship was established several years later with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of Canada (formed in 1928) .9' The IVCF had developed out of the Cambridge and Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions, which had broken with the liberal British SCM in the prewar period. The IVCF had a strongly British, somewhat upperclass character and, although interdenominational, was considerably influenced by evangelical Anglicanism. The influence of the China Inland Mission was very pronounced throughout the national IVCF, from its statement of faith to its marked emphasis on Keswick holiness teachings, fervent evangelism, and overseas missions.92 Similar characteristics marked most other components of the conservative "denomination's" network in Vancouver. The evangelicals supporting it were respectable middle-class British-oriented church members, who looked to the scholarly noncombative gentleman, Walter Ellis, for leadership. They were strongly opposed to liberalism, but they expressed their opposition by quietly founding alternative institutions outside the denominations rather than noisily debating with and separating from their denominations. Their emphasis was less on direct confrontation than on cultivating an intense individual piety and promoting fervent evangelism at home and abroad. Most of these traits owe much to the strong British influences whether resulting from direct immigration or mediated via Toronto on the mainline conservatives in Vancouver. These people were used to working as a fairly respectable minority within a larger doctrinal and ecclesiastical context and thus did not react with the same fervour that was motivated by the great sense of loss of cultural dominance experienced by American evangelicals. The prevalence of Keswick teaching among British evangelicals resulted in somewhat less concern for doctrinal precision than for personal piety and service.93 The emphasis that BC mainline conservatives placed on students, whether in VBTS or IVCF, and on children's evangelism seems to have followed the British evangelical pattern of focusing on training a future generation rather than decrying losses in the present. Finally, the central and moderating role played by Walter Ellis cannot be downplayed. His influence was much like that of moderate conservative leaders in Britain who, according to Bebbington, held the initiative among

75

Mainline Conservatives, 1917—1927

conservatives (rather than this role being played by the more militant conservatives, or fundamentalists).94 In the first decade after 1917, then, when the Oliver campaign had acted as a catalyst to widespread polarization, the mainline conservatives worked together to create a network of evangelistic, missionary, and training institutions in Vancouver. For a relatively undeveloped province, they built a surprisingly complete institutional base to provide conservative alternatives to liberalism. In that same decade, however, two more radical versions of conservative Protestantism made their presence felt in a dramatic fashion.

4 The Separatist Solution: Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928

Two more radical conservative responses developed in British Columbia in the decade following French E. Oliver's evangelistic campaigns of 1917. By 1928, the separatist Baptist and Pentecostal alternatives had each attracted thousands of members and adherents and had established their own rudimentary denominational structures in the province. Both groups expressed much more alienation from the major Protestant denominations and the prevailing religious ethos than their mainline conservative counterparts did. However, neither differed from the mainline conservatives in regard to the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity. What the separatist Baptists rejected was a theologically inclusive approach within their denomination, and they therefore created their own denomination when an attempt to remove liberalism from the mainline Baptist Convention failed. The militancy of their opposition to liberalism qualifies them (unlike most of the mainline conservatives) for the term "fundamentalist."' Socially and economically, the separatist Baptist membership was not as comfortably situated vis-a-vis the mainstream of society as most mainline conservatives were. While most of the members were not completely marginalized and even contained some "respectable" elements, they tended more towards a blue-collar identity; and although their leadership included some men with university degrees, generally they had less exposure to, and less sympathy with, trends in modern higher education. In 1925 the militantly conservative Baptists in British Columbia became the first of their denomination in North America to begin

77 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928 operating their own separate quasi-denominational organization.2 By 1927 a new denomination, the Convention of Regular Baptists of British Columbia was formed by these conservatives who withdrew from the mainline Baptist Convention of British Columbia. Within a year this new convention, with its strength focused in Vancouver, claimed the allegiance of one-third of the active Baptist membership in the province.3 The schism significantly altered the religious landscape of the province. Despite ongoing divisions within its own ranks over the next several decades, the separating Regular Baptists not only survived but by 1980 had exceeded the old, or mainline, convention in the number of churches and weekly attendance.4 In addition, as a result of the 1927 split, numerous other Baptist and independent congregations existed outside the mainline denomination. Two other Baptist denominations that began to grow in British Columbia after World War II - the Southern Baptists and the Baptist General Conference gained their first significant foothold in the province among congregations that had left the Baptist mainline in 1927. The concerns of the fundamentalist Baptists centred chiefly around allegations of modernist teachings in Brandon College, the liberal arts and theology school of the Baptist Union of Western Canada, located in Brandon, Manitoba. However, even before the public allegations were made against the college, some turmoil and division was already taking place at the local level in several Vancouver churches. Between 1917 and 1920, for example, conservatives protested a liberal tendency and heavy social gospel emphasis in Central Fairview and Kitsilano Baptist churches and began leaving them in large numbers.5 Meanwhile, Mount Pleasant Baptist, a little distance to the east, grew very rapidly from an influx of new members, for it was gaining a reputation "as a live centre of evangelism and fundamental testimony" under the leadership of the Rev. A.F. Baker.6 From 1920 on, however, the attention of the wider Baptist constituency shifted to Brandon College. Rumours of unorthodox teaching at the college had been circulating for a time, but the first major public charge came in 1920. It was made by the Rev. W. Arnold Bennett, the young British-born pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Vancouver, who had been a student at Brandon College, 1915-17. Bennett informed the Baptist Ministerial Association of Greater Vancouver in early 1920 that Dr Harris L. MacNeill, professor of New Testament and Greek at Brandon, taught some heretical views. He alleged that in a long conversation at Dr MacNeill's home, the professor told him that a belief in the 'Verbal inspiration and infallibility of the Bible" was "not tenable in the light

78 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

of modern knowledge and research." During this conversation, the traditional views of the integrity, authorship, and dating of the Pentateuch and the Book of Isaiah were disputed by MacNeill and his wife. The latter added to the "distress" of young Bennett by stating that she had once believed as he did, but since then her husband "had shown her the matter differently and she had changed her position." Bennett also stated that he and several other students, who also were concerned with Dr MacNeill's teaching, had met with Dr Whidden, president of the college, to bring the problem to his attention. But, despite a "definite promise" from the president to investigate the charges and report back to them, the students were never informed if anything had been done.7 Later, two other former Brandon students corroborated Bennett's charges with testimony of their own. The Rev. J.B. Rowell, minister of the Kamloops Baptist Church and a recent graduate of Brandon, told of the negative impact Dr MacNeill had on the faith of students. He recounted incidents during his student pastorates in which he had met a total of four former Brandon students who had given up their faith altogether and "argued from the standpoint of Dr MacNeill's teaching." He also told of a friend in Saskatchewan who had "started as a zealous Gospel preacher, and with a desire to be a soul winner" but was changing his former plans of entering the ministry because he had lost confidence in the inspiration of the Bible during his classes with Dr MacNeill.8 The Rev. John Linton, a pastor in Montreal who was also a graduate of Brandon, provided instances of MacNeill's views which, if true, indicated that MacNeill denied teachings that were basic to evangelicalism. Linton claimed that the professor taught that Jesus' human limitations were such that He did not know that His death was a substitutionary atonement for the sins of the world; that words attributed to Jesus, including the command "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel," were thus only words of his disciples, and that the disciples, "in their admiration for their great Master, put words into His mouth that He really never said."9 The charges aroused a swift and prolonged reaction among many of Greater Vancouver's more than 10,000 Baptists.10 In fact, Vancouver was at the centre of protest throughout the seven years of controversy that led ultimately to schism and the creation of a separatist Baptist denomination. In 1923 one of the central participants described the Brandon affair as "the agitation begun and centred in BC."" The Vancouver reaction is not surprising in view of the fact that French E. Oliver had several years earlier been warmly received there by thousands, huge numbers of whom were Baptists, when he repeatedly

79 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928

thundered against the dangers of modernism. Of the larger denominations, Baptists were the most supportive of and most influenced by Oliver's antiliberal evangelistic campaign. Fifteen of the nineteen Baptist ministers in the city in 1917 were reportedly "in full accord with the movement."12 Not only was Oliver's most prominent and outspoken supporter, Dr J.L. Campbell, pastor of the city's largest Baptist congregation, but the man considered most responsible for bringing Oliver to the city was the Rev. A.F. Baker, pastor of Mount Pleasant Baptist, the denomination's second-largest church in Vancouver.13 In addition, the 1917 campaign was not the only exposure Vancouver Baptists had to the militant evangelist. First Baptist Church hosted a smaller but well-attended series of meetings with Oliver in the middle of the Baptist battles in ig22. 14 A glimpse of the impact of the 1917 Oliver campaign on Vancouver's Mount Pleasant Baptist Church provides insight into its remarkable effectiveness in galvanizing the ongoing resistance to modernism in the city. As noted in an account of the Rev. A.F. Baker's ministry, his role in bringing Oliver to Vancouver was the most significant action of his fifteen years at Mount Pleasant Baptist, during which time the church became the leading fundamentalist Baptist church in western Canada.15 The church grew very rapidly in the post-Oliver era, not only through the transfer of fundamentalists from other churches but by its reception and baptism of huge numbers of converts from the campaign. The youth of the church were profoundly influenced by the meetings. In the aftermath of the campaigns, six young men went to study at the conservative Bible Institute of Los Angeles, with which Oliver was affiliated. One of them was Baker's son, Lorimer G. Baker, who was nineteen years old at the time of the meetings. An author who interviewed him in later life reported, 'The impression made by this great evangelistic campaign never faded from Lorimer's mind. Under the powerful preaching of Dr Oliver, he realized his call to fulltime Christian work. Hundreds of conversions took place with great dedication of life."16 By the mid-igsos, Lorimer Baker had become a pastor in the Vancouver area and, not surprisingly, was one of the leaders of the opposition to Brandon. Baptist conservatism in Vancouver was further stimulated and sustained by some of the institutions begun by conservatives in the aftermath of the 1917 campaign. Such a development of conservative institutions had not yet occurred in the rest of western Canada by 1920. For example, classes at what became the Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS) began five years before the founding of the Prairie Bible Institute, the next such school in western Canada. The existence of such an institution in Vancouver provided ongoing encouragement

8o Pilgrims in Lotus Land

and theological sustenance for a wide variety of lay and clerical leaders in the city, and it also provided a thorough grounding in conservative theology for a number of Baptists who came to support the militant conservatives. In 1923 a fundamentalist publication in Vancouver, the Baptist Herald, prominently lauded the work of VBTS. In particular, it singled out a monthly series of public "Fundamentals Lectures" at the school. The militantly conservative editors found that the lectures met the need of people to be "shown without doubt that the old orthodoxy is entirely, and perennially up-to-date and in keeping with the most exacting investigations of scholarship." They added: 'These lectures are open to the public, and are reasoned, serious considerations of the vital truths of our Faith and the Bible.'"7 The specifics of Oliver's attacks on modernists in 1917 may also have encouraged the Vancouver Baptist reaction to charges of heresy at Brandon College. When Oliver warned against the dangers of "infidel" scholars, he singled out the divinity school of the University of Chicago, an institution with strong Baptist connections, for special criticism. His comments that the institution was "a disgrace to the Baptist church of America" and that its graduates were "pegged-legged infidels" received wide publicity in the city.'8 The fear and loathing of the University of Chicago became widespread among BC Baptists. For example, a pamphlet criticizing the BC convention's involvement in the Religious Education Council of British Columbia charged that the modern movement for religious education "was a child of the University of Chicago and based on the German theology taught there, which theology was a humanistic heresy seeking to take 'Christ out of Christianity.'"'9 It was feared that the University of Chicago's influence was especially pronounced at Brandon College, because some of its faculty had received their advanced training at Chicago's divinity school. The Vancouver Baptists' criticisms of Prof. H. MacNeill made much of the fact that he had completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago just before World War I. One pamphlet quoted a layman who said of MacNeill that "the Doctor was alright until he went to Chicago University to complete his studies."20 Thus, upon hearing young Bennett's charges, an alarmed Baptist Ministerial Association of Greater Vancouver responded by demanding that the the Brandon College Board of Governors investigate the charges. The board did investigate, and it reported in March 1921, to the apparent satisfaction of the ministerial association. But the matter would not die. One of the Vancouver ministers noted that the association accepted the board's report only "on definite understanding that 'MacNeill was leaving anyway at the end of the year and Vancouver Ministerial Association did not wish him to 'leave under a cloud.'"21

8i

Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928

However, Professor MacNeill did not leave Brandon College, and the issue was vigorously kept alive in British Columbia, especially in Vancouver. In January of the following year, 1922, Bennett published a widely circulated pamphlet, Facts concerning Brandon College, which repeated his earlier criticisms and included the accounts of Rowell and Linton. This damaging pamphlet put the denomination in a dilemma. On the one hand, the annual meeting of the Baptist Union of Western Canada, held the following month, unanimously denounced Bennett's methods. At the same time, however, it recognized that the pamphlet had touched off in Vancouver a storm of protest against Brandon College, and it thus ordered another review of the school and named a special commission of eleven members to investigate. Tensions increased when, in March 1922, before the Brandon commission's work was really underway, Bennett published another and even more strongly worded pamphlet, Jesuit Methods Used by Baptist Union of Western Canada. In it he accused the leaders of the Baptist Union of using "intrigue ... to gain ecclesiastical control" and of "leaning towards extreme modernism" and of "attempting to whitewash the College."22 Bennett and the other two former-students were not alone in their criticism of Brandon College and the denomination. Several pamphlets, issued by Mrs A.A. McLeod, a retired missionary, and by a small group of anonymous "interested laymen" of Vancouver, criticized the Baptist Union's financial policies, which they regarded as too centralized. They felt that the Baptist Convention of British Columbia, one of the components of the Baptist Union of Western Canada, received less than its share of budget allotments and that administrative costs were too high. They were also concerned that the Baptist Union's policies did not give conservatives the right to steer their financial support away from institutions, namely Brandon College, of which they did not approve, towards denominational programs of which they did approve. As well, they spearheaded the questioning of the denomination's involvement in the Religious Education Council of British Columbia, which was considered too modernistic.23 Such complaints, especially in financial areas, took concrete expression early in the dispute. In January 1922, the first-known instance of a congregation using financial pressure against the denomination occurred. The 2OO-member Ruth Morton Baptist Church in southeast Vancouver expressed its lack of confidence by voting to withhold funds normally sent to the Baptist Union of Western Canada.24 By June 1922, only two months after T.T. Shields of Toronto began publishing his Gospel Witness, Vancouver conservative Baptists had organized enough to begin publication of their own monthly periodi-

82 Pilgrims in Lotus Land cal, the Baptist Herald. Its co-editors were the Rev. Gabriel R. Maguire of First Baptist Church, in downtown Vancouver, and the Rev. H.L. Kempton of Broadway West Baptist Church, in the city's Kitsilano district. Each edition declared that this new effort was "in the interests of the cause of Evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Theology." The publication lasted little more than a year, but it appears to have been an important rallying point for BC fundamentalists, since it reprinted articles by leading North American fundamentalists and provided extensive news and pointed commentary on the local scene.25 Not only did the Baptist Herald champion conservative theology, but it championed the Baptist denomination, together with the Baptist principle of the autonomy of the local church as the safest defence against modernism. One of the early editorials declared, "We believe in the Baptist church, and are convinced that the large majority of our people are loyal fundamentalists and true spiritual democrats. That our work has nothing to lose but everything to gain by the free expression of thought and action. Again, let us beware of the centralization of power ... Entrust the power to the few and our days are numbered for God and man."26 The aims of the more militant conservatives were made clear in the same edition. The editors spoke of the need for "a sterner resolution to purge ourselves." There is no doubt what they meant by this; modernists had to be purged from the denomination if they did not have the decency and honesty to leave of their own volition. After acknowledging the civil rights of modernists to hold their own opinions, the editors declared: "True, all true, but please let us point that you do not expect Baptist people holding Baptists [sic] truths and principles, and contributing Baptist money, to support Unitarianism in all but name. If a man wishes to hold German higher criticism or Unitarianism the honest thing, surely is to withdraw from the Baptist fellowship and join the bodies holding the aforesaid viewpoints."27 These conservatives thus interpreted the Baptist principle of "liberty of conscience" to mean that individuals had the freedom to join or leave any religious body according to their belief. An individual, however, did not have the liberty, according to them, to attempt to change the beliefs of a religious organization underhandedly. It was the modernists, declared the editors of the Baptist Herald, who violated the liberty of conscience of conservative Baptists: Parents send their children to a Baptist school, feeling certain this is the safest place and the best investment, but these false teachers have little compunction in betraying the sacred trust committed to their charge, and insinuate uncertainty and cast doubt on the blessed book of God and the truthfulness

83 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928 of the Lord Jesus Christ By what process of reasoning all this can be made to appear consistent, let alone Christian, is beyond our ken. To us it is the most discomforting thought to know that Baptists have sent hard-earned offerings as they imagined to the spread of the truth, but since have found out that far from establishing young people in the love of God and the light of His word, they have been the unconscious confederates of German destructive criticism.28

The conservatives thus entertained high expectations that the Brandon commission would finally expose the truth about the College and would recommend the removal of faculty who were not teaching traditional Baptist beliefs. However, the commission itself came under suspicion. A Vancouver layman, Mr R.E. Knight, expressed his concerns in a letter to the editors in the November 1922 edition of the Baptist Herald. He wrote: "A rumour is current in some quarters that is giving friends of the College, who are not in possession of the facts, serious concern. There are those who insist that some of the members of this commission are also members of the College Board ... This rumour surely cannot be true."29 It was indeed true. Six of the commission's eleven members were board members of the college, and three others were or had been closely affiliated with the college. Two of the latter group had only recently made strong supportive statements on behalf of the college and its faculty. On the whole commission, only two of the three members from British Columbia - the Rev. G.R. Maguire and the Rev. A.F. Baker, of Vancouver's two largest Baptist churches, First and Mount Pleasant, respectively - had no connection with the school. In the light of these allegations, two of the college's board members resigned from the commission, but its make-up continued to generate suspicion in British Columbia.30 The Brandon commission reported to the Baptist Union's annual meeting in Calgary in January 1923. It had interviewed Brandon College's professors and their critics, had sent questionnaires to the college's graduates, and had compared the college's program and teaching with that of McMaster University and seven Baptist theological schools in the United States. Its twenty-two page report exonerated Dr MacNeill and condemned his accusers as "both false and unchristian." It noted, however, that the professor did not "hold to the traditional verbal theory" of the inspiration of the Scriptures, but did hold "most profoundly to the great throbbing, vitalizing fact of inspiration." The commissioners also approved his views of controversial issues such as the virgin birth, resurrection, and return of Christ, even while noting that MacNeill did not accept unreservedly the traditional views on these issues.31

84 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

In actual fact, the commission communicated a very mixed message regarding MacNeill. On the one hand, it exonerated him and condemned his accusers. (Mr W. Marchant, president of the Baptist Union, for one, believed the college was clearly vindicated by the report.) On the other hand, the commission acknowledged some of the difficulties MacNeill's teaching had caused by recommending that he no longer teach English Bible courses for arts students; such courses should be assigned to a new professor of practical theology and should be of an expositional nature "rather than a critical study."32 Dr N. Wolverton, the only one of the three BC commissioners to sign the report, stressed that this latter recommendation was "the real finding" of the commission. MacNeill's method was considered "too highly critical in character" for the less-specialized students.33 The commission's report was not well received by many in Vancouver, even though it implicitly acknowledged some of the criticisms of the Brandon College in its recommendation to change MacNeill's teaching responsibilities. To begin with, conservatives were keenly aware that the two prominent Vancouver commissioners, Maguire and Baker, had refused to sign the report. They dissented from its analysis of MacNeill's position on several issues, most notably the inspiration of scripture, and consequently refused to support it. Then, to make matters worse, Brandon did not implement the recommendation to hire a practical theologian and replace MacNeill in the English Bible arts courses. Citing financial and administrative difficulties, it left MacNeill's teaching responsibilities unchanged.34 The editors of the Baptist Herald proclaimed that the struggle was not over. They reported to their readers, 'The boast has been made that the liberal element in the denomination has captured the College and that we are helpless to change the present policy and purpose."35 They then clearly enunciated what had become the real issue for the fundamentalists: "A pertinent question at this time is what limitations shall be put upon the beliefs, utterances and teachings of the new President and Professors employed. The Board of Governors should advise us whether they intend to continue a policy which permits the individual members of the faculty to hold a great variety of opinions concerning the Bible, the doctrines of our brotherhood and the things to be taught our spiritual leaders of the future."36 The battle lines were thus clearly drawn, and debate would centre on this issue for the next four years. The conservatives expressed their concerns in pragmatic as well as doctrinal terms. They believed that the purpose of their protests was to avert "disaster forced by the triumph of modernism in our schools."37 The denomination's evangelistic thrust was being weak-

85 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928

ened, they argued, by the liberal teachings of Brandon College, which tended to support the social gospel rather than the "blood-bought Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ." This new gospel, proclaimed the Baptist Herald in January 1923, undercut the old, effective gospel by placing the religious emphasis "on the ethical, and not on the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ." It reduced the traditional appeal of evangelism by its effort to "exalt time and obscure eternity" and lost its power because it "has no place for the supernatural and for regeneration" and "supplants the work of the Holy Spirit."38 These changes to the gospel came, conservatives believed, at the very time when fervent evangelism was needed to stem the relative numerical decline of Baptists in western Canada. T.T. Shields of Toronto, one of the chief supporters of the conservatives in British Columbia, pointed out that the number of rural churches in the prairie provinces had declined from ninety-two in 1907 to fifty-nine in 1925, and he openly speculated whether Brandon College might be one cause of the "dying out" of the Baptist cause in some parts of the West.39 A Vancouver critic of the college cynically expressed disappointment in 1922 that the school was not training pastors and evangelists for western Canada: "A microscopic search had failed to reveal a single theological graduate among the last Commencement graduates in May ... However, as the Theological Head has received the high honor of 'Doctor of Laws, Honoris causa' from McMaster University, that should help some, even if the Home Mission fields are crying for men to take up the work in many needy places. 'Patience is a virtue' says the old proverb, but sometimes it ceases to be such."40 Reports from former students that MacNeill's teaching actually had the effect of dampening the evangelistic zeal of classmates formerly heading for the ministry only heightened the concern of those who had hoped the denominationally funded college would aid Baptist evangelistic work in the West. For these reasons, the fundamentalist protest was building, but two events of the spring of 1923 weakened it. The college and the denominational officials were granted a temporary reprieve when almost all Protestants in Vancouver were distracted and divided in the uproar created by the Charles S. Price evangelistic and healing crusades held in May. The college's defenders must have breathed another sigh of relief when the most charismatic leader of the militant conservatives and Brandon's highest-profile critic, the Rev. G.R. Maguire of First Baptist, Vancouver, left the city that same month to accept a call to Westmount Baptist Church in Montreal.4' In the long term, the Pentecostal upsurge numerically weakened the conservative forces in the denomination. By 1925, hundreds,

86 Pilgrims in Lotus Land including many of the most radical fundamentalists, had deserted the ranks of conservative Baptist churches in Vancouver for a variety of Pentecostal churches.42 How much stronger the conservative forces would have been in the upcoming showdown if these people had still been members of Baptist churches is difficult to determine, but it undoubtedly would have tipped the balance of opinion in some churches. Similarly, it is difficult to calculate the exact extent of the loss of the leadership and influence of Maguire, pastor of the largest and wealthiest Baptist congregation in the province, but it was undoubtedly significant. The new pastor of First Baptist Church, Dr J J. Ross, was a respected conservative and was elected president of the BC convention in 1925. However, he was a moderate conservative who refused to support the efforts of the militants to purge the denomination of liberalism. Also, the Baptist Herald ceased publication immediately upon Maguire's departure, thereby removing a monthly source of inspiration and information for fundamentalists.43 After it ceased publication, many BC militant conservatives turned to T.T. Shields's Gospel Witness for information and inspiration. Shields reserved most of his accusations for McMaster University in Toronto, but he also listened carefully to BC complaints against Brandon College and helped publicize them. Pousett states that the "Gospel Witness enjoyed a wide circulation among fundamentalists in BC, and was avidly read and implicitly believed."44 Still, despite the setbacks, the fundamentalists continued to bring pressure on the Baptist Union, and at its January 1924 annual meeting the union took steps to defuse the issue. Even though it passed a vote of confidence in Brandon and its staff, it removed the college from the denomination's budget. The rationale was that the college could raise far more from direct appeals to its constituency than the Baptist Union budget was providing for it. The more likely reason, however, was that too many churches were withholding funds from the Baptist Union because of the inclusion of Brandon College in its budget.45 This action did not go far enough to satisfy the BC conservatives. The Baptist Union was still not willing to purge the College completely of liberalism, nor would it completely disassociate itself from it. Six BC pastors declared their continuing opposition to Brandon in a letter published in T.T. Shields's Gospel Witness early that spring.46 Several months later, at the June 1924 meeting of the Baptist Convention of British Columbia, the Rev. Andrew Grieve of Ruth Morton Baptist, Vancouver, presented a motion that "we ... do hereby place ourselves on record as supporting our Commissioners in their dissent, and also as disapproving the action of the Baptist Union of Western

87 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928 Canada in the endorsation of, and fellowship with, the unscriptural teaching of Brandon College."47 After extended debate, the motion was tabled for a year, but yet another investigation (the third!) was launched: the BC convention appointed a "Committee of Ten" to "take into consideration the whole question of the relation of this convention to the Baptist Union of Western Canada," including the thorny problem of the the College.48 At the next annual meeting of the Baptist Convention of British Columbia, June 1925, the reception of the two reports generated by the Committee of Ten proved to be the decisive showdown between the various Baptist forces in the province. Its members were unable to reach agreement and submitted majority and minority reports. The majority report, representing the more moderate and liberal positions, recommended that every instructor of Brandon College be a member of "an Evangelical Christian Church." More was required of members of its department of theology, it stated, if the BC convention was to have confidence in the college. Each theology faculty member must be a "member in good standing of a Regular Baptist Church" and must "believe, stand for and teach unequivocably what a Regular Baptist Church believes, stands for, and teaches."49 The minority report represented the militantly conservative forces and went much further in an attempt to guarantee the orthodoxy of the college's faculty. It recommended that an accompanying detailed conservative statement of faith be incorporated into the by-laws of the college and that all faculty be required to subscribe to it. Representing the fundamentalists' view of liberty of conscience, the report added that "if at any time such person shall come into disagreement with such statement, he or she shall immediately resign office."50 The two reports generated heated and lengthy discussion on the convention floor. In an attempt to break the deadlock, moderate conservatives moved a compromise amendment. This amendment defined the beliefs of the Regular Baptist Church to which the theology faculty were to belong. In tones almost as conservative as that of the minority report, it listed ten items considered integral to a Baptist church.5' This, in effect, served as a Statement of Faith without actually being one. Significantly, though, faculty would not be required actually to sign such a belief - a requirement which many felt would violate the traditional Baptist views of the freedom of individual conscience. The voting on the amendment and reports indicated a three-way split among the 144 voting delegates. The amendment was defeated by a vote of 80 to 63. Next, the minority report went down to defeat by a vote of 88 to 49, and the majority report was then accepted by 89 to 54. According to Richards's analysis of the voting, the largest

88 Pilgrims in Lotus Land group of delegates were moderate conservatives (63, or just under one-half), followed by militant conservatives (49, or a little over onethird), and liberals (31, or just over one-fifth.)52 This highly plausible analysis indicates that the tenor of the BC convention was decidedly conservative, but the militant conservatives failed to persuade the moderate conservatives to join them in excluding liberalism from Brandon by requiring that individual faculty members subscribe to the minority report's proposed statement of faith.53 Judging by the contents of their amendment to the majority report, the moderate conservatives did not disagree with the militants' beliefs as spelled out in the proposed statement of faith. However, their interpretation of the Baptist position on liberty of conscience excluded the adoption of what they regarded as a "man-made binding creed."54 Thus, their compromise amendment defined what they felt to be traditional Baptist beliefs while not requiring subscription to them. This effort was narrowly defeated by the combined vote of the militant conservatives (who felt that it would not solve the Brandon problem, because it did not require faculty actually to sign it) and the liberals (who could not agree with the attempt to define a Baptist church by a conservative set of beliefs). The liberals and almost all the moderate conservatives then combined forces to pass the original majority report recommendation by a nearly two-to-one margin. When all the fundamentalist candidates for denominational office were defeated at the convention by the same margin, the rift between militant and moderate conservatives was confirmed. The rejection of the widely respected fundamentalist leader, the Rev. F.W. Auvache, who had served as secretary-treasurer of the convention for some twenty-three years, was especially revealing.55 It became clear to the militants that the moderate conservatives were not interested in their campaign to oust modernism. Shortly after the June 1925 convention, the fundamentalists were encouraged by the Rev. T.T. Shields of Toronto to take action. Shields, for several years an outspoken critic of Brandon, was in Vancouver speaking at a four-day rally of the Baptist Bible Union, a continentwide organization of fundamentalist Baptists, of which he was the "leading spirit."56 Within the month, the BC fundamentalists responded by forming their own organization, the British Columbia Baptist Missionary Council. It was led by some respected individuals in the BC convention; its first officers included a past president, a former secretary-treasurer, and a former board member of the convention, and also a retired Canadian Baptist missionary.57 The purpose of the British Columbia Baptist Missionary Council was to receive and dispense mission donations from fundamentalist

89 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928

Baptist individuals and from the churches that affiliated with it. In addition, Shields's wealthy Jarvis Street congregation channelled the funds it normally sent to the Baptist Union through the new organization.58 Soon the council boasted two auxiliary organizations: a separate women's council, the Baptist Women's Missionary Council, which almost immediately began operating its own city mission in Vancouver; and a youth organization, which drew 300 young people to its first rally. As early as the fall of 1925, the organization was publishing its own periodical, the British Columbia Baptist.'39 The council was not formally a denomination, since its churches were still technically part of the Baptist Convention of British Columbia. However, it operated sufficiently apart from the denomination in the area of finances and women's and youth ministry for its formation to be considered the first schism in Baptist ranks in North America over the issue of modernism.60 In an early pamphlet, the council leaders argued that "the inroads of Modernism into our ranks and the failure of brethren in our midst to stand against it" had necessitated the new organization.6' This certainly was the crux of the matter for the separatist conservatives. They saw themselves as struggling valiantly to rid the denomination of a very serious threat to its spiritual well-being and evangelistic efforts, but the "Convention on each occasion has pronounced against such effort."62 Fundamentalists found it especially difficult to accept the moderate conservatives' stand on the matter. The moderates were willing to reiterate their own traditional beliefs but were not willing to help in erecting a solid creedal barrier designed to keep more liberal views out. Each party felt that fidelity to a different primary principle was at stake. To the moderate conservatives, the liberty of the individual believer and the freedom and autonomy of the local church were principles that made Baptists distinct from other denominations and thus could not be violated. For their part, the fundamentalists feared that the spiritual danger of the modernists' "denial of the authority of the Holy Scriptures" would ultimately destroy the Baptists' work and thereby had to be stopped, at whatever cost.63 Because of the conflict of these principles, as much friction developed between the two conservative groups as between liberals and conservatives. Dr JJ. Ross, pastor of First Baptist since 1923 and president of the BC convention since 1925, provides an example of a moderate conservative who suffered the misunderstanding and criticism of his more militant brethren. His own theological beliefs were certainly orthodox, yet he opposed the fundamentalists' every move to have a statement of faith adopted. In the heat of the debates in 1924 over the Brandon

go Pilgrims in Lotus Land

commission's report, he had stated, "Baptists will never, in Association or Convention assembled, adopt a creed and then seek to superimpose the same upon the churches. This would be contrary to the historic fundamental Baptist principle of the independence, sovereignty and complete autonomy of the organized local church."64 Ross's election as president of the convention and the defeat of the fundamentalist Dr AJ. Brown, a member of his own congregation and former vice-president of the Convention, was one of the precipitating factors leading to the organization of the Baptist Missionary Council. Ross was singled out in Shields's Gospel Witness as being partially to blame for the "deplorable state" of the BC convention.65 To such criticisms were added dogged accusations that he had falsified his academic degrees.66 As a consequence, he felt so uncomfortable in the Baptist Ministerial Association of Greater Vancouver, of which F.W. Auvache, a council leader, was president, that he and a number of other pastors left it in the spring of 1926 to form the Baptist Ministerial Brotherhood of Vancouver.67 Open criticism of his leadership also dogged him as he presided at the June 1926 BC convention. Ross's desire to prove his own orthodoxy in the face of criticisms of his stand almost gave the fundamentalists an opportunity to have the kind of statement he opposed adopted by the convention. Late one evening, during a session of intense debate, he read to the delegates his own personal statement of faith. He was popular with many of the delegates and made an especially moving appeal.68 Richards describes the scene that followed: "Sensing the strategic moment, 'Council' delegate Mr G.R.S. Blackaby moved 'That this Convention place itself on record as heartily endorsing the statement of faith as read by Dr Ross as his own.' The motion placed those conservatives who were outside the Missionary Council in a very awkward position. In the midst of the confusion the Vice-President took the chair and the resolution was ruled out of order as not being 'in the interests of the Baptist churches of this province' ... The meeting sustained the ruling."69 Clearly, the rift was widening and it began to appear less likely that the council could hope to reverse the stand of the BC convention, even though its supporting congregations had increased in number to sixteen. The last attempt came at the 1927 convention when a motion to include a creedal statement in the convention's constitution was defeated by a large majority vote. One new constitutional clause that did pass, however, was clearly aimed at the council. It allowed a threefifths majority of convention delegates to deny a seat to the delegates of any churches "not in harmony and cooperation with the work and objects of the said convention."70 Rather than run the risk of

gi

Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928

expulsion, the delegates of the council churches withdrew from the convention floor. Having failed to oust liberalism from the denomination, they separated themselves from it and from those who apparently tolerated it. On 6 July 1927 the split was solidified with the formation of the new denomination, the Convention of Regular Baptists of British Columbia. The use of the historic Baptist term "Regular" was disputed by the old convention before the attorney general of the province. The Rev. J.B. Rowell, who at the time was pastor of Central Baptist, Victoria, reported that he argued before the attorney general that "our convention does hold to the old ground whereas the other convention has forsaken the historic Baptist position ... Therefore, it was our contention before the Attorney General, that those who maintain their stand on the old ground are still 'Regular,' and consequently have the right to the name and principles which have never been surrendered."71 Attorney General A.M. Manson, himself a "continuing" Presbyterian, was sympathetic to this line of reasoning and refused to take action against the Regular Baptists.72 A sorting process continued over the next year or so as people decided in which camp they belonged. By the end of this process, nearly one-third of the Baptists in the province had aligned themselves with the new denomination and its commitment to defend orthodoxy by separating from any taint or tolerance of modernism. By 1928 the new Regular Baptist convention numbered 1,840 members in twenty-four churches and mission stations. The old Baptist Convention of British Columbia was left with approximately 4,000 members in thirty-four churches and missions.73 Because of Baptist membership requirements, which exclude children and unbaptized adults, the total number of people involved would have been two to three times the membership figures. Thus, the Regular Baptist churches involved about 5,000 to 6,000 people and the old convention 10,000 to i2,ooo.74 Geographically, the new Regular Baptist convention was not equally distributed throughout the province. In Victoria, no existing church left the old convention, but fifty members from First and Emmanuel Baptist churches broke away to form a Regular Baptist congregation, Central Baptist. On the north side of the Fraser Valley, the churches in Maple Ridge and Mission City and the mission station on Nicomen Island joined the new convention. The Thompson-Okanagan region also saw considerable unrest. The fairly strong Kamloops congregation went over to the Regular Baptists, as did the three-point mission charge of Armstrong, Enderby, and Salmon Arm, while in both Vernon and Kelowna a dissident group of about two dozen members formed a Regular Baptist church. Meanwhile, the church in Penticton

92 Pilgrims in Lotus Land suffered tension over the issue for about two years and in 1929 decided on a unique solution: it voted to become an independent congregation to avoid the rupture that alignment with either convention would inevitably cause.75 Vancouver and environs was unquestionably the centre of strength of the new Regular Baptist convention. By 1928, fifteen of its churches and missions, with just under i ,500 members, belonged to the new convention. These churches included fully 80 per cent of the Regular Baptist membership in the province and provided 85 per cent of its financial support.76 Even though their membership in the province as a whole stood at less than half that of the old convention, in Greater Vancouver the Regular Baptists rivalled the mainline Baptists in strength. Their fifteen churches and missions slightly outnumbered the fourteen belonging to the old convention, though the old convention still had more members, with approximately 2,000 compared with the 1,500 in the separating body.77 The Regular Baptist strength in Vancouver in the late 19205 is a clear reflection of the city's considerable fundamentalist Baptist strength, which had existed for at least a decade. In all of western Canada, Vancouver's Baptists exhibited by far the most agitation against Brandon College and the Baptist Union of Western Canada. It was there that the accusations against MacNeill received the most sympathetic hearing, and it was always Vancouver Baptists who expressed the loudest dissatisfaction with the various investigations of the college. By contrast, no formal split in Baptist ranks occurred in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, and in Alberta only three churches affiliated with the fundamentalist Regular Baptist Missionary Fellowship, which was not formed until 1930. The Regular Baptist convention's historian, Prof. John B. Richards of the denomination's theological college, attributes the high proportion of separatist fundamentalists among Vancouver Baptists to two factors: the city's rapid growth, which "resulted in masses of uprooted people" who were open to a more sectarian message; and the influence of American ideas on the West Coast.78 Part of this analysis stands up to scrutiny, but part does not. Certainly, the sect analysis is appropriate to Vancouver. The decade prior to World War I had witnessed massive immigration into Vancouver. Huge numbers could be considered "uprooted," since the city's population grew by nearly five times its size between 1901 and 1921, and that of the adjacent suburbs grew by nearly thirteen times, to 76,000.79 However, the vast majority were not from the prairie provinces as Richards states. So many of these immigrants were British that the city's "proportion of British-born residents doubled in the first

93 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928 decade of the new century" and it gained a strikingly British ambience.80 Many of those with middle-class origins settled on the city's west side, while the east side and nearby South Vancouver became home to thousands of skilled workers, labourers, and other British working-class immigrants. These factors played a major role in the Baptist schism. A strikingly strong majority of Baptist churches in the working-class east side of the city joined the fundamentalist Regular Baptists. In fact, about 90 per cent of the 1928 Vancouver Regular membership belonged to the twelve Regular Baptist churches located east of Cambie Street, which is usually considered the dividing line between the city's east and west sides. By contrast, only about 20 per cent of the old convention's membership belonged to churches east of Cambie Street; the vast majority of its city membership (80 per cent) belonged to churches several of them large and prestigious - in the middle- and upper-class areas on the west side of the city. Pousett notes that the old convention henceforth became largely a middle-class body.8' The 240 members of Ruth Morton Baptist Church in the southeast section of the city were probably typical of the more than i ,300 members of Regular Baptist churches on the city's east side. Almost all lived within several miles of the church in the modest homes on the inexpensive lots typical of the area. Over two-thirds were blue-collar workers or the dependants of blue-collar workers. These were generally not marginalized people, however. Approximately 60 per cent of the blue-collar workers were skilled tradesmen and most of them, even some of the labourers and unskilled workers, owned their homes.82 Rather than being fringe elements of society, most appear to have been part of the quite respectable British working class. It must be noted that some notable exceptions to the east-west geographic split existed. The majority of the members of Jackson Avenue Baptist Church, situated in the poorest area of the city, remained staunchly loyal to the old convention despite the strenuous efforts of their fundamentalist pastor to persuade them to separate.83 On the other hand, four of the seventeen members of the Baptist Missionary Council's first board were still members of the leading oldconvention church, the prestigious First Baptist, Vancouver. The leading fundamentalist Baptist church, Mount Pleasant, was situated just east of Cambie Street but in close proximity to a range of different socio-economic residential areas, including some quite wealthy districts. Mount Pleasant drew from a wide area of the city and did so even more when large numbers of Regular Baptist sympathizers over a hundred in 1926 alone — left old-convention churches on the west side to join it.84 Membership lists are not available, but it is

94 Pilgrims in Lotus Land known that both Mount Pleasant and the smaller fundamentalist Broadway West church, several miles to the west, did have numbers of business and professional members in their ranks.85 It is not difficult to understand why lower-middle-class church members tended to react more to liberal theology than did their uppermiddle-class counterparts. Even though they might be reasonably respectable, their general lack of higher education meant that they had less contact with and less vested interest in the newer trends in scholarly thought. Unlike some of the moderate conservatives, they did not see liberal theology as a sincere though misguided and wrong attempt to grapple with intellectual developments of the previous decades. Instead, such ideas appeared to them as alien forces which, once gaining a foothold at Brandon, would destroy the work of the denomination. Indeed, they used even stronger language, viewing modernists as being deliberately destructive. In its statement of purpose, the Baptist Missionary Council declared modernist teaching to be "calculated to pervert the faith of our young men and women who go to Brandon with a view to preparation for life work on our mission fields and in our churches (my italics)."86 Some of the ministers who left the denomination to form the Regular Baptist convention did have university and seminary training, but over half of those serving in the working-class areas did not. Those among them with university and seminary education had studied at Acadia College in Nova Scotia or in British universities, rather than in the Baptist institutions in Toronto, Rochester, Chicago and Brandon - the institutions favoured by ministers who stayed in the denomination. The aim of the latter group of schools, according to Baptist historian W.E. Ellis, was "to socialize students who, mellowed by culture, refinement, social convention and ivy-covered institutions, would create an environment where sectarianism would diminish and ecumenical cooperation and progress would flourish."87 The experience and concerns of most of the Regular Baptist ministers was decidedly different from that represented by the schools described by Ellis. A few had no formal training at all, but a much larger number had studied at Bible institutes in Vancouver, Toronto, the United States, and Britain.88 The purpose of such training was to produce aggressive evangelists and staunch defenders of conservative Protestant doctrines, not mellowed and cultured graduates sympathetic to ecumenical and nonsectarian movements. These ministers and their lay supporters believed that the priority of the theology department of their own school, Brandon College, should be the training of missionaries and evangelists, rather than academic scholars of religion. The academic honours bestowed upon Prof. MacNeill

95 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917-1928 simply could not compensate for the failure of the college's theology department to train men who would "take up the work in many needy places."89 Evangelism, then, whether of urban masses or isolated rural settlers, was the chief concern of the separatist Baptists. Pousett, whose account is more sympathetic of the old convention, confirms this. He notes that one of the most significant losses for this mainline body as a result of the schism was a reduction in its evangelistic thrust. The fundamentalists were more active and vigorous evangelists; they "tended to be a little more enthusiastic and ready to proclaim their faith openly. "9° The fundamentalists frequently cited the biblical commands to evangelize and longed for a return to the fervent, revivalistic evangelism of the individual, which had been a hallmark of the Baptist denomination in Canada during its period of vigorous expansion in the late nineteenth century.91 The growth of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto was attributed to the uncompromising doctrinal stand and aggressive evangelistic preaching and activity of T.T. Shields.92 The fundamentalists also looked to the success of Charles H. Spurgeon of the 6,ooo-seat Metropolitan Tabernacle, in London, England (who broke with the British Baptist Union in 1891 in protest over its liberalizing trends) as the model for modern urban evangelism.93 Locally, Mount Pleasant Baptist, which grew rapidly through the fervent evangelistic preaching of A.F. Baker and the extensive evangelistic campaigns in the period after World War I, was an attractive model for Vancouver fundamentalists.94 Conservatives believed that the traditional secularity of Vancouver and its recent massive growth required increased rather than decreased evangelistic fervour.95 Indeed, the conservatives declared on numerous occasions that the great need of the hour was old-fashioned revival, and reports from the churches to their monthly periodical eagerly chronicled signs that "revival fires" might be breaking out. Incidents of fervent prayer meetings, conversions, and baptisms all pointed towards the possibility of a major revival.96 T.T. Shields reported from a 1925 meeting in Vancouver, "There is a great spirit of prayer among the Vancouver brethren, and expectations of the kindling of revival fires."97 To these fundamentalists the academically respectable training offered by liberal colleges such as Brandon produced only spiritual lethargy and "dried up sermons" rather than the longing for revival.98 The second aspect of Richards's analysis - that Baptist fundamentalism was strongest in Vancouver because of the openness to American ideas on the West Coast - reflects a great deal of popular thinking but only partially squares with the facts. Certainly, the separatist funda-

g6 Pilgrims in Lotus Land mentalism of the new Regular Baptist denomination bore all the appearance of being strongly influenced by its powerful American counterpart. For example, Dr French Oliver, whose very significant influence has already been stressed, was an American Presbyterian. Also, the Baptist Bible Union, a continentwide organization of Baptist fundamentalists, had held a rally in Vancouver immediately before the organization of the British Columbia Baptist Missionary Council in 1925. It was well known among its opponents that membership in the council required subscription to the Baptist Bible Union's statement of faith." So even though the formation of the council in British Columbia may have reflected local initiative, it would be difficult to argue that the union's leadership did not exert a strong influence on the situation.100 The old convention's board certainly thought so and produced a pamphlet condemning the council. Among other things, it declared, "The movement, resulting in the organization of the Council, is an importation from the United States ... It certainly is not justified in Be."101 On closer inspection, however, the picture becomes less clear and the separatist fundamentalism among BC Baptists appears more as a segment of a transatlantic fundamentalist movement. The Baptist Bible Union, for example, was not entirely an American movement. Its founding president and "leading spirit" was the English-born Toronto fundamentalist, T.T. Shields, who has been described as "a Britisher of the Britishers, and actually one of the last great Victorians."102 Shields consciously modelled himself on the great English Baptist, Charles H. Spurgeon, and travelled to London on several occasions to preach for Spurgeon in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. His greatest aspiration was to receive a call to become its permanent preacher.103 Shields enjoyed preaching in Vancouver and visited the city twice during the first six months of 1925. He wired back to Toronto, for publication in his Gospel Witness, glowing first-hand reports of the vigorous fundamentalist Baptist activity in the city and of the huge crowds who rallied to the cause.104 In all likelihood, Shields's English orientation helped give him a positive hearing among the vast number of British-born Baptists in Vancouver. He once noted with delight how many former members of Spurgeon's tabernacle he met in Baptist Bible Union meetings on the West Coast.105 It has been noted, by way of contrast, that there was little in common between Shields and William Aberhart of Alberta.100 Although the Regular Baptists of British Columbia never affiliated with Shields's Union of Regular Baptists, his personal visits to the city, the wide circulation of his Gospel Witness, and his congregation's financial support of the Baptist Mis-

97 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928

sionary Council and then the Regular Baptist home missions all attest to his influence in the Vancouver area.107 Within British Columbia itself, no single leader rose to pre-eminence among the fundamentalist Baptists. Instead, a considerable number of ministers, along with some strong laymen, gave leadership to the separatist movement. The ministers' leadership very often played a key role in determining which direction their congregations went on the issue of separation. The sixteen ministers who led in founding the fundamentalist Convention of Regular Baptists did not appear to be defensive against influences from the United States. Indeed, the larger churches, such as Mount Pleasant, would often bring in American evangelists for a series of meetings. However, the make-up of this body of sixteen ministers was decidedly British. Over half of them - nine (56 per cent) - were British-born, compared with the 5,000 (21 per cent) British-born Baptists in the province. Four other pastors were from central Canada, and two were from the Maritimes. Only one came from the United States, and as his brand of fundamentalism was not to the liking of his Broadway West Baptist congregation, he was asked to leave within two years of his appointment. Two other pastors had received all or part of their training in the United States.108 The orientation of the new Convention's flagship church, Mount Pleasant Baptist, was probably best expressed by a member's response when she was asked why her church called the Rev. W.M. Robertson from Scotland in 1927 on the recommendation of T.T. Shields. She replied, "When you looked for 'men of God,' you looked to the Old Country - that seemed to be where they came from."109 If openness to American influences had been a critical factor in the stimulation of separatist Baptist sentiments, one could have expected Alberta's Baptists to have been even more divided than their BC counterparts. In Alberta, the American orientation was far stronger, and the British and central and eastern Canadian orientation weaker, than on the West Coast. Census figures for place of birth provide one measure of this. In 1931, Alberta's relatively large Baptist population (4 per cent of the population compared with 3.3 per cent in British Columbia) included a larger number from the United States. More than 5,000 Alberta Baptists were born in the United States, nearly double the portion of American-born in British Columbia (17 per cent, compared with 9 per cent), but a relatively small population of the Alberta Baptists were British-born (12 per cent compared with 21 per cent). Alberta's number of Maritime-born Baptists was quite small compared with the fairly significant number in British Columbia (5 per cent compared with 11 per cent), and its proportion of Ontario-

98 Pilgrims in Lotus Land born was also smaller (10 per cent, compared with 12 per cent). Despite this, as previously noted, separatist fundamentalism was not as prevalent among Alberta Baptists as it was in British Columbia, and only three churches affiliated with the Regular Baptist Missionary Society when it was formed in 1930. In Saskatchewan, where Americanborn Baptists were also proportionately more numerous than in British Columbia (12 per cent compared with 9 per cent), no such division occurred at all.110 Indeed, in an interesting reversal of Richards's thesis, a fairly plausible argument can be made that liberalism was introduced into western Canada through American influences to a greater degree than separatist fundamentalism was. It certainly is true that in areas of western Canada where American influences were strongest among Baptists, the theological tenor was more likely to be liberal, or moderate, than fundamentalist. The Northern Baptist Convention in the United States contained a stronger liberal element than its Canadian counterparts, and its three most influential seminaries at this time Chicago, Rochester, and Crozer - produced many liberal and radical leaders.1" In 1927 fully twenty ministers serving in the Baptist Union of Western Canada had studied at one of these three institutions. Only one of the twenty was serving in British Columbia, the remainder being in the prairie provinces.112 It is noteworthy that Brandon College's liberal orientation stemmed in large part from its American orientation. The college never did train considerable numbers of pastors, but it nonetheless exerted considerable influence in the prairies, much more than in British Columbia. The 1927 yearbook of the Baptist Union of Western Canada lists only fourteen Brandon graduates serving in the West, of whom eleven were in the prairie provinces and only three in British Columbia.113 Dr Dore S. Sharpe, superintendent of the Baptist Union before World War I and later a member of the faculty at Brandon, recalled the liberal and American orientation of Brandon: Brandon College played a large part in developing a forward looking liberal spirit. The first president, Dr A.P. McDiarmid, was a staunch liberal as was [President F.W.] Sweet (1923, Chicago and Rochester trained). Dr (David) Bovington had taught at the old Rochester Seminary ... Brandon had two liberal scholars both trained at the University of Chicago Divinity School Matthews had been definitely influenced by Rauschenbush, while Dr H.L. MacNeil had been tried for heresy while a professor at Brandon ... Note: Rev. S. Everton, Dr A.A. Shaw, Dr F.W. Sweet, Dr H.F. Waring, Martin Storgaard, Charles St Stone, and H.R. McGill were all graduates of Rochester."4

99 Fundamentalist Baptists, 1917—1928 On the West Coast, the orientation of the BC fundamentalist Baptists is best summed up as fairly cosmopolitan. Unlike Maritime Baptists, for example, there was very little localism. It has been stated that most Maritime Baptists "did not like outsiders telling them what to do, especially Torontonians," since their sense of regional identity was too strong. Thus, fundamentalists such as Shields gained a very limited following in that region."5 However, settlement in British Columbia was simply too recent, and far too high a proportion of its Baptists were immigrants, for strong localism to develop. Its fundamentalists were alienated from the leadership and direction of their own denomination in western Canada and were not adverse whatsoever to looking to outsiders for leadership, whether from the United States, central and eastern Canada or, especially, Britain. All the foregoing makes it clear that it is difficult to make simple generalizations about fundamentalist Baptists in British Columbia. They rejected modernism and clung to traditional doctrines, yet they were strongest in the modern metropolitan centre of the province, the city of Vancouver. They tended to be strongest among the working classes but rejected social gospel solutions to the worker's problems and favoured individualistic salvation. They turned "inward" by erecting creedal barriers against the inclusivist approach of the mainline Baptists but continually demonstrated great concern for a strong "outward" evangelistic thrust. They fervently longed for the next outbreak of a revival of heartfelt religion - all the while adamantly insisting on doctrinal purity. They welcomed American evangelists and organizations but were strongly British in orientation. They looked to Shields of Toronto for a considerable measure of leadership yet formed their own denomination, which never formally affiliated with his. By 1927 the separatist Baptist solution to the modernist challenge had taken concrete denominational shape. That denomination, the Convention of Regular Baptists of British Columbia, and the Baptist groups subsequently separating from it, were to play significant roles in the conservative Protestant movement in the province. At the same time, however, a very different and even more dynamic alternative, but one with surprisingly close affinities, was rapidly establishing itself.

5 The Supernatural Solution: The Pentecostals, 1917-1928

The Pentecostals rejected even more of the prevailing ethos of that society than the separatist Baptists did. On the one hand, they defended the same conservative evangelical doctrines as the fundamentalist Baptists and, likewise, rejected the inclusiveness of the mainline conservatives. Some Pentecostals could even be called "ultrafundamentalists" because of their willingness to accept even more radical measures than other fundamentalists in their defence of evangelicalism. On the other hand, many fundamentalists who became Pentecostals abandoned the determined struggles of the separatist Baptists to purge the denomination of liberalism as a primary strategy in the fight against liberalism. Most significantly, they rejected the view that liberalism, and the rationalist assumptions associated with it, could be defeated by conservative theological scholarship and debate. They relied more on contemporary, personal experiences of the supernatural to validate conservative views of the supernatural origins and content of the Bible. To these Pentecostals, the best means of proving that the rationalist, modernist approach was wrong and of offering certitude to the troubled believer about the truthfulness of the Scriptures was to demonstrate that the kind of supernatural events recorded in the New Testament still occurred. It was their emphasis on the experiences and baptism of the Holy Spirit, as evidenced by glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues," that distinguished Pentecostals in British Columbia from the fundamentalist Regular Baptists. A dramatic surge of Pentecostal growth occurred in the province during the 19205. In 1921 only 247 people claimed Pentecostal affini-

ioi

The Pentecostals, 1917—1928

ties in the census, and only four Pentecostal congregations existed. Two of these, a moderate-sized congregation and a small downtown mission, were in Vancouver. Elsewhere, only Victoria and Prince Rupert had Pentecostal churches, both of which were tiny, struggling congregations. By 1925 the number of Pentecostal churches in Vancouver alone had exploded to ten, and the Victoria congregation had become quite large. Several years later, a large congregation flourished in Nanaimo and a smaller one in Ladysmith, both on Vancouver Island, and churches were established in the Fraser Valley (Abbotsford and Chilliwack), the Okanagan-Boundary region (Penticton and Grand Forks), and in the West Kootenays (Nelson). The 1931 census reported nearly a tenfold increase in Pentecostals in the province to 2,277, most being concentrated in the Greater Vancouver area.1 The actual numbers were in fact much higher, because people's readiness to identify themselves as Pentecostal for census purposes lagged behind their willingness to attend Pentecostal services. One church in Vancouver attracted crowds of more than a thousand with some regularity, and sometimes that many attended services in Nanaimo; several of the other churches were quite large as well. The Pentecostal growth can be attributed to several factors, including a spectacular, highly publicized healing campaign and a desire on the part of some, especially traditional Methodists, to recapture the spiritual experiences of revivalism. However, revival-oriented Methodism was not sufficiently strong to account for the large response to Pentecostalism after 1923. This response was most clearly a reflection of the modernist/fundamentalist struggles in the province, particularly in Vancouver. Not until the atmosphere among Protestants had become charged with ongoing tensions between the opposing camps did many evangelicals look upon Pentecostalism's dramatic claims of supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit as an important bulwark against the claims of modernists. The situation in British Columbia offers dramatic confirmation of the view of one Pentecostal historian that "in an age filled with discordant and capricious theological sounds," Pentecostalism offered a "retreat from the turbulence of doubt and denial."2 While the ongoing polarization in Protestantism created conditions conducive to rapid Pentecostal growth, the catalyst was Dr Charles S. Price, evangelist and faith healer. He held immensely successful crusades in both Victoria and Vancouver in April and May 1923, attracting crowds that overflowed the largest auditoriums in both cities, and he returned again in the spring of 1924. These meetings directly influenced several thousand to join the fledgling Pentecostal movement in these two cities, which then became the bases for expansion into the rest of the province.

1O2

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Price was particularly well suited for the pivotal role he played in the growth of Pentecostalism in the province. His British birth, of which he made much in the intensely British cities of Victoria and Vancouver, removed the potential charge that he was a foreigner.3 After legal training at Oxford, he had moved to the United States. There, following a conversion experience, he became a minister, serving in the states of Washington, California, and Alaska, first as a Methodist and then as a Congregationalist. He had held a position as superintendent of Congregational missions in Alaska and later became well known as a public lecturer, first as a Liberty Loan speaker and then as a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit.4 His speaking style was frequently described in Victoria and Vancouver as eloquent, gracious, and polished. Because of these factors, his meetings were accorded a level of respectability not often experienced by Pentecostal faith healers and he was able to appeal to a wide variety of Protestants, including those in the mainline denominations. Theologically, Price was in a good situation to have an impact on the polarized Protestant community, especially in Vancouver. Until 1921 he had described himself as a modernist, and he later reported that his sermons had never stressed the need for personal conversion but instead emphasized "the social ethics of Jesus."5 But in 1921 he converted to Pentecostalism at meetings in San Jose, California, held by the Canadian evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Price had been attending her meetings in an attempt to gather evidence to use against this "mob psychologist" for a prominently advertised sermon in his large Congregationalist church in Lodi, California.6 Following his conversion, he began to preach theologically conservative Christianity and to emphasize the reality of divine supernatural manifestations. Soon he had embarked on an itinerant evangelistic and healing ministry, which was to last the rest of his life and to make him an important figure in North American Pentecostalism.7 Unlike French E. Oliver, the fundamentalist evangelist who had figured so prominently in the province six years earlier, Price was always described as gracious in his speech. However, he was just as adamantly opposed to theological liberalism. He once described the rationalism of modernism as "nothing more or less than gross unbelief masquerading as higher criticism."8 In his BC meetings he frequently inveighed against evolutionary and higher critical ideas and affirmed traditional Protestant doctrines. In Vancouver he declared that he had "discarded as revolutionary all the evolutionary ideas" that he had once held in favour of a "simple belief in the Scripture."9 Of great importance to those who lamented the decline in traditional evangelism was the fact that he was very gifted as an evangelist. In

103 The Pentecostals, 1917—1928

both cities, thousands responded to his invitations to leave their seats and make their way towards the platform to seek salvation. Price was originally invited to Victoria by the Metropolitan Methodist Church board on the recommendation of its minister, Dr WJ. Sipprell. Upon receiving word of amazing results in connection with Price's work in Roseburg, Oregon, Sipprell had travelled south to investigate. He had attended six services there and returned "greatly impressed" with the "wonderful work, both spiritual and healing."10 Subsequently, the Victoria ministerial association unanimously voted to endorse the campaign, and more than twenty churches actively participated in it." Price described the three-week Victoria campaign of April 1923 as the "best and biggest" he had ever held.12 Pentecostal historians have noted that the Victoria and Vancouver meetings were indeed the most successful of his career, which spanned more than two decades.13 At both afternoon and evening services for the first half of the campaign, the crowds attending severely strained the seating capacity of the Metropolitan Methodist Church. It was estimated that up to 2,000 people sat or stood in the main auditorium while hundreds often jammed the church's overflow rooms. City police were sometimes needed to regulate the crowds of people, reported at up to 1,500, unable to gain access to the building.'4 In response to the unprecedented attendance, the organizing committee secured the 6,ooo-seat Willows Arena for the second half of the campaign, but even its capacity was insufficient for the crowds seeking to see and hear Price. The newspapers reported that there were between 8,000 and 9,000 jammed into the arena some nights, with as many as 4,000 being turned away. On the final night they reported: 'Twice during the evening the crowds outside who could not gain admittance burst the doors open, but they were soon pushed back and the service went on irrespective of the impatient crowd outside."15 The attendance figures indicate that on any single evening during the ten days the meetings were held in the arena, at least 10 per cent (and up to 25 per cent) of the 55,000 people living in all of Greater Victoria and the Saanich Peninsula converged on the site.'6 As a revivalistic evangelistic effort, the campaign was a resounding success. Newspapers reported hundreds of conversions almost every night. Price later wrote, 'There were days when from seven hundred to one thousand persons came to the altar, all under the same conviction of sin."17 What made the meetings so different from other evangelistic campaigns were the spectacular reports of miraculous physical healings. City newspapers gave extensive, detailed, and almost exclusively posi-

104 Pilgrims in Lotus Land tive coverage of the meetings. It is not difficult to imagine how the excitement and curiosity of the public was aroused by the following examples drawn from the Victoria press. On 14 April the front-page headline of the Daily Colonist declared, "Manifestation Shown of Divine Healing," and the subheading read: "Before Tremendous Gathering in Metropolitan Church Persons Physically Afflicted Are to All Appearances Restored at Meetings Held by Rev. Dr Price, Who Ascribes All Power to God." The paper went on to report: A crowded church last evening witnessed a remarkable demonstration of divine healing at the Metropolitan Methodist Church during the service conducted by Dr C.S. Price, the evangelist. About thirty-five persons afflicted with various forms of diseases and bodily ailments testified that the pain with which they had been suffering had left them, as they cried with joy "The Lord be praised, Hallelujah, Glory to God." One of the most outstanding cures was that of a dumb boy who, after Dr Price had prayed over him, said two words, "praise" and "yes," the great congregation manifesting its satisfaction by hearty applause, while many in the audience waved their handkerchiefs and shouted praise to God."'8 Daily reports of amazing events continued. Cripples were said to be walking, the blind seeing, and the deaf hearing. On 18 April the Victoria Daily Times reported: Rev. WJ. Knott, a well-known Victorian, told his friends after the close of the service that he had been cured of goitre from which he had been suffering for years ... Mr Knott's cure was perhaps the most striking that Dr Price has effected here. After Dr Price had prayed over Mr Knott, who is an elderly man, he fell backward and lay on the platform moaning. When he arose he declared that his goitre had left him entirely. A most pathetic scene was witnessed at the end of the service, when Mr Knott ... was greeted by his sons. One of the sons hastened down the aisle as fast as he could wend his way through the crowd and embracing his father, kissing the place where the goitre had been. Both of Mr Knott's sons were excited over the remarkable healing, as their father, it is alleged, had not long to live, the goitre already commencing to strangle him.'9 A week later the Rev. Knott appeared on the evangelist's platform to testify that all symptoms arising from his goitre had left him. That same evening his sister came forward for prayer for a similar malady, and the next day the Daily Colonist recounted: "When she came to the platform there was a noticeable protrusion from her neck, and she

105 The Pentecostals, 1917-1928

stated that she had a goitre. After being treated by Dr Price, she collapsed upon the platform crying, 'Oh, hallelujah: thank you, thank you.' When she finally rose to her feet the protrusion had disappeared. She embraced her brother, who was sitting on the platform."20 Dozens of other cases of apparent healings were detailed by the two city newspapers during the three-week period, but the most famous was that of Ruby Dimmick, daughter of the Methodist minister the Rev. J.F. Dimmick, whose story circulated far beyond Victoria and whose case later became embroiled in controversy. Several days after the original stories of Ruby's healing appeared, the crowd in the arena was greatly excited by an apparent medical confirmation of it. The Daily Colonist reported of that meeting: "Rev. Dimmick stated that Dr Ernest Hall, who has for some time been treating his daughter, had made a thorough examination of her since she was prayed for by Dr Price and had said that her spine was now perfectly straight and her foot completely healed. Ruby ran onto the platform, and walked about as though nothing had ever been wrong with her. She had been ill for eight years, and one of her legs was several inches shorter than the other. The audience of 7,000 people lustily cheered the young lady and the minister's statement."21 The newspapers repeatedly drew attention to Price's personal eloquence, charm, and grace. In light of such favourable reporting, it is not surprising that he publicly thanked the Victoria press for its coverage. At a farewell banquet he acknowledged the importance of the newspapers' "support and publicity" and "fair and accurate" reporting. It was through the Victoria press, he said, "that I have succeeded in reaching many people."22 Given the widely publicized reports emanating from the massive meetings, it is surprising that the Victoria campaign generated very little public controversy. There are few reports of any people in the city rejecting the claims of miraculous healings out of hand. Most people seem either to have been convinced that truly extraordinary events were indeed taking place or else they kept their views quiet. The liberal Western Methodist Recorder observed: "In Victoria there was apparently a unity of support given him; and if some ministers were less enthusiastic than others they said nothing to discourage a work which in many respects was so remarkable and which was having such a stirring effect upon the churches and the public. Even the most analytical were not antagonistic, but watched with intense interest what was transpiring."23 A report from the Rev. T. Albert Moore, general secretary of the Department of Social Service and Evangelism of the Methodist Church of Canada, seems to indicate he was one of the sceptics who

io6 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

was convinced. He was in Victoria at the time and attended the meetings. As a modern Methodist focusing his work much more on the social aspects of the gospel than on traditional revivalistic evangelism, he expressed some criticisms of aspects of the meetings, especially Price's emphasis on healing at the expense of "enthroning Jesus in all the affairs of life." Nevertheless, he became convinced that the claims of healing were genuine. He wrote to his associate Hugh Dobson: "The Price Evangelistic Meetings obsess every person. He emphasizes Divine Healing. He has been in Victoria for three weeks, and there are some marvellous results. Rev. Dimmick's daughter has been healed of curvature of the spine, her short leg is lengthened and her crooked foot is straightened. I saw her and know she is healed. I also saw many other wonders. It made me think of the times of Jesus, and to wonder whether we are living far beneath our privileges."24 Nearly two weeks after the close of the meetings, the Victoria Ministerial Association passed a resolution to "heartily commend the work of Rev. C.S. Price, Ph.D. as an evangelist to all our churches." It lauded his "fine Christian spirit" and "strong, persuasive and scriptural" evangelistic message and stated that "the prayers offered for the healing of the sick have been answered in many cases that can be verified."*5 In the following weeks and months, Reformed Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist ministers gave glowing descriptions of the heightened religious interest in the city. Price received warm letters describing ongoing revival from several Victoria-area Presbyterian ministers, including W.G. Wilson of First Presbyterian and John Smith Patterson of St Paul's Presbyterian.26 The Rev. Arthur de B. Owen of the Reformed Episcopal Church enthusiastically reported that his church was filled with more than four hundred people on Saturday nights for an interdenominational prayer meeting.27 A similar enthusiasm was shown by seven Victoria Methodists ministers, who (in response to a storm of controversy in Vancouver the following month over the evangelist's claims of divine healings) reported in a letter to the editor of the Christian Guardian: Nearly two months have now elapsed since the campaign closed and we say without reserve, that never have more wonderful and evangelistic results followed any evangelistic effort held in the city ... Never was there known a more beautiful and fraternal spirit among ministers and congregations, and never has it been as easy to get men and women to consider the claims of Jesus Christ upon life and possessions ... Congregations are larger, hundreds have entered the churches upon profession of faith, spiritual life has been quickened, and there is an unusual hungering and thirsting after righteousness.28

107 The Pentecostals, 1917—1928

At about the same time, Metropolitan Methodist Church reported that there were huge responses to altar calls in its Sunday services and that its midweek meetings for prayer were drawing nearly one thousand people, a dramatic increase over the forty before the campaign. One such gathering sent Price a telegram to encourage him as he faced bitter criticism in Vancouver.29 The previous day, Dr W.J. Sipprell had hastened to Vancouver to announce from Price's platform that the Victoria ministers had become more enthusiastic as time passed after the campaign.30 A year later, at the annual meeting of the church's board, it was reported that 128 new members had been received during the year, which was described as "the most successful in the history of the church." At the same meeting the board decided to cancel two Sunday evening services that month in order to allow its members to attend Price's second campaign in Victoria, which was held in May 1924.3' As had been the case with the Oliver campaign of 1917, strong support from a number of respectable, influential churches and the unwillingness of critics to publicize their reservations kept controversy in Victoria to a minimum. Much of the Pentecostal impulse was contained within the mainline churches of Victoria, partly because of the positive view of the Price meetings among many of the leading ministers and partly because of the ongoing revival of religious enthusiasm in the churches. Most of Price's converts and enthusiastic followers were content to remain in their churches, particularly the Methodists. Gradually, however, the enthusiasm subsided and the city's mainline churches moved away from permitting exuberant worship. This caused some of those most inclined towards Pentecostalism to leave. They first gravitated towards the small Nazarene church, but when the leadership there did not accept their view that speaking in tongues was the genuine evidence of the infilling of the Holy Spirit, they departed for Victory Temple, the already existing Pentecostal church. This small congregation received such an influx of Methodists, Nazarenes, Salvationists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists that it relocated to a larger downtown auditorium in 1924. The numerical strength of the congregation at the time is not known, but it was large enough to support a short-term Bible school in the fall of 1924. Although the school operated for only two semesters, it graduated forty students in May 1925, many of whom went into the full-time Pentecostal ministry.32 Meanwhile, the April 1923 Price campaign in Victoria had been so remarkably successful in awakening religious interest in the capital city that the Greater Vancouver Ministerial Association had extended an invitation for Price to hold a similar campaign in the mainland city in May. Unlike their Victoria counterparts, however, the Vancouver

io8 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

ministers' invitation was not unanimous.33 While most voted in favour of Price's coming, an incipient liberal/conservative split was evident. The Rev. G.O. Fallis, a liberal Methodist, preached against the concept of faith healing the Sunday before Price arrived,34 while the militantly conservative Baptist Herald printed a strong endorsement of the upcoming campaign. Its editors praised Price's work in Victoria, noting that "the mourners' benches were crowded with sinners repenting and turning to Christ. A great many healings have been reported."35 Despite the early signs of division, the Vancouver meetings also achieved extraordinary results. For a three-week period, crowds often reaching 10,000 jammed the city's 8,ooo-seat arena. Sometimes up to an estimated 5,000 were barred by police and fire officials from gaining entry into the already overcrowded building. The Vancouver Sun took a critical stance towards Price but nevertheless was impressed with the stir he created in the city. A front-page article reported: "Anyone who questions the divine healer as a prize drawing card should have stood outside the arena and seen the thousands pouring in, until at 6 o'clock the police closed the doors and put out stop ropes. Fully 5000 people must have been turned away ... A special call had to be sent into the street car barns for forty extras to handle the crowd ... Evangelistic revivals are no new thing in Vancouver but never has the city been worked up to such a pitch of excitement and religious disention [sz'c]."36 Anticipation had been building in Vancouver, for its newspapers had provided extensive coverage of the amazing events in Victoria. But the Vancouver meetings were sufficiently dramatic in their own right to attract throngs of people. The enthusiastic singing of revivalist hymns by the vast congregations was reported to have literally shaken the building. Reporters were unanimous that Price's preaching was eloquent and powerful and an estimated total between 5,000 and 10,000 responded to it by coming to the front of the arena to seek salvation. On one occasion, the crush of people leaving their seats to move forward was so great that Price had to advise them to wait in order to prevent any injuries. Of course, the hope of witnessing miraculous events, especially physical healing, maintained a climate of fervent expectancy in the crowds. Although prayer and annointing for healing were not emphasized every evening, hundreds claimed to have been healed. Among them were leading citizens such as Malcolm Bell-Irving of a prominent pioneer family. In a letter printed on the front page of the Vancouver Daily World, he described how he had been suffering "frightful sciatic pain for over five years" from war wounds and how, after a whole day spent at the arena, he had "received instant and very decided relief."37

log The Pentecostals, 1917—1928

Mrs Grieve, wife of the Rev. A. Grieve of Ruth Morton Baptist Church, claimed to have been healed of a chronic asthma problem.38 Frequent testimonials of such healings and those of many who had travelled over from Victoria, as well as the sight of hundreds, including prominent city ministers, literally falling to the floor "under the power of the Spirit," kept the excitement at fever pitch.39 Then, one week into the campaign, the latent division over Price exploded into the open to become the most publicized religious controversy of Vancouver's history. On 14 May two city newspapers headlined criticisms of Price by three prominent Vancouver ministers. The Rev. A.E. Cooke, minister of First Congregational Church and chairman of the committee in charge of the Price meetings, totally disassociated himself from the campaign. As president of the Greater Vancouver Ministerial Association, he had initially accepted the chairmanship of the committee on the understanding that it would be primarily an evangelistic campaign, "with questions of physical healing entirely secondary." He was resigning, he said, because "the whole thing has been a gigantic campaign of 'divine healing,'" which threatened to create "a great deal of mental anguish by raising and then dashing the hopes of many who suffered from physical ailments." The paper also featured the opposition of the Rev. G.O. Fallis, a liberal Methodist who had declared himself against the concept of faith healing before Price arrived, and of the Rev. A.S. Lewis, minister of the liberal Fairview Baptist Church.40 The following day the Vancouver Sun published a front-page editorial condemning Price for "fraudulent" clams of healing.4' The Vancouver Daily World, on the other hand, was clearly supportive. For three days straight, it ran huge front-page headlines announcing the backing that Price was receiving from other ministers. On 16 May the bold headline declared, "Criticism Causes Rally to Price," and the article below it reported that forty area ministers had publicly demonstrated their support by sitting with Price on the platform at the arena.42 A Victoria paper identified these ministers as "Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and a few Anglican."43 Meanwhile, a third paper, the Vancouver Daily Province, made the astonishing claim that the number of supportive ministers was actually far higher, "about 200. "44 All three daily newspapers were deluged with letters to the editor on both sides of the issue. The editors declared that they were able to publish only a small fraction of the letters received, yet those printed daily in the Vancouver Sun occupied almost a full page of newsprint.45 To resolve the confusion, the ministerial association struck a committee to investigate the claims of healing.46 Eleven clergymen, eight doctors, three professors, and one lawyer served on the committee

no

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

and investigated 350 of the approximately 6,000 cases in which Price had annointed and prayed for individuals in Vancouver. They also looked at a few claims of healing in Victoria. The committee's report, released in December 1923, sharply criticized Price's claims. It found that of the 350 cases, only 38 had experienced specific or general improvement and only 5 were completely cured. The vast majority either had experienced no improvement or had actually suffered a deterioration, and 39 of the 350 had died since the meetings ended. Significantly, all of the ailments that had been cured or improved were determined to be the type that could have responded simply to mental suggestion or to a patient's improved mental or spiritual outlook. The report rejected any claim of a "supernatural" cure and concluded that any attempt to seek cures apart from "the laws of body and mind as revealed by modern science" was "contrary to good sense, to sound morals and to genuine religion."47 The definite conclusions of the investigating committee did not settle the matter. In fact, both the appointment of the committee and its report engendered ongoing controversy. Its chairman was none other than A.E. Cooke, and its members included G.O. Fallis and A.S. Lewis, who had joined him in public denunciation of Price. Several other members of the committee had also already pronounced their negative conclusions of the faith healer's claims.48 In protest, A.F. Baker of the conservative Mount Pleasant Baptist Church resigned from the committee. Several weeks later, the Baptist Ministerial Association of Greater Vancouver passed a resolution declaring its refusal to cooperate with the committee because of its make-up.49 The Rev. J.R. Robertson, a leading Presbyterian minister, wrote to the ministerial association, stating that because of the composition of the committee, and especially the choice of Cooke as its chairman, its members "can not make an unprejudiced investigation, nor can they have the confidence of the public who are interested."50 Two dissatisfied members of the investigating committee produced a minority report that took issue with the majority on several counts. They were concerned that the 350 cases investigated were drawn largely from those who were disappointed because they had not been healed, and they argued that the proportion reported to have died was far higher in the sample than in the total number receiving annointing and prayer. If the rate of 39 out of 350 was extrapolated for the whole 6,000, they reasoned, the city's death rate would have shown a sharp increase for the year; but instead, government statistics indicated that it had declined slightly from the corresponding periods in 1921 and 1922. The minority report authors also charged that the committee generally had relied on information from parties other

in The Pentecostals, 1917-1928 than the individuals concerned. However, despite the seriousness of these concerns, the most important difference with the majority report was the minority's belief that "God may, and at times does, heal both functional and organic diseases through other laws than those revealed to medical science."5' Another serious and highly publicized challenge to the findings of the majority report was contained in a letter, printed in several newspapers, from the Victoria ministers J.W. Sipprell and J.F. Dimmick. Dimmick's teenage daughter Ruby had been cited in the majority report as an example of someone who had been cured by nothing more than "mental suggestion." In reply, Sipprell and Dimmick charged that the committee had totally misunderstood the young woman's illness. They alleged that none of the committee, in the course of investigation, had spoken to her, to any member of her family, or to any of the medical specialists in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto who had treated her over the previous six years. According to her father, all medical opinion had agreed that her curvature of the spine, shortening of the leg, and bending of the foot at the ankle were due to infantile paralysis and could not possibly have responded to mental suggestion as the report had concluded.52 The division of opinion over the committee's reports put the ministerial association in a dilemma. That body received both the majority and minority reports at a tense, specially called meeting, which, after lengthy discussion, voted to expel the members of the press who were present. Then, after further lengthy debate, the meeting voted to refrain from either endorsing or rejecting the reports. Copies of both were released to the press - but at another specially called meeting the divided ministers decided not to have the reports printed for distribution.53 Thus, the investigation, despite its announced purpose, did not lay the issue to rest. Indeed, both its composition and its report actually increased the controversy in some quarters, and strong differences of opinion continued to polarize many of the religious leaders and laity of the city. By this time, it was becoming clear that a major line of division regarding Price was drawn between theological liberals and conservatives. Not all the opponents of Price can be identified as liberals, nor were all those supporting him clearly known as conservatives; but there is no doubt that the confidence of the investigating committee's majority that medical science had discovered the laws necessary for the treatment of physical disorders and its rejection of other cures displayed the influence of the rationalistic views characteristic of modernism. It is also noteworthy that the opposition to Price was led by significant liberal spokesmen such as Cooke, Fallis, and Lewis.

112

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Cooke had played a significant role in the opposition to the French E. Oliver campaign six years earlier, and Lewis was minister of the bastion of Baptist liberalism, Fairview Baptist. Some liberals were obviously afraid that the Price campaign would lead to a resurgence of theological conservatism in the province as the Oliver campaign had done. One critic made much of the fact that some of the ministers who had been active in bringing Price to Vancouver and Victoria had also been solidly behind French Oliver's fundamentalist campaign.54 As a consequence, the majority of Vancouver ministers refused to sponsor Price's second campaign, which was held in April of 1924. Only the fundamentalist Baptists and the two Pentecostal congregations officially gave it their support. Consequently, even though it drew crowds that almost filled the arena on occasion, the second campaign was generally smaller than the first and generated far less publicity and public controversy.55 At the same time, the liberal ministers' opposition to Price caused a number of their members and adherents to leave their churches. For example, young Harold Davies, a twenty-year-old plumber who had immigrated with his family from England in 1910, was converted as a result of Price's meetings. When his Methodist minister "tried to talk him out of the conversion experience," he left the Methodist church and joined Sixth Avenue Pentecostal Church.56 Similarly, the entire membership of the young women's prayer circle from nearby Mount Pleasant Methodist Church joined the burgeoning Pentecostal ranks as a result of opposition within their church. Many of them had been converted during the Price meetings but had continued to attend Sunday services at Mount Pleasant until the leadership there criticized their fervency of worship.57 For a variety of reasons, Price appealed much more to conservatives. His recent conversion from, and attacks on, theological liberalism, the enormous response to his evangelistic appeals, and his claim that "this is nothing else but a return to old time religion," were all important factors.58 Among the main supporters of Price were the ministers of Vancouver's two largest Baptist churches, First and Mount Pleasant. As described in the previous chapter, these two men, G. Maguire and A.F. Baker, had comprised the conservative minority on the Baptist Union of Western Canada's Brandon College Commission, which had reported earlier in 1923. Two weeks after Price's campaign, sixteen Baptist ministers signed a resolution expressing their "unshaken confidence" in him. In explanation, they cited the great evangelistic success of the campaign, their belief that "a goodly number have been blessed in body, in answer to prayer," and the important fact that Price's "loyalty to the Word of God is above and beyond question." Of

113 The Pentecostals, 1917—1928

the thirteen whose position in the developing Baptist schism can be ascertained, fully ten were part of the fundamentalist group. Included among them were A.F. Baker, A. Grieve, A.W. McLeod, D.G. McDonald, F.W. Auvache, and H.L. Kempton, all of whom later took a leading part in the formation of the new Convention of Regular Baptist Churches of British Columbia.59 The emphasis on the supernatural at the Price meetings contributed to their appeal for many fundamentalists. While supporters varied in their estimation of the laws of medical science, they agreed that these laws could at times be superseded and supernatural healings could take place. As conservatives, they fully accepted the accounts of miraculous events recorded in the Bible and believed that rationalism, or antisupernaturalism, was the truly destructive force behind liberalism. Even the anti-Pentecostal fundamentalist T.T. Shields believed that "Christianity was built on a supernatural book, full of supernatural events manifesting a supernatural Christ calling for the need of a supernatural experience."60 Just six months before Price's arrival in the province, the conservative Baptist Herald of Vancouver had reprinted an article containing views that make it perfectly clear why most fundamentalist Baptists were predisposed to support Price and the concept of faith healing. "Fundamentalism, then," wrote author Curtis L. Laws, "is a protest against that rationalistic interpretation of Christianity which seeks to discredit supernaturalism. This rationalism, when full grown, scorns the miracles of the Old Testament ... laughs at the credulity of those who accept many of the New Testament miracles." He went on to enunciate the conservative belief that "Christianity is rooted and grounded in supernaturalism, and when robbed of supernaturalism it ceases to be a religion."61 In the light of the strenuous battle Vancouver fundamentalists such as Maguire and Baker were leading at that very time against what they saw as the antisupernaturalism being taught at Brandon College, the apparently genuine occurrences of supernatural healings at the arena came as a most welcome affirmation of the credibility of the biblical accounts of the miraculous. This strong conservative support, in addition to the curiosity of the general public, certainly helped encourage attendance in the face of considerable opposition. On the final day of the 1923 campaign, after two weeks of controversy - which raged at a level described as "a white heat"62 - a total of 20,000 crowded into two services at the Vancouver arena, afternoon and evening, and thousands more were turned away.63 However, conservative solidarity on the issue was never complete. Indeed, confusion and division increasingly reigned over it in evangelical quarters. Some dispensationalists had argued from the

114 Pilgrims in Lotus Land beginning that miraculous gifts were not possible in the present age.64 Other conservatives, while believing that miraculous healings were indeed possible, gradually came to the conclusion that Price's methods and claims were not valid. Others accepted the genuineness of Price's claims but reacted negatively to Pentecostal practices such as speaking in tongues, which were more prominent in his 1924 campaign. The fundamentalists' support began to decline when Price spent much more time in 1924 stressing the distinct Pentecostal doctrines of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" and "speaking in tongues," which was seen as the only genuine evidence of this Baptism. Although similar in some respects to his emphasis on the "filling of the Holy Spirit," which had so impressed so many fundamentalists in 1923, these were distinct Pentecostal doctrines that most were not willing to accept. Consequently, by the end of his second campaign, most fundamentalist ministers in Vancouver had dropped their support for Price and Pentecostalism. But they had supported him and his beliefs for too long for their change of mind to be received calmly by their congregations. Many church members had fully accepted Price's teachings and did not respond favourably to their ministers' abandoning him. The result was that many hundreds of fundamentalists, mostly Baptists, joined the swelling Pentecostal ranks. The Rev. Andrew Grieve and his congregation at Ruth Morton Baptist Church provide a good illustration of both the depth of fundamentalist support for Price and of the changing views towards him. Grieve was a leader of the militant conservatives in the developing Baptist schism, and his church was one of the first to withhold funds from the denomination in order to exert financial pressure on its leadership.65 He was heavily involved in the 1923 Price campaign, and city newspapers took note of his wife's claim of being healed of asthma and publicized his experience of "falling under the power" on the evangelist's platform.66 In the four months after the meetings, the church's baptismal tank was busy nearly every Sunday as fifty-two of the new converts were admitted into membership in the church by baptism - a very high number for a congregation of only two hundred members.67 The Price campaign deeply influenced Grieve's ministry, and he instituted considerable change in the church, introducing meetings "to be held along the lines of the infilling of the Holy Spirit, also Divine Healing."68 Crowds attending these healing meetings overflowed the church auditorium.69 At several congregational business meetings, he spoke with "great feeling" of the dramatic positive change in the life of the church. The board of deacons concurred with his innovations and passed a motion stating "that we as a board

115 The Pentecostals, 1917-1928 stand behind the four-fold gospel and the teachings practiced by our pastor."70 In March 1924, nearly a year after the first Price campaign, the church fully endorsed the second campaign and cancelled all of services and activities that would conflict with the campaign.7' Grieve's attitude changed and became decidedly negative, however, when Price heavily stressed in his 1924 meetings the distinct Pentecostal doctrine of speaking in tongues as the only genuine evidence of the filling of the Holy Spirit. But Pentecostal support had become widespread in Grieve's congregation, and several of his deacons and many church members began to advocate these new teachings and practices. When Grieve made a public statement against such emphases, five deacons and fifty-nine other adult members and their families responded by withdrawing from the church and joining one of the new Pentecostal congregations in the city.7a Other conservative Baptist churches that had endorsed Price experienced significant losses to Pentecostalism at about the same time, most notably the much larger First Baptist and Mount Pleasant churches and also North Vancouver's First Baptist Church. Exact numbers are not known, but certainly the loss was considerable. Not only were many enthusiastic new members and adherents - converts of the recent campaigns - lost by the Baptist churches, but many ardent, longtime fundamentalists also departed. It is just possible that without these losses, the fundamentalists might have made more headway in their efforts to control the Baptist Convention of British Columbia.™ In the many cases where fundamentalists left conservative churches for Pentecostalism, the differences were not over traditional evangelical Protestant doctrines; they were over methods of defending those doctrines. Even though they accepted significant new innovations in practice and doctrine, the fundamentalists who joined Pentecostalism did not feel they were abandoning their fundamentalism. Many Pentecostals were just as opposed to modernist interpretations of the Bible as the most militantly separatist Baptists were. "I believe in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures," declared one American Pentecostal leader. "I detest and despise ... this higher criticism, rationalism, and this seeking on the part of ungodly professors to do away with objectionable parts of the Word of God, and as fire-baptized people we stand on the whole Book, hallelujah!"74 Such Pentecostals well deserved the title "radical fundamentalists"75 or even "ultrafundamentalists."76 The difference between other fundamentalists and Pentecostals was that the latter argued that there was only one effective argument against "modernist unbelief: a renewal of miracles and the super-

n6 Pilgrims in Lotus Land natural power of God as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Pentecostals did not stress to nearly the same extent the theological argumentation and creedal definition pursued by other conservatives. One Vancouver pastor, a recent convert to Pentecostalism, described the tenacity of modernists by likening them to buzzards, who "cannot be ousted from the Christian church by means of argumentation. Whoever heard of a buzzard being driven from his delicious meal by cold logic?"77 Instead, certitude about the truthfulness of the Scriptures and their portrayal of the supernatural was offered by means of personal experiences of the Holy Spirit. A Pentecostal evangelist visiting Vancouver made the same point. Referring to the fundamentalists' recent refusal to accept the Pentecostal view of the outpouring of the Spirit, he wrote: "I pity the poor fundamentalists. God help them. They have certainly got a hard time of it. I pity any man who is attacking the evil forces of this age without the full armour of God upon him."78 The rift between Pentecostals and other fundamentalists widened rather quickly, and relations between the two parties in Vancouver became like those elsewhere in North America. In 1927 Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, the "flagship" church of the new, fundamentalist Convention of Regular Baptist Churches, chose a powerful anti-Pentecostal spokesman as pastor. W.M. Robertson, a noted fundamentalist from Liverpool, did not disappoint those who believed that his antiPentecostal stand was needed to steady the non-Pentecostal fundamentalists in Vancouver. Indeed, the doctrines of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues were subjected to sharp criticism from his pulpit and pen in terms almost as severe as those reserved for his modernist foes.79 In contrast to the situation in Victoria, the opposition of many ministers, first liberal and then fundamentalist, let to the exodus of several thousand from existing Protestant churches in Vancouver. They left their churches despite Price's explicit admonition in 1924 against "coming out from the churches, or starting of new organizations." The influx of new members into Pentecostalism resulted in the formation of eight new congregations, in addition to the one congregation and one downtown mission previously in existence. As well as the fundamentalists who were attracted by the certainty of belief offered by Pentecostalism, there was other evangelicals, especially those of the Wesleyan-style holiness persuasion, who were drawn to the new movement. H.B. Taylor, pastor of Vancouver's very small Free Methodist Church, abandoned his Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification in favour of Pentecostalism's similar though distinct teaching of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking

117 The Pentecostals, 1917-1928 in tongues. He later recalled his experience in language reminiscent of that used in revivals of other eras: I shall never forget that day, the 2ist of March, 1924, when God baptized me with the Holy Ghost and fire. I was shaken like a reed in the wind. Streams of fire and divine power went through me from head to foot. My whole being was filled with God ... Everything about me was changed, transformed and energized by this mighty baptism. My heart was filled with such divine compassion and tender love as I had never known before. Such a love for the souls of men consumed me that I cared not whether I ate or slept ... The following Sunday when I entered the pulpit the power of God fell in a remarkable way. The whole church came to the altar.80 Despite the displeasure of some Free Methodist members with Taylor's new teachings, hundreds of Price's converts and members from other churches poured into the church, attracted by the new emphasis and the enthusiastic worship.8' The name Pyramid Temple was adopted after Taylor and his followers left the Free Methodist denomination, and for several years after 1925 it was the largest Pentecostal church in Vancouver. The congregation erected an i ,8oo-seat tent on property it had purchased in the city's Mount Pleasant district, and with vigorous promotion and enthusiastic services, including an orchestra that could be heard blocks away, filled it every evening for several months.82 In 1926 the Pyramid Temple congregation was split by divisions over the 'Jesus Only" controversy. H.B. Taylor began to espouse the doctrine, which was growing within Pentecostalism continentwide, that there was only one person in the godhead -Jesus Christ - and that the terms, "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit" were only "titles" to describe aspects of Christ's person. This teaching had been popularized locally during a 1925 campaign in Vancouver by the Pentecostal evangelist William Booth-Clibborn, grandson of the Salvation Army's founder.83 The division caused a severe decline at Pyramid Temple as hundreds of its more orthodox members departed for other Pentecostal congregations. All other Vancouver area Pentecostal churches, with the exception of a small mission in downtown New Westminster, rejected the Jesus Only movement. Meanwhile, Sixth Avenue Pentecostal Tabernacle, which had been the major Pentecostal church in Vancouver before the Price campaign, grew in the years after it, but not as dramatically. In early 1923, just months before Price's first Vancouver campaign, the majority of the tabernacle's members had left their rented downtown meeting place and had purchased the building of Sixth Avenue Methodist

118 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Church in Kitsilano, where the tabernacle drew between four and five hundred people to its services. However, it did not grow nearly as rapidly following the Price campaigns as some of the newer Pentecostal congregations that sprang up after 1924. Although it received a large influx of new converts from the campaigns, pastoral instability and internal divisions stunted growth, so that at six or seven hundred, it was less than half the size of the largest Pentecostal congregation in the city.84 However, despite its inner turmoil, Sixth Avenue Tabernacle became the "mother" church of a number of Pentecostal churches in the province. A pool of young workers, converted in the Price meetings and sometimes partially supported by the Vancouver church, were instrumental in establishing churches in other areas of the province. These young evangelists, often at least partially self-supporting, spread into outlying areas, zealously spreading the message of Pentecostalism. They were most influential in nearby parts of Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley, but they had spread into the southern interior by the late 19205 and throughout the province by the end of the 1930s.85 The downtown remnant that the members departing for Sixth Avenue Tabernacle had left behind eventually developed into another significant Pentecostal church. These members had opted not to relocate to Kitsilano with the majority because they equated the oak pews, stained glass, and pipe organ of the former Methodist building with the formalism of the religious past they had abandoned. But by 1928, after a complicated merger and schism, this group relocated to east Vancouver and took the name Foursquare Gospel Temple. Firmly under the authority of Aimee Semple McPherson and her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, headquartered in Los Angeles, the church grew significantly and encouraged the formation of other Foursquare congregations.86 The remaining churches of Vancouver's total of ten Pentecostal churches were not as large. The original Pentecostal mission, established in 1907, was still functioning as a downtown mission without a stable family-oriented congregation. Only decades later did it move out of the downtown core and become a sizable congregation. The other five congregations were initially independent, but three of them eventually affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Pentecostal churches did not begin keeping membership records for a number of decades, so it is difficult to analyse the new movement's social and economic characteristics with any degree of precision. However, it appears that apart from a few significant exceptions, most of the new members were young and were of a lower socio-economic

ng The Pentecostals, 1917-1928

status.87 Most of the Pentecostal churches were in the largely workingclass area east of Cambie Street or in rented storefronts or upstairs halls in the downtown area. The main exception was Sixth Avenue Tabernacle in the west-side Kitsilano district, but it eventually relocated to East Broadway so that it could better reflect the geographical distribution of its membership. An analysis of those leaving the fundamentalist Ruth Morton Baptist Church provides the most complete list available and gives an intriguing look at one group of Pentecostals. The departing group included most of the church's younger, more recent converts but also quite a number of its highly committed, long-term members. Most were bluecollar workers, as was typical of the church's general membership, but the leader of the departing group was the church's wealthiest member, an accountant owning one of the most valuable homes in the area.88 The explosive growth of Pentecostal membership in Vancouver was aided by the tremendous diversity evident within the movement. Donald Klan explains that the widely varying backgrounds and expectations of the membership of early Pentecostalism resulted in a great variety of "diverging standards, practices, and expectations." "Such issues as theological orthodoxy, pastoral responsibility, and church polity caused repeated divisions resulting in a further proliferation of new assemblies."89 Until approximately 1928, the great range of practices and expectations among Pentecostals led to considerable instability, which was characterized by sharp increases and declines in attendance in particular congregations and repeated splits and mergers. Soon, however, a measure of stability began to emerge as those favouring differing emphases sorted themselves out into various groupings. The best indication of this stability was the organization of the British Columbia District of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada in July 1928. Ten churches in the province affiliated with the major national organization of Pentecostal churches at that time. The largest of these were Sixth Avenue Tabernacle in Vancouver and Victory Temple in Victoria. Other churches affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies in 1928 existed in Nanaimo, Ladysmith, Prince Rupert, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Penticton, Grand Forks, and Nelson. Likewise, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the episcopally governed body under the control of Aimee Semple McPherson, emerged as a fairly substantial grouping of Pentecostals and by the late 19205 had established four churches in the province: two in Vancouver, one in Victoria, and one in Penticton.90 In addition, the large Pentecostal population of Vancouver supported several independent congregations, which offered other differences in theo-

12O Pilgrims in Lotus Land

logical emphasis and style, thereby increasing the diversity within Pentecostalism. By 1928 British Columbia, and Vancouver in particular, had become the home of a dynamic Pentecostal movement. Price's uniquely powerful evangelistic and healing campaigns of 1923 and 1924 alone account for the interest of thousands of people, especially those longing to recapture the experiences of revivalism of an earlier era. But Pentecostalism in British Columbia must also be considered as part of the bitter fundamentalist protest against religious modernism which wracked Vancouver churches for much of the 19205. Even though Pentecostalism's experiential and doctrinal innovations sometimes pushed it to the outer limits of evangelicalism, it was still fully a part of evangelicalism. Innovation in worship and experience was not the prime motive of many Pentecostals but was merely a by-product of a more conservative desire. It was a desire on the part of many Vancouver evangelicals for certitude of doctrine, a desire often born in the intense fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which led to their acceptance of Pentecostalism's innovative experiences.

6 The Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928-1941

In 1935 J. Edwin Orr, the well-known Irish revivalist and evangelist, travelled Canada from coast to coast to assess the state of evangelicalism in the country. His observations led him to conclude that it was in the healthiest condition in Ontario and Alberta. Toronto was "the most Evangelical city in Canada," and the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta was "a prime factor in the hope of revival in the Dominion." In contrast, Orr was not impressed with what he saw in British Columbia. In Vancouver, he found "many dead, liberal churches carrying on with a 'social club' programme." Yet the evangelical churches were not providing a satisfactory alternative, because they were badly disunited. On Vancouver Island, conditions were no better, he said. Victoria was a 'Very sleepy place, especially spiritually. Lethargy has seized hold of most of the churches." The rest of the province suffered a dearth of evangelical churches: "There are huge areas without a true gospel witness."1 Margaret Ormsby, whose 1958 general history of British Columbia remained the dominant work on the province for three decades, indirectly confirmed Orr's gloomy assessment of religious prospects on the West Coast. She portrayed Vancouver at the beginning of this period, in the year 1929, as a city in which a spirit of materialism held sway: "The spirit of the city was still, as it had been at the beginning, predominantly materialistic. An eager, grasping, acquisitive community, it squandered its own resources of natural beauty, all the time extending its economic power until it held most of the province in fee."2

122 Pilgrims in Lotus Land The Great Depression did not bring a general religious revival, apart from some brief excitement associated with the Oxford Group,3 and the mainline Protestant denominations retrenched and closed churches in many parts of the province. Among evangelicals, the spirit of separatism evident in the Baptist schism of 1927 continued unabated in Vancouver and environs, resulting in several more dramatic and bitter schisms. Although some strong evangelical congregations were developing in Victoria, the capital city became increasingly peripheral in many respects to much of the evangelical activity in the province. Furthermore, in many of the towns scattered throughout the interior and north of the province, no explicitly evangelical churches existed. At the same time, however, developments were taking place in conservative Protestantism that were not evident to Orr. A significant broadening and strengthening of the base that had been laid in the previous decade took place between 1928 and 1941. Three of these developments were of particular importance. First, the divisive spirit in Vancouver so deplored by Orr was actually responsible for some of the growth. New congregations, which eventually formed the basis of several additional streams of Baptists, emerged from the schisms that continued to rack the Convention of Regular Baptists after 1927. The first split occurred in 1928 when nearly half the congregation of the new denomination's largest church, Mount Pleasant Baptist, left to form the independent Metropolitan Tabernacle. This highly militant and separatistic church soon began attracting congregations of more than a thousand. The Regular Baptists suffered further substantial losses, including the remainder of Mount Pleasant Baptist, as a result of a schism in the mid-thirties. Despite the bitter divisions, however, and indeed partly because of them, the Baptist population of British Columbia grew faster between 1931 and 1941 relative to general population than anywhere else in Canada.4 A second development that escaped Orr's attention was perhaps even more significant. Between 1931 and 1941 the number of Pentecostals enumerated in the province increased 130 per cent, from 2,277 to 5,235-5 By 1941 the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC) had established at least one church in all but one region of the province. Despite deep financial depression, which caused mainline denominations to close some churches and struggle to keep others open, the PAOC opened many new churches, and the number of its affiliated congregations soared from nine in 1928 to sixty-six in 1941.6 It was the first explicitly conservative denomination to establish a provincewide network of churches.

123 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941 A third factor not recognized in Orr's gloomy assessment was the beginning of the immigration of large numbers of non-Anglo-Saxon evangelicals, who were later to form one of the largest components of the conservative Protestant population. The most numerous of these groups was known as the Mennonite Brethren, a group that became established in the province as a result of a wave of Mennonite immigration, beginning in 1928. Of all the different Mennonite groups, the Mennonite Brethren was the most unambiguously evangelical and revivalistic. Significantly, British Columbia was the only province in which the the majority of the Mennonite population belonged to the Mennonite Brethren. In fact, by 1950 British Columbia had become the home of the largest concentration of Mennonite Brethren in North America. This unique feature eventually led to a greater identification of most of the province's Mennonite population with the goals and values of the wider evangelical population rather than with its own ethnic heritage. In addition to the above three developments, which will be expanded on in this chapter, the organizations and institutions associated with mainline conservatives continued to increase between 1928 and 1941. Vancouver Bible Training School enrolments, both fulland part-time, exceeded one hundred on several occasions in the 1930s.7 The Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at University of British Columbia - strongly encouraged by Walter Ellis and by a steady flow of CIM missionaries en route to and from China - remained active and vital throughout the 19305, in contrast to the general decline on other campuses in western Canada.8 The British Columbia Evangelical Mission grew in the 1930$ and peaked in the early 19405 with fourteen stations.9 In addition, a new organization, the British Columbia Sunday School Mission, was founded in 1929. It was an evangelistic organization that was launched in order to bring vacation Bible schools and Bible correspondence courses to children living in isolated areas of the province's interior. Margaret Eraser, a graduate of Vancouver Bible Training School, founded the mission and its board was led by the Rev. Walter Ellis and was composed largely of mainline conservatives, though it included two separatist Baptists and a Plymouth Brethren. The mission flourished for fifteen years and in that time utilized a total of approximately 150 students of the Bible institute as summer workers in nearly every corner of the province.10 In 1944 it became part of the Canadian Sunday School Mission, which was the most prominent evangelical organization working with children in western Canada.11

124 Pilgrims in Lotus Land BAPTIST SCHISMS AND GROWTH

Metropolitan Tabernacle

The most visible development in the period was the division of Vancouver's Mount Pleasant Baptist Church and the establishment of the nearby Metropolitan Tabernacle. The tabernacle's size, vigour, and uncompromising insistence upon separation from the world made it the most prominent centre of resistance to modernism in the province. The militancy of its stands against liberalism and against many other positions rendered its tone more similar to that of American fundamentalism than anything found elsewhere in the province. Unquestionably, the dominating force of Metropolitan Tabernacle was the personality of the Rev. W.M. Robertson.12 Born in Scotland to a Presbyterian home in 1883, he began working in a machine factory in Glasgow as a youth. He soon involved himself in the labour movement and became an aggressive socialist speaker, developing a forceful and controversial platform style, which he always retained and used to advantage. Christianity had been one of the targets of his verbal attacks, but he was converted at a Glasgow evangelistic meeting while in his early twenties. He enrolled in the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow and emerged an itinerating evangelist and, later, a Baptist preacher. In 1919 he became pastor of the large Toxteth Baptist Tabernacle in Liverpool, where he established a widespread reputation as a fearless, controversial fundamentalist. After eight years in Liverpool, during which time he undertook evangelistic tours of Australia, New Zealand, and North America, Robertson resigned to accept a call to Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Vancouver. As noted earlier, one member of the congregation later remarked that it was natural the congregation should look to Britain for leadership. "When you looked for 'men of God,'" she explained, "you looked to the Old Country - that seemed to be where they came from."'3 Robertson had built a reputation in Liverpool for his "forceful and plain exposure of the attack that is being made today against 'the Faith once for all delivered to the Saints.""4 Apparently T.T. Shields had recommended the fiery Scotsman to the church's board as a suitable "contender of the faith" for the pulpit of the province's leading fundamentalist church.15 Robertson had become so well known throughout Britain that at the time of his departure from Liverpool, F.B. Meyer of Christ Church, London, wrote, "You will leave quite a wide gap behind, and we shall miss your strong, noble advocacy very much."16 The new preacher was successful in drawing large crowds that

125 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928-1941 packed the auditorium of Mount Pleasant, but his pastorate there was a short and stormy one. It began in September 1927 and ended only ten months later, in July 1928, when he and more than 200 adult members and their families withdrew from the church. Almost immediately, Robertson and his followers, who amounted to nearly half of Mount Pleasant's pre-schism membership of 500, began holding services in the nearby Broadway Theatre. Three and a half years later, they completed a building with a seating capacity of i ,000 located in a residential district only three blocks west of the Mount Pleasant Church and a short distance east of the site on which the new Vancouver city hall was to be completed several years later. The division of their largest church created consternation among Regular Baptists, because the customary doctrinal issues, which pitted conservatives against liberals, were not at stake. The editor of the BC Baptist lamented, "We are saddened also when we consider that the division was not due to difference of opinion on the great doctrines of the faith."'7 Instead, at the heart of controversy was the question of separation from the "world" and any apparent form of worldliness. According to Robertson and his flock, both the separatist Convention of Regular Baptist Churches and Mount Pleasant Baptist, the first church to separate itself from the old convention, were still too accommodating with worldly ways. One of the main purposes of their new church, they declared, was "to emphasize the neglected truth of separation from the world on the part of believers.'"8 This heightened concern for separation centred on four issues. First, Robertson and a number of fundamentalist Baptists distrusted the move towards denominational consolidation that was evident in the new Convention of Regular Baptists. The majority of EC'S Regular Baptists were separatists only in their desire to separate from modernism and the tolerance of modernism. They were still denominationalists wanting to see the development of a full-orbed denominational structure, including a missions board and other common ventures in areas such as church planting, publications, Christian education, womens' work, and youth work. Richards notes that in the eyes of a substantial minority of fundamentalist Baptists, however, any form of centralization represented an accommodation with worldliness. They felt that it could eventually lead either to the unwilling complicity of the churches in the promotion of doctrinal heresy, as had occurred in the case of Brandon College, or to the submission of the local congregation to an outside, human authority in important matters. They argued that the safest organizational bulwark against all types of worldliness, including modernism, was the independent local congregation free of denominational authority in any form.'9

126 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Robertson was the most radical example of this independent attitude found in the province, and in 1931 he led Metropolitan Tabernacle in its affiliation with the militantly separatist organization, the Independent Fundamental Churches of America.20 He contributed regularly to the latter's monthly publication, the Voice, and was its president in 1945 and 1946.2' Robertson's separatist mentality was undoubtedly influenced by a desire to emulate Charles H. Spurgeon and to model his ministry after that of the great preacher who had separated from the Downgrading movement among British Baptists. According to Robertson's son, he idolized Spurgeon and kept a large portrait of him on his study wall.22 His heavily British congregation must have shared something of his view of Spurgeon, since they agreed that the name of their new church, its purpose, and to some extent even its architecture should all be patterned after Spurgeon's church in London.23 Secondly, according to Robertson, Mount Pleasant Baptist's (and all Regular Baptists') practice of congregational government was worldly. It did not provide the pastor, the church's spiritual leader, with enough authority, much of which remained with the congregation and its officers.24 To the independent-minded Robertson, such constraints on his authority stood in the way of "an aggressive and spiritual ministry." He made it abundantly clear that he would tolerate no organizational or human (and thus worldly) restrictions on his methods and preaching.25 In this regard, Robertson was unique in British Columbia. He was the only high-profile conservative in the province who conforms to David Elliot's image of fundamentalism as characterized by highly authoritarian and individualistic leaders who built their religious empires around their charismatic personalities.26 Most other evangelical leaders worked within a system of congregational or denominational authority. Thirdly, Metropolitan Tabernacle's separation from the world included separation from "worldly methods of raising money."27 Robertson adamantly disagreed with the practice of many churches, including Mount Pleasant Baptist, of raising funds by incurring mortgages or any other form of debt. Such a practice, he and his followers believed, expressed a greater confidence in the financial system than in God, and went against the scriptural injunction to "owe no man any thing."28 A congregational meeting in 1931 unanimously approved the motion that "the church do not incur any mortgage on the new building."29 Putting this principle into practice required tremendous financial sacrifice on the part of the church's membership. In just over three years, which included the first two years of the Depression, the new congregation contributed a total of over 563,000 towards their building in order to complete it debt-free.30

127

Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

The fourth and final issue pertaining to separation in the schism was the question of the indulgence of the youth of Mount Pleasant Baptist in unspecified "worldly amusements." Robertson held an extremely restrictive view of the role of amusements in his personal and family life and expected his church members to follow his example. His view of separation from the world necessitated "a firm stand against all amusements."3' He led the members of Metropolitan Tabernacle in the adoption of a doctrinal statement that included the article: "We believe in the need of a holy walk and conversation on the part of professed believers and their separations from worldly and questionable amusements."32 Throughout the 19305 and well into the 19405, Metropolitan Tabernacle continued to be the most visible centre of fundamentalism in British Columbia. Modernism remained the chief enemy, and Robertson never hesitated to do battle with it. Sunday evening services were his favourite battleground, and his fiery, often sensational, oratory and use of special features attracted large audiences, which regularly packed the tabernacle. He brought in well-known fundamentalist leaders such as T.T. Shields, Oswald Smith, P.W. Philpott, W.G. Scroggie, and Charles Fuller. Sometimes he dared his opponents to appear on his platform to debate him and several did, including his cousin, the Rev. Andrew Roddan of Vancouver's First United Church.33 Robertson published a number of his sermons in books and pamphlets. Much of their polemical power is retained in the written form. 'The Disastrous Results of Dethroning Revelation!" - the last chapter of The Bible at the Bar (1930) - provides a good illustration of his views and style. He derided "specious, sentimental platitudes about charity," which blinded people "to the issues at stake." What really was at issue, he argued, was the future of Christianity: "Were the principles of modernism to prevail, it would mean nothing less than the overthrow of all that has been understood by Christianity since the days of the apostles." In response to arguments that not all modernists were the same, he thundered, "It is idle to talk of degrees. There are degrees - but they are degrees that mark the stages of the progressive denial of the supernatural ... All objective standards of authority are repudiated and every man becomes a law unto himself." Regarding the social gospel, he argued, "Modernism talks proudly of 'applied Christianity,' but there can be no applied Christianity unless there can be a Christianity to apply." He concluded, "Modernism is not Christianity. It evacuates the faith of its real content and offers the world a miserable counterfeit."34 Modernism remained the major, though not the only, target of Robertson's oratorical fire. In the 19405 he joined T.T. Shields's

128 Pilgrims in Lotus Land crusade against what he viewed as the unwarranted influence of the Roman Catholic Church on governmental policy in Canada,35 and he organized a Vancouver branch of the Shields-led Canadian Protestant League, which attracted to its meetings up to 500 people, half of them members of Metropolitan Tabernacle.36 Robertson's guns were also frequently trained against his fellow conservative Protestants. Pentecostalism's teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues was subjected to criticism from his pulpit and pen almost as severe as that reserved for his modernist foes.37 Indeed, some people speculate that his strong anti-Pentecostal reputation was a major reason why Mount Pleasant Baptist invited him to post-Price Vancouver. In the wake of the large Baptist losses to the Pentecostal movement in the mid-igaos, it had been felt that a firm voice was needed to steady the non-Pentecostal conservatives.38 The Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit also increased the divisiveness of eschatology as an issue among Vancouver's evangelicals. The strongly dispensationalist Robertson lashed out at contending views. Postmillennialism was, not surprisingly, dismissed as being equivalent to the social gospel propounded by the modernists. However, nondispensationalist premillennialists also came under considerable fire for "refusing to rightly divide the Word of Truth."39 This created tension between Robertson and Walter Ellis, who was not a dispensationalist and refused to restrict the Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS) to a dispensationalist position. As the only Bible school in British Columbia in the 19305, VBTS was an attractive option for the large number of young people affiliated with Metropolitan Tabernacle. Yet Robertson decidedly favoured the dispensationalist Prairie Bible Institute of Three Hills, Alberta, and advised the youth of his church to enrol there rather than at Ellis's "unsound" school.40 He also made sure that church members who were Prairie Bible Institute graduates going out as missionaries received the lion's share of the tabernacle's substantial missionary offerings.4' To his displeasure, however, numbers of his young members did attend classes at VBTS because of its convenient location and because of Ellis's warm encouragement of their extensive work in local evangelistic efforts.42 Compounding Robertson's frustration, one of the tabernacle's leading laymen, Oswald Smith, became president of the VBTS council in 1Q42.43 Robertson could not prevent such involvement by his membership, but his obstinacy on this issue contributed to the eventual decline of his influence. Robertson's strident, controversial, and authoritarian leadership raises questions about the kind of congregation attracted to Metropolitan Tabernacle. Perhaps surprisingly, the overwhelming impres-

12Q

Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

sion gained from the sources is of the tremendous enthusiasm and vitality of the membership from 1928 into the early 19405. People eagerly crowded into the i ,ooo-seat building for the Sunday evenings services, sometimes lining up as much as an hour early outside to ensure themselves of seats.44 The membership tripled from 211 in 1928 to over 600 ten years later.45 The congregation has been described as "family oriented," but young people, especially, were attracted to the services.46 Some of them were converted and baptized at Metropolitan Tabernacle, but many came from other city churches, drawn by the excitement generated during the tabernacle's first decade. Large numbers of the congregation's youth actively involved themselves in missions, such as the British Columbia Evangelical Mission and the British Columbia Sunday School Mission, and others went to foreign fields with a variety of mission boards. In addition, the church's young people, along with other members, supported and staffed three of the congregation's outreach Sunday schools and adult services in outlying areas.47 The financial commitment of the congregation matched its enthusiasm in other areas of church life. Over and above the 563,000 donated by the members in the first three years of the church's existence, their donations to the regular budget, and especially to missions, was at a higher rate per member than that of Mount Pleasant Baptist, which was financially the strongest of the Regular Baptist churches.48 Many members acknowledged that Robertson's style of leadership was authoritarian and abrasive, and by the mid-i94os most had departed because of it. In the meantime, however, huge numbers were attracted by his vigorous evangelistic preaching and the vibrancy evident in every aspect of the church, especially in its outreach programs. People were eager to become part of a congregation that appeared to be so effective in spreading the gospel to the city and beyond.49 The Metropolitan Tabernacle congregation was a remarkably diverse group in terms of social and economic standing. Many of the members were younger people employed as clerks, apprentices, or unskilled labourers. However, in 1932 two of the members possessed enough wealth to make anonymous donations of 510,000 each towards the new building.50 The original adult membership of just over two hundred differed in social standing from both the predominantly middleclass Fairview Presbyterian congregation a short distance to the west and the more working-class Ruth Morton Regular Baptist congregation to the southeast. In the mainline conservative Fairview congregation, white-collar workers and their dependants outnumbered their bluecollar counterparts by approximately two to one. In the separatist Ruth Morton congregation, the ratio was reversed and the blue-collar

130 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

workers predominated by a two-to-one margin. In contrast, the Metropolitan Tabernacle congregation was more heterogeneous; blue- and white-collar workers were almost evenly represented. Approximately one-quarter were professionals, managers, or owners of their own businesses. Another quarter were employed at other white-collar occupations, mainly clerical and sales. The blue-collar workers and their dependents were similarly split nearly equally between skilled and unskilled workers.5' The geographical distribution of the membership also indicates considerable social diversity and breadth. Members lived in every area of the city, and a few travelled in from the suburbs of Burnaby, New Westminster, and the North Shore. The proportion from the typically middle- and upper-class west side of the city roughly equalled that from the generally working-class and lower-middle-class east side.52 The broad occupational and geographical spectrum represented in the congregations makes it difficult to pinpoint any particular social base of separatist fundamentalism in Vancouver. Although the congregation has been described by observers as heavily British, it displayed remarkable similarity to the urban American fundamentalist congregations, which Joel Carpenter suggests were marked by social and economic diversity.53 Metropolitan Tabernacle's size and influence peaked in the early 19405. Membership stood at 645 and approximately 700 attended Sunday morning services, which were broadcast over radio station CJOR. Crowds upwards of i ,000 regularly filled the building on Sunday evenings. However, a marked decline occurred in the mid-ig4os from which the church never recovered. The decline was largely the result of unrest over Robertson's authoritarian leadership, which culminated in a dispute over his adamant refusal to give up control over the allocation of the church's large missionary offerings. Although he managed to win a vote of confidence at a congregational meeting, some of the strongest leaders and most vigorous evangelists left the church. They scattered to a wide variety of other city churches, which included several Regular Baptist and Plymouth Brethren congregations, Fairview Presbyterian Church, and a small independent congregation begun by some young dissidents.54 Metropolitan Tabernacle indicates both the strength and limits of militantly separatistic fundamentalism in the province. Robertson's views and style of leadership certainly appealed to crowds of people, and he was able to generate considerable enthusiasm and evangelistic activity; but once disillusionment with his personality set in, the church was never able to regain its size and strength. The fifteen years of Robertson's ascendancy, although spectacular, were not represents-

131 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

live of most conservative evangelicals in the province. We will turn now to several groups which, although less spectacular, in the long run attracted and retained far more people than the militantly separatist Metropolitan Tabernacle. Regular and Independent Baptists

The newly organized Convention of Regular Baptist Churches of British Columbia expanded significantly on Vancouver Island in this period. However, in the Vancouver area it continued to experience the problem of separatism within its ranks after the Mount Pleasant schism of 1928. At its founding in 1927, the Regular Baptist convention was mostly a regional group of churches centred on the Lower Mainland with a few in the southern interior. It included no churches on Vancouver Island, since none there had left the mainline Baptist convention to join it. However, within several months the Rev. J.B. Rowell, at the request of the Regular Baptist convention's board, commenced work in Victoria with several fundamentalist families who had withdrawn from the mainline First Baptist Church. The new church, Central Baptist, quickly grew to become one of the larger Regular Baptist churches in the province, often filling its 45o-seat auditorium, which was completed in igag.55 Between 1931 and 1939 the church operated a part-time Bible school on Tuesday evenings, offering courses in Greek, Hebrew, public speaking, and Bible, and enrolling up to sixty-seven students. In addition, during the 19305 the church assisted in the establishment of several other Regular Baptist churches and branch works on Vancouver Island, at Brentwood Bay, Luxton, Langford, Sidney, and Duncan.56 For thirty-one years, the English-born and -raised Rowell provided very capable leadership for the fundamentalist cause in Victoria. From 1909 to 1912 he had itinerated throughout Britain as a "Wycliffe preacher" with the Protestant Truth Society, working against perceived Roman Catholic expansion and aggression. He came to Canada in 1913 to study at Brandon College, Manitoba, and in 1916 was part of the delegation of students who protested to the college president, alleging that Dr Harris MacNeill was teaching modernist views. As a pastor at several churches in the interior during the 19205, he was a vocal critic of the mainline Baptist Union of Western Canada and Brandon College, and he led the relatively strong Kamloops church, which he had pastored for seven years, out of the mainline convention and into the Regular Baptist fold. His strong stand for the fundamentalist viewpoint, his demonstrated success as pastor, and his English upbringing and orientation all made him the ideal candidate to begin

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the first church for the Regular Baptists in Victoria, the province's capital and second-largest city. Not only was Dr Rowell's work in Victoria a success, but he became known in North America and Britain as a conference speaker, writer, and Protestant activist.57 Meanwhile, on the Lower Mainland, the Convention of Regular Baptists continued to experience the problem of separatism within its ranks, following the Mount Pleasant schism of 1928. The issue of denominationalism versus congregation independence again raised its head; this time the focal point was foreign missions policy.58 The denominationalists wanted to see the formation of a Regular Baptist foreign mission board, but others, the nondenominationalists, were leery of such centralization. They argued that each congregation should independently support missionaries serving under interdenominational agencies such as the China Inland Mission. Feelings ran very deep on the issue in some churches because their congregations were already heavily committed to supporting their own members, who were serving with a variety of agencies, and did not desire to be burdened with denominational mission obligations as well. The denominationalists prevailed, however, and the Regular Baptists acquired the assets of an independent mission in China in 1929. Severe difficulties, which stemmed from a complete misunderstanding of the nature of this mission, forced several difficult and drawn-out reassessments of missions policy between 1930 and 1936. In the end, the denominationalists again prevailed, but dissent was still strong. Sapperton Baptist in New Westminster, for example, was in 1935 already supporting members working with the China Inland Mission, the Navajo Indian Mission, and the British Columbia Evangelical Mission, and also had members studying at various Bible schools in preparation for missionary work with other interdenominational missions. Its leadership and membership were not interested in diverting support to the denominational mission, which had brought nothing but difficulties and division to the Regular Baptists.59 Ultimately, in 1935 and 1936, four sizable congregations in Vancouver and environs withdrew from the convention over the issue to become independent Baptist congregations. The combined adult membership of the four - Mount Pleasant and Broadway West in Vancouver, Sapperton in New Westminster, and Maple Ridge in Haney - amounted to approximately yoo.60 In the process of debating the issue, the Mount Pleasant, Sapperton, and Maple Ridge churches experienced internal division that led to denominationalist minorities seceding and establishing new congregations, which affiliated with the Regular Baptist convention. Despite the repeated divisions among the Baptists, their growth rate

133 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

was high. In fact, between 1931 and 1941, British Columbia was the only province in Canada, apart from Ontario, to experience a Baptist growth rate higher than that of the general population. While the Ontario Baptist growth was only slightly more than that of the provincial population (12 per cent, compared with 10 per cent), Baptist growth in British Columbia was substantially higher than the provincial population increase (26 per cent, compared with 17 per cent).6' Significantly, these two provinces were the scene of the nation's only major Baptist divisions over fundamentalism in the late 19205, and both saw considerable divisiveness among the fundamentalists in the 193os.b2 By contrast, the Baptist population of the Maritime provinces, which suffered only minor schism over modernist-fundamentalist issues,63 grew at approximately half the rate of the general population. An even greater contrast was present in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where the theologically mixed Baptist Union of Western Canada lost no churches to theological division. Despite this unity and a 4 per cent increase in the provincial population, the Baptist population of Manitoba fell by i per cent. Even more dramatic was the 15 per cent decline in the Baptist population of Saskatchewan,64 which more than matched the 3 per cent drop in the general population. Although conventional wisdom views the Baptist schisms as a source of weakness, it appears that the division of Baptists into a number of competing groups in British Columbia must in fact be considered an important reason for their relatively strong growth rate there. Their experience after the divisions of the 19208 and 19308 strongly supports the thesis of anthropologists Gerlach and Hine that decentralized and segmentary popular movements are often better able to adapt to social change and to grow than centrally controlled groups. While more bureaucratically minded people believe that divisions weaken the overall movement through infighting and wasteful duplication of effort, Gerlach and Hine argue that the divisions create a number of self-governed units, which in total contribute more to the cause than one unified group could do. Even though the separate groups often compete against one another for followers and funds, the strenuous expenditure of effort necessary to recruit enough followers to sustain the new group in the end contributes more to the overall growth of the cause than the more complacent recruitment programs of a large, unified body. In addition, with their various styles of church government and leadership, their differing nuances of belief, and their diverse practical emphases, the divided cells prove better able to attract and retain a greater diversity of membership. Thus, they are able to penetrate differing segments of society much more succesfully than more unified organizations are.65

134 Pilgrims in Lotus Land With a localized rather than centralized form of church government as a foimdational principle, the Baptists seem to have been well able to survive, and even profit from, schism. This can be seen clearly in the British Columbia schisms. Once W.M. Robertson, for example, had broken free from what he saw as the restrictions imposed by the congregational government of Mount Pleasant Baptist and was able to put into place his own aggressively evangelistic, highly separatist, and contentious program, his church enjoyed very rapid growth. Metropolitan Tabernacle grew by an average of 20 per cent per year in its first six years of existence. Although many of the new members were drawn from other Baptist churches, half of them were accepted by means of baptism - a strong indication in a Baptist church that large numbers of new converts were being won.66 Moreover, the schisms and ongoing competition did not appear to hinder the overall appeal of the Baptist cause in Vancouver's Mount Pleasant district. Mount Pleasant Baptist, still a strongly fundamentalist church (by any standards but Robertson's!), grew to regain much of its former size; and Douglas Park Baptist Church, the result of the 1936 split, also became a sizable congregation. In 1936 the adult membership of the three churches that resulted from Mount Pleasant's two schisms totalled approximately 1,000, double Mount Pleasant's pre-schism 1928 membership of 5O0.67 The schisms of 1927, 1928, and 1935-36 created at least four options in the Vancouver area from which the Baptist population and potential converts could choose. The old mainline convention, the most centralized organizationally, offered a theologically somewhat diverse but generally middle-of-the road, conservative option that appealed largely to a middle-class constituency; the Regular Baptist convention offered an alternative denominational structure and appealed to many of the more evangelistically inclined and to the greater number of the working-class Baptists; Metropolitan Tabernacle, which offered Robertson's dynamic leadership, the excitement of huge crowds drawn by the thrill of ongoing controversy, and aggressive evangelism, appealed to a wide social spectrum; the churches leaving the Regular Baptist convention in 1935 to become independent appealed to very strongly evangelistic and mission-minded fundamentalist Baptists who feared being tied to a denominational structure. Overall in the province, the more centralized mainline Baptist convention held its own numerically, but only just. Its 1941 membership stood at virtually the same level as the 1928 post-schism figure, and the number of churches had dropped by two to thirty-two.68 It was the fundamentalist, separatist Baptist churches that experienced the growth. The combined membership of the independent Baptist

135 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

congregations and those in the Regular Baptist convention increased by over 50 per cent in the same period, and the number of these churches rose substantially from sixteen in 1927 to twenty-seven in 1945-69

The higher rate of increase of the fundamentalist Baptists was due both to transfers from other churches, including mainline ones, and to a higher proportion of new converts. The mainline Baptist convention baptized new converts over the whole period at the rate of one per thirty-two members each year, which was generally not enough to keep membership from declining slowly unless other factors such as immigration compensated.70 The Regular Baptists, however, recorded a baptism-to-membership ratio of one per twenty-two, a rate sufficient for modest growth.7' The independent Metropolitan Tabernacle's ratio of one baptism per twelve members ensured a very rapid growth rate.72 The fundamentalists' more stubborn loyalty to conservative interpretations of faith, including the church's evangelistic mission, and their willingness to separate, if necessary, for these beliefs played a significant factor in their greater growth. Their position was in contrast to the emphasis on institutional rather than doctrinal loyalty among many of the mainline Baptists. Joel E. Harris, a conservative minister in Calgary who remained within the Baptist Union of Western Canada, with which the BC mainline Baptist convention was affiliated, observed with concern the relative decline of his denomination. He noted that it was due to complacency, a lack of doctrinal commitment, and a willingness to compromise with the surrounding culture. He wrote in the Western Baptist, the denominational paper, "We have toned down the plain teachings of the New Testament to appease modern unbelief, and it hasn't worked, except to our enfeeblement."73 The fundamentalists, however, by dogmatically refusing to compromise, even if refusal led to separation, demonstrated a commitment and a simplicity and certainty of belief that appealed to many. It also led to their sense of urgency with regard to the evangelistic task of the church and to the expenditure of far more energy and money in this direction.74 PENTECOSTALS

Pentecostalism experienced even more dramatic growth in the 192841 period. During this time the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC) established a provincewide network of churches, the first homogeneously conservative group to do so. The number of PAOC churches, branch churches, and Sunday schools soared from nine in 1928 to sixty-six in 1941. Approximately thirty other branch works

136 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

and Sunday schools were begun in this period by the PAOC, but either they did not survive or they merged with stronger churches nearby. In addition, the number of churches belonging to the other significant Pentecostal denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, rose from four to six.75 The Pentecostal expansion is all the more impressive when one considers that most of it occurred during the Depression years, when mainline denominations had difficulty maintaining existing churches and had to close some in smaller communities. By 1941 every region of the province had at least one Pentecostal church, with the exception of the isolated and thinly populated central coast, which was serviced by Pentecostal mission boats. The number of new churches, branch works, and Sunday schools begun in the period amounted to nearly thirty in the Lower Mainland, about a dozen in each of the Okanagan-Similkameen, West Kootenay, and Vancouver Island regions, nine in the East Kootenays, and seven or less in all other regions.76 Census figures also are good indicators of this growth. Unlike the figures provided by the census on older, usually mainline groups, those for Pentecostalism are generally not higher than actual participation figures. Indeed, the figures are usually conservative because of the time lag that frequently occurred between a person's beginning to attend Pentecostal services and his or her willingness to be identified with the new movement. In the decade between 1931 and 1941, the number of Pentecostals enumerated in the province rose from 2,277 (tne lowest as a proportion of population in western Canada) to 5,235, an increase of 130 per cent. A similar rate of growth was sustained over the next decade so that in 1951 the number stood at 11,781, the highest proportion of provincial population in all of Canada west of New Brunswick.77 Regional breakdowns of the Pentecostal growth provide some significant insights. The largest numerical gain occurred in the heavily populated Lower Mainland, which remained the centre of BC Pentecostalism (up by 85 per cent to over 2,600, or 0.6 per cent of the population). However, the proportionate increase was much greater in the more newly settled interior. In the fruit-growing OkanaganSimilkameen region, the number of Pentecostals rose in the ten years by 300 per cent to 850 (or 1.7 per cent of the population) and in the mining towns of the West Kootenays, numbers soared from next to nothing to over 400 (0.9 per cent of the population). Pentecostals on Vancouver Island increased more than 200 per cent, to 735, but constituted only 0.5 per cent of the total population.78 The key to the propagation of Pentecostal churches throughout the province proved to be the availability of a relatively large number of

137 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

young evangelists committed to spreading the Pentecostal message and planting churches. Most of these young people were from British Columbia and had been converted during the Price campaigns of the early 19205 in Vancouver and Victoria. Some had been trained in the short-term Bible school held in Victoria in 1925-26. Others had left the province for training in Pentecostal Bible schools in the prairies or on the Pacific Coast of the United States, and some had received no formal training at all. The province received some workers from other parts of Canada but suffered a net lost of leaders to the United States.79 Quite a large number of the Pentecostal evangelistic workers and church planters were women. Donald Klan refers to at least twenty-five single women who travelled the province, often in pairs, as evangelists and church planters. Male pastors almost always replaced them eventually, usually when a stable church had become established. It is not clear whether the Pentecostals in British Columbia viewed the use of women preachers as purely an evangelistic or "missionary" exception to the general rule that women should not take leadership in the church, or whether they had a more egalitarian view of ministry in the 19205 and 19305 than they had in the late 19305 and beyond.80 But undoubtedly their extensive use of women at this time indicates that they were far more willing than other groups to be flexible in method as long as this furthered the all-important task of evangelism. Pentecostal church planting in British Columbia required a very high degree of commitment to enable the worker to withstand the difficult conditions. Almost no denominational money was available for home missions, and only sporadic support came from the established Vancouver and Victoria churches. The Depression reduced the flow of funds that might otherwise have been available; and of the funds that were donated, far more went to foreign mission fields than to outlying areas of the province.8' A few preachers survived on the meagre offerings and gifts in kind which their tiny congregations could afford. Many other church planters supported themselves fully or partially by working at secular employment, and some paid for much of the other costs involved (such as building rental or construction) from their own earnings. Pentecostal church planter Arthur Townsend serves as a good example of a self-supporting worker. In 1939 he arrived in Prince George, a resource-extraction and transportation centre of slightly under 2,000 people. Although the largest town in north-central British Columbia, Prince George was described in the early 19405 as a "settlement of untidy shacks with mud roads."82 Townsend threw himself into the work of beginning a Pentecostal church in this raw northern centre. For much of the time he supported himself and his

138 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

family through manual labour, and in addition he paid for the rental of a hall used for meetings and spent part of his weekends cleaning the hall before and after the meetings. He later provided much of the money and labour for construction of the congregation's own small building.83 Other difficulties frequently hindered the efforts of the Pentecostal church planters. Because of the lack of funds and, often, suitable buildings to rent in many of the rough frontier-style towns, the Pentecostal church planters held meetings in any available structure. Tents, storefronts, trailers, schoolhouses, private homes, theatres, dance halls, mortuaries, and even renovated barns, chicken coops, feed sheds, and garages were used to house little Pentecostal gatherings.84 Some of the most acute problems experienced by the itinerant preachers occurred during their travels on the undeveloped mud-andgravel mountain roads. Snowstorms, thick mud or dust, washouts, rock slides, and mechanical breakdowns on the rough roads added considerable uncertainty and hardship to their work. In addition, because of the unpopularity of Pentecostalism among both the more respectable and the rowdier elements of the towns, they often faced various forms of opposition to their efforts. Despite the hardships, converts were won and congregations formed. As was the case of early Pentecostalism throughout North America, most of the members and adherents were of lower- or lower-middleclass social standing.85 Because of the informal structure of the early Pentecostal churches, virtually no records of membership were kept, and consequently it is difficult to compile a detailed socio-economic picture of Pentecostalism. However, first-hand accounts describe derelict little meeting places and demonstrative and emotional worship, which attracted an assortment of people, including drunken men, lonely outcasts, neglected children, native Indians, and impoverished as well as working-class families.86 In the view of many members of the province's middle and upper classes, Pentecostals were gullible, marginalized people who lacked status, respectability, and refinement. Bernice Gerard, a teenager who was converted to Pentecostalism while living in the Okanagan Valley, was subjected to considerable ridicule in the elite circles of Vancouver in which she, an orphan, was later placed. She recalls that her respectable foster family "was sure I was ruining my life with religion. They were certain that Pentecostal pulpits were filled by racketeers and that the pews were filled with people who had failed in business or in love or had lost their health."87 After learning that Gerard, by then a university student, had done some street preaching in downtown Vancouver, her social worker upbraided her:

139 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941 I promised you all the education you could absorb and now I find you using it down on the street corner with vulgar people ... I did not ask you to give up religion. I only asked that you follow after a faith that would be more in keeping with intelligence and culture ... Why can't you worship God in a mighty church where, as the organ peals out its anthem, you walk down the carpeted aisle, kneel and pray, then quietly arise and go? ... But you have to go to a little church where they pump your hand at the door and say, "God bless you, we are so glad to have you. Will you sing a solo today?"88

The unusually complete census records of the period tend to confirm the picture of marginality and help fill in some other features of Pentecostalism in the province. Its age characteristics might suggest that its membership was lower in status than the general population. It was generally a youthful movement and was most weakly represented in the age group between twenty-five and fifty four, the age group that is usually more financially independent than younger or older people. In 1931 only 35.8 per cent of BC Pentecostals belonged to this age bracket, way behind the 44.2 per cent of the general population of the province. In 1941 the gap had closed a little, but still only 36.5 per cent of Pentecostals were in this age bracket, compared with 42.2 per cent of the general population. A much larger proportion of Pentecostals were younger. In 1931 virtually half of BC Pentecostals were under twenty-five years old (49.7 per cent, compared with 43 per cent of the general population). Over the next ten years the gap widened considerably. The proportion of those under twenty-five fell more than 5 per cent, to 37.8 per cent, while the Pentecostal figure fell only slightly, to 48.2 per cent.89 The general youthfulness of Pentecostals highlights two significant reasons for the movement's growth: evangelism and high birth rates. In 1931 the percentages were largest for those between the ages of ten and nineteen. More than one-quarter of Pentecostals (25.1 per cent) were in this age group, compared with only 17.8 per cent of the general population. This fits well with the picture presented by Klan of relatively large, aggressively evangelizing youth groups in the major cities which successfully drew other youth into Pentecostalism. The census figure also fits with descriptions by both Townsend and Girard of the appeal that Pentecostalism's dedicated young workers and warm and enthusiastic services held for isolated and lonely young people throughout the province.90 Its youthfulness suggests that Pentecostalism's uninhibited and spontaneous worship and its experiential emphasis on the supernatural were able to make more headway among those who were less established in their careers, their society, and their churches. Not only

140 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

did it provide a solution to the universal longing for "meaning for this world and salvation for the next," but it provided a place in which "the old stratifications were razed and a new order erected." Regardless of their age, learning, or status, people "could take their rightful turn as priests at the altar," because once "touched by the fire of the spirit, they found themselves made 'kings and priests unto God.'"91 Within Pentecostalism they found generally small, tightly knit fellowships in which they gained a sense not only of belonging but of opportunity. They were given freedom to pray or testify at church services, or even to assist in leading them, and to take a leading role in evangelistic street meetings. Many Pentecostal young people spent at least several years in full-time ministry, either in foreign fields or at home. Indeed, most frequently it was relatively young women or men who itinerated as church-planting evangelists in the hinterlands of British Columbia. The 1941 census suggests a second reason for both the youthfulness of Pentecostalism and its rapid growth. While Pentecostals were still overrepresented in the ten-to-nineteen age group, the under-ten age group had become proportionately the largest by 1941 (19.2 per cent of Pentecostals compared with 13.8 per cent of the general population). This can point to nothing else but the very high birth rate among Pentecostals. In Canada as a whole in 1941, the Pentecostal birth rate was higher than that of all other Protestant groups except the Mennonites. They did not experience nearly as significant a drop in birth rates between 1931 and 1941 as other religious groups in the nation.92 Although birth rates are not listed by religious group for the provinces, the number of Pentecostal children who were under five years old in British Columbia indicates that the Pentecostal birth rates equalled those of their counterparts across the country.93 Because the birth rate in the general BC population was significantly lower than the national average,94 such high birth rates among Pentecostals would have had relatively even a greater effect on their rate of growth. The 1941 census also indicates that the national and international spread of Pentecostalism played a role in the rapid population growth of British Columbia. Pentecostals were twice as likely as the general population to be of Scandinavian, German, or Dutch extraction. Klan mentions the high proportion of Germans among the Pentecostals in the Okanagan Valley and of Scandinavians in and around Dawson Creek in the northeast.95 Most Pentecostals (65.8 per cent) were of British extraction, as were the majority of British Columbians (69.9 per cent), but a sizable minority of the Pentecostal population (21.8 per cent) were of Scandinavian, German, or Dutch background (compared with 9.4 per cent of the general population).96 These figures

141 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941 are not surprising since, at least into the 19505, the proportion of Pentecostals remained higher in Sweden than anywhere else in the world and the congregation in Oslo, Norway, was considered to be a major centre of the movement.97 In Canada, a number of immigrants from northwest Europe identified themselves as Pentecostals, and indeed separate Swedish- and German-speaking Pentecostal bodies existed in the prairie provinces. These ethnic groups increased in British Columbia largely because of increased immigration from the prairie provinces in the ig3os.98 The tendencies of the economically and socially marginalized and of younger people and northwestern Europeans to join the small but growing Pentecostal population served as major factors in that growth. However, except in a few isolated cases, these groups did not spontaneously form themselves into congregations.99 The vast majority of the new churches required strenuous evangelistic activity and ongoing pastoral attention to attract and coalesce new converts and any existing sympathizers into a viable, ongoing congregation. Without a sizable force of enthusiastic young workers itinerating in various regions of the province at relatively little cost to the denomination, most of the new churches would not have been formed. But the availability of this workforce, combined with the Pentecostals' practice of encouraging young workers, women as well as men, with relatively little formal training, to commit themselves to evangelism and church planting, made possible the expansion throughout the province during the 19305. In contrast, the more established mainline, generally liberal, denominations - which lacked the Pentecostals' intense zeal for evangelism and their flexibility in the area of workers' qualifications and lack of dignity of meeting places - found themselves forced to retrench in the Depression period. MENNONITES

The beginnings of large-scale immigration of Mennonites into the province proved to be another significant development of the period that was not evident to Orr during his 1935 tour. Until the late 19205 only a few scattered Mennonites lived in the province, but an influx beginning in 1928 and continuing throughout the 19305 resulted in a 1941 census report of 5,119 Mennonites in British Columbia. This figure was to triple over the next decade, to 15,387, making Mennonites the largest evangelical group in the province after the Baptists.100 This number included the largest concentration in all North America of the strongly evangelical Mennonite Brethren. However, their linguistic and cultural isolation prevented them from closely identifying

142 Pilgrims in Lotus Land with, or being fully accepted by, the English-speaking majority of evangelicals for a number of years. Nevertheless, as the process of cultural assimilation began removing cultural and linguistic barriers, it became clear that the majority of the new immigrants shared a revivalistic, pietistic heritage with many other evangelicals in the province. Furthermore, they shared with all evangelicals an alienation from the liberal and secular elements of the wider culture. Early in 1928 ten Mennonite families arrived at what is now Yarrow, near Chilliwack in the eastern Eraser Valley. They had responded to advertisements in the Free Press Prairie Farmer and the Mennonitische Rundschau for the sale of land on the recently reclaimed Sumas Lake bottom. This initial immigration soon became a rush as drought and crop failures in the prairie provinces, most notably in southern Saskatchewan, caused hundreds of Mennonite families to look towards the mild climate and fertile soil of the Eraser Valley. Available land in Yarrow was soon filled, and Mennonite settlement spread into nearby Agassiz and Sardis. In 1930 the cheaper, recently logged uplands twenty miles west of Yarrow in the Abbotsford area began to attract large numbers of settlers, and the central Eraser Valley thus soon began to rival Yarrow as the centre of Mennonite settlement. As the massive stumps were removed and as raspberry, strawberry, dairy, and chicken farms became established, Clearbrook, an almost exclusively Mennonite settlement, began forming several miles west of Abbotsford. Further Mennonite settlement occurred farther west in the Coghlan and Langley Prairie districts. The search for tracts of land large enough for compact Mennonite settlement led some families to a 7,ooo-acre tract of recently reclaimed lake bottom at Pitt Meadows, north of the Eraser River, and others to a io,ooo-acre tract at Black Creek, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The Pitt Meadows settlement failed because of drainage and transportation problems, but a small, permanent settlement developed at Black Creek. A drift into Vancouver in search of well-paying employment was already underway by 1930, but for several decades a large majority of the Mennonite settlers remained rural and many became successful small fruit, poultry, and dairy farmers.101 The significance of the rapidly growing numbers of Mennonites for the larger evangelical community of British Columbia was heightened by the fact that most of the Mennonites were recent Russian immigrants who came to identify with the revivalistic Mennonite Brethren Church rather than with the rival, more theologically mixed, and less evangelistically committed Conference of Mennonites. In 1940 the adult baptized membership of the province's eight Mennonite Brethren churches stood at 1,131, while the nine Conference

143

Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928-1941

Mennonite churches claimed a total of only 336 members.102 British Columbia was the only province in which the Mennonite Brethren were stronger than the Conference Mennonites. The Mennonite Brethren movement was born in the mid-nineteenth century during religious awakenings in the Mennonite colonies in Russia. Those forming the new, separating congregations cited spiritual decadence, laxity of church discipline, and a lack of clarity and urgency regarding the conversion experience as reasons for leaving the established Mennonite churches.103 Baptist influences led to the adoption of the practice of baptizing believers by immersion rather than by the traditional method of sprinkling. Contact with German Plymouth Brethren evangelists strengthened the emphasis on the conversion experience and contributed to the spread of dispensationalist teachings among Mennonite Brethren.104 More emphasis was placed on evangelism and personal conversion than on preserving traditional Mennonite cultural values and practices. The movement grew rapidly from 4.3 per cent of the Mennonite population of Russia in 1888 to 22.5 per cent by 1925.105 There were no Mennonite Brethren in the 1874-80 influx of 8,000 culturally conservative Mennonite immigrants to Manitoba, but some did enter the United States in that period, and several Mennonite Brethren churches were established in Manitoba in the i88os through evangelistic efforts from the United States. Mennonite Brethren immigrants from the American plains formed a further twenty congregations in Saskatchewan during the massive influx of farmers into the Canadian prairies from the United States in the years before World War I.106 By 1912 an estimated 1,200 baptized adults belonged to Mennonite Brethren churches in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.107 The exodus of Mennonites fleeing Russia in 1923-30 brought a great surge of Mennonite Brethren growth in Canada; approximately onequarter of the more than 20,000 refugees had belonged to the movement in Russia. Adult baptized membership in Canadian Mennonite Brethren churches consequently soared, and in 1931 it totalled 4,i86.l°8 As early as 1928 the newcomers had established six new congregations in Ontario, seventeen in Manitoba, ten in Saskatchewan, and five in Alberta. In addition, their numbers swelled the membership of the already existing churches in Saskatchewan.109 It was many of these newcomers to the prairies who would soon pull up stakes and move to the West Coast. The other major Mennonite group to become established in British Columbia, the Conference of Mennonites in Canada (generally referred to as Conference Mennonites), was formed from a considerable variety of groups and did not possess the same evangelical distinctive-

144 Pilgrims in Lotus Land ness as the Mennonite Brethren. It originated both among Mennonites of Swiss origin in eastern North America, who were shedding many of their old-world customs, and among the thousands of Russian Mennonites who migrated in the late nineteenth century and the 19205. In order to accommodate the different groups, the Conference Mennonites came to stress tolerance, the principle of congregational autonomy, and the accommodation of different emphases and theology. The culturally conservative Mennonite groups regarded the Conference Mennonites as too progressive, but the more revivalist and evangelical Mennonite Brethren regarded them as culturally too conservative and yet doctrinally too latitudinarian and evangelistically too uncommitted."0 The greatest expansion of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada occurred between 1923 and 1930. During this period, an estimated two-thirds of the large influx from Russia, being neither strongly culturally conservative nor religiously evangelical and revivalistic, identified with the Conference Mennonites."1 By 1931 they had established congregations from Ontario west to Alberta, and the baptized adult membership stood at 8,911 - more than twice the membership of the Mennonite Brethren."12 In British Columbia, however, the situation was reversed during the settlement process and the Mennonite Brethren dominated numerically. This occurred partly because the Brethren migrated to the West Coast first and in greater numbers. They also absorbed almost all the members of the Alliance, a Mennonite group struggling to find a mediating position between the two major groups. In addition, they won over many members of the Conference Mennonite churches. Between 1932 and 1947 a number of Conference Mennonites, including some key leaders, sought rebaptism by immersion and requested membership in Mennonite Brethren churches."3 Frank Epp, the major Mennonite historian in Canada and the son of a Conference Mennonite pastor serving in the central Fraser Valley during the period, recalls with a measure of distaste the movement of conference members and leaders into the Mennonite Brethren. Yet he offers an explanation for the trend: the Brethren's clearer evangelical commitment. They "were more numerous, had stronger leaders, and offered a more lively, committed, and simple religious experience." Their missionary purpose, clarity of doctrine, and predictability of church discipline were powerful attractions to other Mennonites."4 The evangelical emphases and priorities of the Mennonite Brethren in British Columbia were clearly reflected in their general council and in their semi-annual and quarterly conferences. In contrast to the Conference Mennonite churches, many of which "had an educational

145 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941 approach and catechism classes to induce faith and to prepare the young people for baptism and church membership,"115 the Brethren stressed a definite, often emotional, conversion experience. The 1932 semi-annual provincial council meeting admonished the churches to use "Bible Conferences," which had most of the characteristics of the old Methodist protracted meetings, and home visitation for evangelistic purposes.1'6 Sermons delivered in the devotional services before the business sessions repeatedly stressed over the years the themes of sin and salvation, conversion, and the crucial evangelistic responsibility of the churches.1'7 The Mennonite Brethren also expressed a strong sense of being a community that understood itself as different, in more than merely cultural terms, from the surrounding culture. The urgency of separation and differentiation from the "world" and from "unbiblical" (referring to liberal) denominations is clearly evident."8 In contrast to the Conference Mennonite churches, which were less concerned with and less unified over matters of personal conduct and church order, the Mennonite Brethren churches expressed almost anxious interest in such matters. Meetings of the male membership of the local congregation, known as "the brotherhood," and sometimes of the delegates at provincial conferences exercised church discipline, which occasionally involved excommunication from "the brotherhood.""9 As a consequence of their theological orientation and commitments, the Mennonite Brethren churches quickly organized to combine their efforts in evangelistic outreach programs. They initially concentrated their efforts on fellow Mennonites. From the first recorded conference of BC church delegates in 1931, every meeting concerned itself with scheduling pastoral and evangelistic visits from the established churches to Mennonite families scattered in outlying areas of the Lower Mainland. In 1937 they appointed a full-time worker for this task, supporting him with churches' contributions to the Home Missions treasury. In 1939 they added a second worker. In addition to home visitation, these workers organized Sunday schools and worship services wherever possible. The focus of this missionary effort soon grew to include non-Mennonite German-speaking people, and occasionally - and increasingly - was directed at English-speaking residents.120 Enthusiasm for evangelism among many Mennonite Brethren also led to the formation of informal, or voluntary, outreach efforts that were not directly under the authority of the Mennonite Brethren Conference in the 19305. A group in the Yarrow church sought out German-speaking people through street meetings, Sunday afternoon schools, and evening evangelistic services. Workers from the South

146 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Abbotsford church led in the outreach to non-Mennonites, and focused on Lulu Island, in the delta of the Fraser River, and Nicomen Island, on the north side of the river.121 In 1939 these efforts coalesced in the founding of a related but separate ministry known as the West Coast Children's Mission. It followed the lead of Saskatchewan Mennonite Brethren, who in 1937 had founded the Western Children's Mission. Both missions were inspired by the "faith mission" concept pioneered by the China Inland Mission and followed by scores of other evangelical missionary organizations. The West Coast Children's Mission was established to be "interdenominational, international, evangelical and evangelistic" in character, but in reality it was entirely dependent upon the Mennonite Brethren churches for support and workers. It focused its work on the province's unchurched children, regardless of ethnic background, and after 1945, when it came under the direct control of the Mennonite Brethren Conference of British Columbia, it became a successful vehicle to begin a number of new congregations.122 The city of Vancouver, home of a growing number of Mennonites, was viewed by the Brethren as "the critical point" of their missionary work in the province.123 One of the chief items of business at the 1931 meeting of delegates from the newly established churches in the eastern Fraser Valley was to undertake the support of a "home for Mennonite girls working in Vancouver."124 Many single young women were moving to Vancouver, fifty or sixty miles west of the Mennonite settlements in the Fraser Valley, in order to find employment to earn cash for their families, which were struggling to establish themselves on farms during the Depression. Considerable fear was expressed for their well-being in the alien environment of the city. One minister commented: "I hope to God that the economy in our communities improved, so that wage earning will no longer be a compelling requirement. I am not surprised that mothers and fathers are deeply concerned and often think about their children in the big city with heavy hearts. They have reason to! Therefore, you dear parents, urge your girls to join the Home and to spend their free time on Thursdays and Sundays listening to God's word."125 The home was to act as a referral centre for young women seeking jobs as domestics, to provide residential quarters for girls working in the city on a day basis, and, most importantly, to be the social and spiritual centre for the young women. The matron of the home was expected to be a friend and counsellor to the women and to lead those not yet converted into an experience of salvation.126 In 1934 the churches unanimously decided to launch a mission in Vancouver in order to gather the increasing number of Mennonite

147 Broadening of the Institutional Base, 1928—1941

families into a Mennonite Brethren church.127 Two years later it was reported this had been accomplished. However, the appointed missionary continued to work in the city but broadened his field to take in non-Mennonite Russian immigrants and to preach for the city's German Baptist church.128 Later, the Mennonite Brethren work in Vancouver was broadened further to include outreach to the Hindu community and the "Skid Row" district. The establishment of a wave of Mennonite Brethren Bible schools in western Canada in the 19305 further indicates the significant place that evangelical doctrines and evangelistic activities played in the denomination. In British Columbia, three such schools were founded in the 1930$: at Yarrow in 1930, at Abbotsford in 1936, and at Greendale (Sardis) in 1938. The schools were all connected to individual congregations and were not very large, though the Yarrow school experienced enrolments as high as fifty in the ig3os.129 The founding of these schools was partly a response to the fact that English-language non-denominational Bible institutes in western Canada were attracting young Mennonite Brethren. Dozens of well-known members of the denomination attended the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, and the president of Briercrest Bible Institute in Caronport, Saskatchewan, estimated that about 30 per cent of his students were Mennonite.130 The establishment of the Mennonite Brethren schools also reflected how significant were the affinities of the Mennonite Brethren with wider conservative evangelicalism in North America. They were modelled, at least in part, after the Moody Bible Institute and institutions such as the Prairie Bible Institute that sprang up in western Canada. As was the case in most North American Bible institutes, they generally taught from a strongly dispensationalist point of view.131 Their goal was to establish students in "sound doctrine" and to train fervent evangelists.'32 Historian J.B. Toews wrote of the Mennonite Brethren Bible schools, "The emphasis on personal... conversion ... and responsibility for a lost world generated the kind of spiritual concern within the brotherhood that could not be contained within the slow-moving corporate functions of a conference."133 The schools' goals and orientation served to move the Mennonite Brethren farther from some of the cultural and religious values of their traditional Mennonite heritage, and brought them more closely into the orbit of North American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. A Mennonite Brethren historian has argued this point, complaining that "resources for these courses were largely drawn from authors of evangelical fundamentalist orientations. In contrast to this emphasis there was little reference to the original ... Anabaptist understanding of faith and life. The curricula of our Bible schools provided only very

148 Pilgrims in Lotus Land limited emphasis on the understanding of our faith in distinction to that of American fundamentalism."'34 The Conference Mennonites in British Columbia, though members of a denomination generally not as closely associated with North American evangelicalism, were not entirely uninterested in the issues and causes that gripped the Mennonite Brethren. For example, they established a Girls' Home in Vancouver in 1935 and a Bible school near Aldergrove in 1Q39.'35 However, their moderate cultural conservatism and their greater tolerance and acceptance of theological diversity kept them from embracing the hallmarks of North American evangelicalism as wholeheartedly as the Mennonite Brethren. This may have helped preserve their cultural identity as Mennonites, but at the same time it greatly reduced the possibility that they would have an evangelistic thrust outside their own community. It may even have made it more difficult for them to keep their own young people. Epp argues that growing exposure to the outside world made a deliberate act of personal decision increasingly important to the winning and keeping of the Mennonite youth.'36 The revivalistic style and intense commitments of the Mennonite Brethren demanded such a decision, but the more gradual, educational approach of the Conference Mennonites often did not. In the new settlements of British Columbia, the approach of the Brethren proved more successful at winning and retaining the Mennonite population and eventually, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, at attracting many from outside it. Thus, the Depression era was not as barren for evangelicalism in British Columbia as observer Orr thought. Highly significant developments occurred among three particularly vigorous branches of evangelicalism — separatist Baptist, Pentecostal, and Mennonite Brethren. Although some very significant new groups arrived or developed in the province after the 19305, these three branches remained among the most significant. As late as 1981, Regular Baptists (and the other Baptist groups and independent churches that grew out of the 19308 schisms), the Pentecostal Assemblies, and the Mennonite Brethren accounted for nearly half the membership in evangelical churches in British Columbia.

7 Period of Transition, 1941-1961: Developments among the Original Conservative Groups

British Columbia experienced a major wartime and postwar boom between 1941 and 1961. During World War II the city of Vancouver, in particular, received a major influx of people to work in war-related industries, most notably in shipbuilding. At the same time, much of the province's north was opened up with the building of the Alaska Highway. After the war, a major development and resource boom brought growth to the whole province, especially the interior and northern regions.' Provincial governments in the postwar era, notably the Social Credit government that was elected in 1952, built a network of highways and railroads to link the hinterland with the populated southwestern corner of the province. In the latter region - the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island - suburbs came to claim an increasing proportion of the population.2 The provincial population not only grew significantly — doubling in the twenty-year period to just over 1.6 million - but it became increasingly diverse. In 1961, although the province was still strongly British in origin, the dominance was no longer so pronounced. The proportion of people of British origin dropped by 10 per cent during the period to 59.4 per cent, a decline that was more than matched by an increase of those of continental European origin. Immigration resulted in a more than tripling of the number of residents of continental European origin from 175,000 (21.5 per cent of population) in 1941 to over 550,000 (34.1 per cent of population) in ig6i. 3 Between 1946 and 1961, a total of 95,104 immigrated to British Columbia directly from continental Europe. Even more Europeans, however,

150 Pilgrims in Lotus Land came by way of the prairie provinces, which had received hundreds of thousands of continental Europeans in previous decades. This influx, which had become significant in the 19205 and was even more so in the 19305, swelled to a flood during and after World War II. The number of prairie-born residents in British Columbia nearly tripled, from 115,000 in 1941 to 323,000 in 1961, by which one in every five British Columbians (20.3 per cent) had been born in the prairie provinces. Already by 1941 more people in the province had been born in the prairies than had been born in central and eastern Canada, and by 1961 the prairie group comprised nearly three-quarters of the BC population that had been born elsewhere in Canada.4 Conservative Protestantism proved better able to adapt to the shifts in make-up of the population than most of the mainline denominations. Even though the period was one of an unprecedented boom in church attendance throughout Canada and even though affiliation with the United Church in the province soared from 201,000 (24.6 per cent of population) in 1941 to 504,000 (31.0 per cent of population), nevertheless, the largely liberal, mainline Protestant denominations as a whole were not keeping up with population growth. The "big three" mainline Protestant churches - Anglican, United and Presbyterian declined from 66.1 per cent of the provincial population in 1941 (a percentage that had remained virtually stable for several decades) to 59.1 per cent in 1961. In particular, the two mainline denominations with the most clearly British origins, Anglican and Presbyterian, plummeted from a combined 41.5 per cent of the population in 1941 to 28.1 per cent in 1961.5 Some of their losses were undoubtedly to the more Canadianized United Church, but the overall decline represents, at least in part, the difficulties experienced by these largely Britishoriented middle-class denominations in penetrating the province's hinterlands and suburbs, and also its increasingly ethnically diverse population.6 Conservative Protestant groups enumerated in the 1941 census, however, ran counter to the overall mainline Protestant trend. The eleven conservative denominations enumerated more than doubled, from 51,000 (6.3 per cent of population) to 115,000 (7.1 per cent) in 1961. Although the proportional increase was not staggering, it is significant because much of it was due to evangelicalism's ability to adapt to the province's emerging new patterns of ethnic and geographic distribution. Some conservative groups successfully penetrated the Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and East European, as well as British communities, while others were largely based in one of the European immigrant communities. The situation in British Columbia clearly

151 The Original Conservative Groups, 1941—1961

confirms Joel Carpenter's assertion that "many people in immigrantbased Protestant denominations found that fundamentalism offered an appealing way to sing Zion's songs in a strange land."7 In addition, several conservative groups successfully penetrated the growing population of the province's interior and north. Indeed, in an exaggeration of the evangelicals' success in the interior by the early 19505, one recent history of the province places considerable significance, political as well as religious, on "the numerous fundamentalist groups in the British Columbia interior."8 The proliferation of a great variety of evangelical denominations proved one of the most striking and important developments within conservative Protestantism in the period. While this became much more obvious in the 19408 and the 19505, the process had begun much earlier. From the beginnings of the open controversy with liberalism in 1917, conservative Protestantism in British Columbia had never been organizationally united. In addition to several small holiness groups and the Plymouth Brethren, there are emerged three different strands: mainline conservative, separatist Baptist, and Pentecostal. From 1928 through the 19305, diversification had increased, with further splintering among the Baptists and the addition of large numbers of evangelically oriented Mennonites. After World War II, the Regular Baptists and Pentecostals grew significantly and developed some important institutions of their own. The Mennonite population grew by nearly four times in the twenty-year period to 1961 and increasingly began to identify with other evangelicals as it lost some of its ethnic distinctiveness. Rivalling these developments in importance was the appearance of many other denominations, some of which had become quite large by 1961. These included the Baptist General Conference, the Evangelical Free Church, the North American Baptist Conference, the Chrisdan and Missionary Alliance, the Christian Reformed Church, and a wide variety of smaller groups. All of these latter groups had strong links with the United States because of earlier immigration into that country and earlier denominational developments there. Most of the newer denominations were not as militantly separationist as the Metropolitan Tabernacle, or even the more subdued Convention of Regular Baptists. However, they did stress clearer lines of demarcation from the "world" than the mainline evangelicals did. They were largely of the "believers' church" tradition in that they baptized only believers and admitted only converted adults to church membership. Local congregations were of primary importance to them because they believed their exclusivist church membership best embodied the view of the church as a company of believers separate

152

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

from the world. Practically speaking, these local congregations, which were often small in size, functioned as warm, close communities, and this enhanced their attraction to many outsiders. The new denominations were homogeneously conservative and, with the exception of the Christian Reformed Church and other Orthodox Calvinist bodies that had recently arrived from Holland, developed strong denominational programs of evangelistic outreach in the province. Like the Pentecostal Assemblies and the Regular Baptists, they were strongly committed to, and quite successful at, the establishment of new congregations. As a result, by 1960 the number of evangelical congregations outside the mainline denominations had risen to approximately 350, well over double their number in 1940. So significant were these developments that a marked shift in the "centre of gravity" of conservative Protestantism took place. No longer were most evangelicals in the mainline denominations, and no longer were the institutions that were largely affiliated with them as central as they had once been. Instead, most evangelicals were widely scattered in a number of smaller, homogeneously conservative denominations.9 Symbolic of the shift was the transfer of ownership in 1956 of Vancouver Bible Training School (which had been renamed Vancouver Bible Institute in 1950) from its interdenominational board to the Baptist General Conference, a relative newcomer to Vancouver. At approximately the same time, six independent congregations, several of them quite large, and a number of mission churches, most of which had been begun by the mainline-oriented British Columbia Evangelical Mission, affiliated themselves with either the Baptist General Conference or the Evangelical Free Church of America. The increasing fragmentation of BC evangelicalism into a bewildering variety of groups in the postwar period was not accompanied by major schisms of the kind suffered by the Baptists in the 19205 and 19308. It was much more the result of the establishment of new groups by means of immigration, evangelistic and church-planting efforts, and the coalescing of independent churches into new organizations. Indeed, some aspects of the process actually reflect the peculiar brand of evangelical ecumenism that very often simply disregarded denominational boundaries or viewed them more as matters of convenience than as matters of deep conviction. There were strong indications of evangelical unity at the level of belief in the authority of scripture and in the great priority placed on evangelism and missions, and, in order to protect the former, an opposition to the type of theological liberalism found in much of mainline Protestantism. Agreement around these priorities did not completely remove differ-

153 The Original Conservative Groups, 1941—1961

ences rooted in varying denominational, theological, and ethnic background and conviction. It did, however, reduce their importance enough to facilitate some significant realignments at several junctures. In this chapter our attention will turn to developments among the original conservative groups, those that had either developed in British Columbia by 1927 or had grown out of those groups. Chapter 8 will focus on the newer developments, those that relied primarily upon immigration into the province after 1927. MAINLINE CONSERVATIVES

In the earlier period, between 1928 and 1940, the organizations associated with mainline conservatives had developed and expanded considerably. In many ways they fit Carpenter's description of the consolidation and growth of evangelical institutions in the United States in the same period. The evangelical "denomination" had been enlarged with the growth of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, at UBC and the expansion of the British Columbia Evangelic Mission's network of churches in the Lower Mainland. The addition of the British Columbia Sunday School Mission in 1929 had added a provincewide component to the "denomination" based in Vancouver's mainline conservative Protestantism.10 However, growth in these mainline evangelical institutions did not keep pace with that in the homogeneously conservative denominations. In addition, their constituency shifted somewhat and the number of Presbyterians and Anglicans declined in relation to Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, and members of other nonmainline groups. For example, Vancouver Bible Training School's reliance on Presbyterian instructors lessened during the 19305, when two independent Baptists, one Regular Baptist, one Convention Baptist, and a Plymouth Brethren served on its part-time faculty." Although the school's council continued to be denominationally mixed, the mainline influence declined there also. In 1942 Oswald Smith, a member of the independent Metropolitan Tabernacle and (after 1943), of Mount Pleasant Chapel (Plymouth Brethren), was elected its president. The growth of the student body in the 19308 was largely due to the growing numbers of independent Baptists, Plymouth Brethren and members of Metropolitan Tabernacle. The increased use of the school by nonmainline groups was exemplified by the practice of Marshall Sheppard, the Sunday school superintendent of Mount Pleasant Chapel (the largest of Vancouver's Plymouth Brethren assemblies) of regularly bringing his whole staff to Principal Walter Ellis's Thursday evening lectures for Sunday school teachers.12 The mainline Convention Baptists, however,

154 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

continued to contribute the largest single group of students to Vancouver Bible Training School.13 The death of Ellis at the age of sixty-one in 1944 removed the most respected mainline evangelical leader and hastened the shift that had begun in the previous fifteen years. Ellis was succeeded as principal by Joseph E. Harris, who had served as a Convention Baptist minister in Alberta and British Columbia, and was to do so again after his principalship. Harris was able to work quite well with the Presbyterians and Anglicans in the school's constituency but understandably was most successful in appealing to the mainline Baptists.14 At the same time, however, the influence of nonmainline groups increased.15 The Vancouver Bible Training School (VBTS) - which became Vancouver Bible Institute (VBI) in 1950 - enjoyed a brief postwar surge of enrolments, only to be followed by a sharp decline after 1950. From a high of forty full-time students and sixty-five part-time students in Vancouver, plus nineteen part-timers in a short-lived extension school in New Westminster, enrolments dropped so much that a discouraged Harris returned to the Baptist pastorate in ig52. 16 He was replaced by Edward I. McPhee, a young Presbyterian minister, who was unable to increase the school's appeal either to the mainline evangelicals or to other conservatives. In 1956 enrolment was so low that the council decided not to proceed with the 1956-57 academic year. Instead, the buildings and other assets were offered to several evangelical groups in the hope that one would "be sure to continue to train young people for the Lord's work."17 A combination of factors, in addition to the loss of Ellis, contributed to the decline of VBI after 1950. Since the International Uniform Lesson series was used less in Sunday schools in the postwar era, attendance dropped at the popular Thursday evening lectures on the series.18 The 1949 fall of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China necessitated the closing of the China Inland Mission home in Vancouver, thus removing a constant source of encouragement to the school. In 1949 the Baptist Union of Western Canada (to which the province's Convention Baptists belonged) opened in Calgary its own lay training institute, the Baptist Leadership Training School. Baptist officials had frequently expressed anxiety over their young people's attraction to the burgeoning nondenominational Bible schools on the prairies, and thus sought to keep them in a denominational setting with their own school.19 Consequently, it became difficult for VBI to recruit students in what previously had been its most fertile field.20 Five years earlier, the Regular Baptists had opened their own school in British Columbia, so the trickle of students from this source also was cut off. Meanwhile, VBI'S continuing inclusive stance on eschatology contin-

155 The Original Conservative Groups, 1941—1961

ued to deter some students from strongly dispensationalist churches, such as Metropolitan Tabernacle. The rapidly expanding Bible institutes in Saskatchewan and Alberta, especially the Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, held the greatest appeal for the dispensationalist constituency.21 Indeed, VBI'S very character as an institution closely associated with mainline Protestantism was a hindrance to it when competing with the Bible schools in the prairies for students from the increasingly important nonmainline segment of evangelicalism. In 1953 the former principal, Harris, wrote to the discouraged new Presbyterian principal, Edward McPhee, observing: "The newer Gospel churches of small denominations or non-denominational groups are not fields in which you or I could make the appeal like Maxwell (of Prairie Bible Institute) could make. We are not informal enough or fervent enough or perhaps anti-denominational enough for them."22 On the other hand, many mainline and urban evangelicals, who in an earlier era might have looked to VBTS for at least part of their training for missionary or ministerial work, were needing higher levels of schooling than it could offer. Because of its mainline character and its urban setting, the school was affected far more by rising levels of education than the Bible institutes in the prairies were. Mainline evangelicals, always more sensitive to the need for higher education than their more sectarian counterparts, increasingly were less willing to be trained in an institution that could not offer degrees.23 The growing strength of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at nearby UBC in the very same time period in which VBI was struggling to attract students attests to this. Despite open opposition from the Alma Mater Society, the UBC group was thriving, with approximately two hundred members.24 BAPTIST GENERAL CONFERENCE AND EVANGELICAL FREE CHURCH

In the years after World War II, two relative newcomers, the Baptist General Conference (BGC) and the Evangelical Free Church (EFC) of America, became well established in British Columbia. In most parts of North America, both denominations were generally viewed as immigrant groups because of their development among immigrants from Sweden and Norway. In British Columbia, however, a unique set of circumstances led to the development of these two groups apart from extensive Scandinavian immigration. To a very considerable extent, both developed out of foundations laid by the earlier-established mainline conservatives and separate Baptists.

156 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Across North America both the BGC and the EFC assimilated into the predominant culture and became closely identified with the wider evangelical movement after 1920. Neither was militantly fundamentalist, but both were definitely conservative and highly concerned with a strong evangelistic and church-planting thrust. Both had existed for decades in the prairies and had attempted to establish themselves in British Columbia before World War II, but both had largely failed to do so. After the war, their renewed efforts were assisted by two significant developments: the shift of institutions and congregations previously more affiliated with mainline Protestantism and separate Baptists; and the greater availability of money from the United States and the Canadian prairies for church planting. The experience of both demonstrates something of the purely secondary nature and fluidity of denominational loyalties among large numbers of evangelicals. The BGC quite unexpectedly became a significant force in the Vancouver area in the mid-1950s. The large, independent Mount Pleasant Baptist Church affiliated with it in 1954, and the denomination assumed control of VBI in 1956. VBI'S council had offered its assets to three groups in 1956: the Canadian Sunday School Mission (with which the British Columbia Sunday School Mission had merged in 1944), the EFC, and the BGC. The Canadian Sunday School Mission declined the offer. The EFC was eager to accept, but it was unable t bring the issue to its convention for a vote before the enthusiastic trustees of the BGC accepted.25 The transfer of VBI made good sense in that Mount Pleasant Baptist Church had affiliated with the BGC two years earlier. Since the founding of the school in 1917, its relationship with Mount Pleasant Baptist had been close. R.W. Sharpe, the VBTS council's first vice-president and its primary benefactor until his death in 1925, had been a prominent member of Mount Pleasant Baptist. The church's facilities were frequently used by the school, and many of its young people attended VBTS. Thirty years after the death of Sharpe, when discussions regarding the possibility of the transfer began, the chairman of Mount Pleasant's board of deacons was serving as vice-president of VBI'S council, and the church's associate pastor was an alumnus of the school.26 It may seem surprising that the British-oriented Mount Pleasant Baptist Church would affiliate with the BGC, a group with origins among Swedish immigrants to North America. The denomination began in the mid-nineteenth century among Swedish Lutherans, who were converted to Baptist beliefs while still in Sweden under the influence of the pietist movement, or in the United States under the influence of nineteenth-century revivalism. In 1856 the churches formed

157 The Original Conservative Groups, 1941—1961

by the converts in Minnesota and Illinois organized as the Swedish Baptist General Conference, and by 1889 the new denomination included churches across the country, from New England to Washington State.27 In Canada, the first Swedish Baptist church was organized in Winnipeg in 1894. A total of twenty-six other churches, supported where necessary by both the Baptist Union of Western Canada and the Swedish Baptist General Conference, were established on the prairies during the great influx of immigrants between 1896 and 1914-28 In British Columbia, firm establishment of the BGC did n come until much later. A Swedish church was organized in Golden, in the East Kootenays, in 1906, but it lasted only a few years. In 1910 the Swedish Baptist Church in Bellingham, Washington, assisted eighteen of its members who were residing forty miles to the north in Matsqui, British Columbia, on the Eraser River near Abbotsford, to organize their own church. This church survived but never became large, because the Swedish community in the area did not grow significantly. The next year a Swedish Baptist church was organized in Vancouver, but it was disbanded in iggS. 29 Renewed immigration from Sweden in the late 19205 resulted in a large number of Swedish immigrants in Vancouver, especially during the winter months when logging activities in the higher elevations in the mountains ceased. In response, Swedish Baptists in Washington and Oregon inaugurated the Scandinavian Baptist Mission in downtown Vancouver. It continued for twenty years, offering food to the destitute and giving emotionally stirring revivalistic-style services, featuring a Scandinavian string band.30 In 1948 mission work was begun in the growing newsprint town of Powell River, on the coast 190 miles northwest of Vancouver, and a congregation composed largely of non-Swedish members was formed.3' In British Columbia, the real breakthrough for the BGC ("Swedish" was dropped from the name during World War II) came in 1954, when the congregation of Mount Pleasant Baptist, Vancouver's secondoldest Baptist church, voted to affiliate with the BGC'S Columbia district. This unexpected move occurred for several reasons. After nearly twenty years of independence, the congregation clearly felt the need to be part of a denomination that could provide help in areas such as ministerial education, church planting, and youth programming. However, lingering memories of the repeated schisms of the 19205 and 19308 and ongoing concerns over the issues of theological liberalism and denominational centralism made both major Baptist groups in the province, the Convention Baptists and the Regular Baptists, unattractive. The BGC was known to the congregation because of one

158 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

prominent member's former association with it in Winnipeg. It almost perfectly met the congregation's criteria for denominational affiliation: it had not been tainted by involvement in any of the earlier schisms; it was solidly conservative; and it made considerable allowance for the autonomy of local congregations in areas of emphasis and practice. Of special interest to Mount Pleasant Baptist, considering its unhappy history with the Regular Baptists' foreign missions efforts, was the BGC'S missions support system, which allowed congregations to continue their support of interdenominational missions.32 The difficulties that the British-oriented Mount Pleasant Baptist congregation might have experienced in fitting into the Swedishoriginated BGC were largely alleviated by changes that had occurred within the BGC, for it was rapidly losing its ethnic character and distinctiveness. Enough of its members saw their identity in terms of their evangelical beliefs and practices rather than their ethnicity, and thus most cultural barriers were removed that might have stood in the way of Mount Pleasant Baptist's full participation within the BGC, which increasingly viewed itself as part of North American conservative evangelicalism. The BGC'S revivalistic and pietistic heritage, combined with its opposition to theological liberalism, had created strong sympathy for the conservative forces during the fundamentalistmodernist controversy. During the 19305 and 19405, most BGC members read books and periodicals by fundamentalists and evangelicals, and many supported interdenominational evangelical missions. Although the members did differ a little among themselves regarding their degree of acceptance of all doctrines commonly held by fundamentalists (for example, dispensationalism), almost all came to view American evangelicalism as a safe haven, well fortified against the threat of modernism, within which to assimilate themselves into North American culture.33 The affiliation of Mount Pleasant Baptist with the BGC set in motion a significant chain reaction. In the early 19505 Mount Pleasant was sponsoring two mission churches in south Vancouver, and these went into the denomination at the same time as their mother church. They amalgamated and, with financial support provided from the BGC'S sale of the Scandinavian Mission, acquired property and built a large sanctuary.34 Also in 1954, a mission in North Vancouver, begun in part by members of Mount Pleasant, officially affiliated itself with the church and thus with the BGC. Taking the name Delbrook Baptist, it grew rapidly to become one of the larger evangelical churches in the prestigious North Shore suburbs.35 The chain reaction spread much further. As noted above, the BGC'S acquisition of VBI was significantly related to Mount Pleasant Baptist's

159 The Original Conservative Groups, 1941—1961

transfer of allegiance two years earlier. The new orientation of VBI in turn influenced the long-established, independently minded Broadway West Baptist Church, Vancouver, into joining the BGC in ig57.3994> or 5 2 -5 Per cent) came from outside the ethnic group. Corresponding figures for Mennonite Brethren churches from Alberta east to Ontario in the same period were 1,453 of 3,815 (38 per cent) of new members. In British Columbia, the incoming "outsiders" were nearly equally divided between those who came by means of transfer from other denominations and those who were new conversions. By the end of this period, an older pattern reversed itself and more members were transferring in from other denominations than were transferring out to other denominations - a sure sign that evangelicals from other backgrounds saw the Mennonite Brethren churches as attractive options, fully within the evangelical realm.53 The difference between British Columbia and the other provinces is partly due to the leadership within the denomination on the West Coast. From the 19305, Bible school teachers had strongly encouraged their young people to engage in such evangelism, and they later encouraged the language transition in the churches to facilitate the incorporation of new members from outside the ethnic group. After World War II, the province's West Coast Children's Mission led the way among Canadian Mennonite Brethren in evangelistic activity beyond the ethnic group.54 At least from 1970 onwards, the leaders of the British Columbia Board of Extension (George Braun and then Nick Dyck) increased evangelism as a priority of all Mennonite Brethren churches in the province.55 Dyck argued that the conversion of individuals took precedence over any other denominational distinctiveness.56 The difference between the situation in British Columbia and the other provinces also stems from the nature of BC society. The secular, transient character of the province's population and the high growth rate of an ethnically mixed population in areas of Mennonite settlement militated against the maintenance of a closed, ethnically based group. Further, the general secularity of the province and the many isolated pockets of population created a religious vacuum in many

247

Components of Growth

areas, which the mission stations of the Mennonite Brethren churches were able to fill. The development of ethnically mixed congregations out of these stations forced the denomination to evaluate its identity, and it increasingly opted for one that was evangelical and nonethnic. The assimilation of the Mennonites into the wider evangelicalism indeed, their use of evangelicalism as a "vehicle of assimilation" significantly aided the growth of evangelicalism in British Columbia by means other than the growth of the Mennonite Brethren churches. Although many Mennonite Brethren churches changed quite rapidly, and in so doing were able to bring in outside members, the assimilation of individuals and families often occurred much more quickly than that of whole congregations. Many members, frequently the more evangelistically inclined, grew impatient with the slower rate of collective change and left for other evangelical churches and organizations, which readily welcomed them. The exact size of this exodus is not known, but it certainly played a significant role in the growth of many other churches and organizations. For example, the Mennonite Brethren statistics for 1981 noted that a total of 130 BC Mennonite Brethren were serving as pastors or missionaries within the denomination, including 19 with the inter-Mennonite organization, the Mennonite Central Committee. However, almost as many members, 107, were serving non-Mennonite Brethren mission and evangelistic agencies.57 In addition, a surprising 35 of the 82 pastors listed by the Christian and Missionary Alliance as having served churches in the province between 1940 and the late 19705 are identifiable by family names as being of Mennonite background.58 Similarly, 19 of the 119 pastors and lay leaders listed in the 1981 directory of the Evangelical Free Church can be identified as having a Mennonite background.59 These two denominations appear to have gained the most from Mennonite transfers, but the informal 1984 survey of evangelicals in the Lower Mainland indicates that other groups also benefited from the children and grandchildren of Mennonites who transferred into their churches. In fact, about 12 per cent, or one in eight, of approximately i ,000 respondents in non-Mennonite churches in the Lower Mainland reported having Mennonite grandparents. While some of these people resided in the Fraser Valley, where such transfers might be expected, others were found in the largely British-oriented Plymouth Brethren and Baptist churches on the west side of Vancouver. Other bodies of European origin, such as the German Baptists and the Christian Reformed, did not play such a key role in the broader evangelicalism but did increasingly and consciously identify themselves with it. Some German Baptist churches, for example, dropped elements of their ethnic identity in an attempt to appeal to the wider

248 Pilgrims in Lotus Land community, and many individual members transferred to the other churches.60 The Calvinist confessional distinctions of the Christian Reformed churches inhibited, to a certain extent, a ready assimilation into the evangelical subculture, but some indications of change had become apparent by the late 19705. Part of the impetus for change came from the denomination itself, which was composed largely of fourth- and fifth-generation immigrants in its American Midwest heartland (in contrast to the first- and second-generation immigrants in British Columbia).6' Another strong impetus came from the educational scene in British Columbia. A growing alienation from the public school system and a corresponding interest in Christian schools among large numbers of evangelicals brought them into closer cooperation with Christian Reformed people, who were much more experienced in this area and were quite willing to cooperate in establishing and operating such schools.62 The strong charismatic movement in the province also influenced many Christian Reformed members. The worship of some of their congregations was modified somewhat while, in others, charismatic experiences resulted in the transfer of members to nonreformed churches, especially to independent charismatic congregations.63 FAMILY SIZE AND RETENTION OF CHILDREN

Larger than average family size, together with high retention rates of children, played a very important role in the growth of a number of conservative groups. Earlier data on age distribution is available for the province for only several conservative groups and the mainline denominations. However, the 1981 census cross-lists the BC population by age and religion for an unusually large number of denominations and thus allows for a closer examination of the numbers of children raised in evangelical families than was possible for earlier decades (see table 7). These figures contribute greatly to an explanation of the varying rates of increase and decline of different religious groups. For example, in 1961 the actual number of children in the Baptist population, not an especially prolific group, was not much smaller than that in the Presbyterian population, even though the total number of Presbyterians was almost double that of the Baptists. Similarly, the Pentecostal population, which was just over one-fifth of the Presbyterian in 1961, contained well over one-third as many children as the Presbyterians. By 1981, both the Baptist and Pentecostal categories contained more children under fifteen years old than the Presbyterian population did,

249 Components of Growth Table 7 Proportion of British Columbia's Population under 15 Years Old, bv Denomination. 1941. 1961. 1981 1961 %

1981 %

-

—

29.1 37.9

36.9 35.2

21.1

30.2

24.3

32.8

39.7 30.1 29.0 29.0 28.6 24.0 22.9 22.3 20.0 25.2

United Anglican Presbyterian Weighted average

23.6 19.5 16.6 20.5

33.6 19.5 21.5 30.7

19.1 17.4 14.0 18.0

ROMAN CATHOLIC

26.4

1941

Denomination

%

CONSERVATIVE PROTESTANT

Canadian Reformed Evangelical Free Christian Reformed Christian and Missionary Alliance Pentecostal Mennonite Salvation Army Baptist Church of Nazarene Weighted average

_\

M A I N L I N E PROTESTANT

NO RELIGION BC POPULATION

35.5

22.9

-

-

25.9

21.4

31.3

21.7

Sources: Calculated from 1941 Census, vol. 3, table 14; 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 86; 1981 Census, vol. 2:5, 93-934, table 6. 1

A dash indicates that no data are available.

though the latter was still slightly larger than the Baptist population. Even if other variables had been equal, these figures clearly demonstrate that natural increase alone has accounted for, and will continue to account for, much of the increase of those two evangelical groups relative to the Presbyterians. Among the factors that need to be considered in explaining the higher proportions of children in the conservative groups are the following: there were generally fewer older people, especially in the newer groups, and consequently fewer women beyond childbearing age (this was also true, to a far greater degree, of those in the "no religion" category); a higher proportion of members resided in suburbs and rural areas rather than in the larger cities; and there were lower education levels and economic status in some evangelical groups. Any adequate explanation must also include the positive effect

250 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

of the conservatives' traditional views of the family. This is especially important in light of the continuing high birth rates in 1981, despite rising educational and social levels among many evangelicals. Large numbers of evangelicals gave tangible expression to their oftstated high esteem of the traditional family by giving birth to a larger than average number of children. Most evangelical groups were silent on methods of contraception, except abortion; but the Canadian Reformed churches, whose relatively small membership had the highest proportion of children of any group in the province, did refer frequently to the biblical mandate to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."64 A high rate of retention of their children greatly increased the significance of the larger family sizes among conservatives. Bibby cites the combination of high birth and retention rates as a primary reason for the growth of conservative groups in Canada.65 Because of a greater fear of secularization than that shared by their mainline counterparts, evangelical parents were far more likely to ensure that their children were religiously trained. The higher Sunday school enrolments presented in table 4 (chapter 9) are one indication of this emphasis. Another result was the great concern for youth ministries among evangelicals and the frequent hiring of full-time youth pastors by many medium and larger-sized evangelical congregations. Bibby's 1975 survey found that 68 per cent of the children of those who identified themselves as conservatives regularly attended religious services, while only 27 per cent of the children of mainline Protestants did so.66 The conservative parents' greater commitment to traditional concepts of salvation naturally led to a greater urgency to encourage an individual personal decision on the part of the child. The 1984 informal survey indicated that a very high percentage (77 per cent) of respondents' children over sixteen years old had reported a conversion experience and that most of these (87 per cent) were active in an evangelical church. Going back one generation, similar rates were reported for the evangelical families in which many of the respondents were raised. The 202 Mennonite Brethren responses revealed something of the powerful growth potential that high birth rates combined with an enthusiastic revivalistic style could produce. An average of 4.4 children per family in which the respondents had been raised had not only experienced conversion but were active in some evangelical church. These figures help explain why the Mennonite Brethren churches were able to "supply" many of the other evangelical churches with members and yet continued to experience growth themselves.

251

Components of Growth

ALIENATION FROM MODERN CULTURE

The motivation behind many of the developments within conservative Protestantism in British Columbia in the earlier periods can be stated in negative terms: conservatives felt alienated from many religious and cultural developments taking place around them. Yet their motivation can also be stated positively, for their efforts expressed more than a defensive alienation from modern thought and developments; they were directed towards the preservation of many beliefs, values, and practices which the conservatives considered crucial to genuine Christianity and which in their view most adequately met the needs of the human condition. Certitude of faith and doctrine based on an authoritative Bible (biblicism), a personal experience of conversion from sin (conversionism), the importance of Christ's sacrificial death for sin (crucicentrism), a life of personal holiness and fervent evangelism at home and abroad (activism) all seemed endangered by liberal accommodations to modernism. Conservatives believed that liberal Protestants were far too willing to modify these features of traditional evangelicalism in the light of modern thought, and thus they strove to maintain these aspects of their faith. Over the decades, additional conservative groups, very often immigrants, who shared a similar set of values and belief increasingly recognized their spiritual kinship with the more established evangelicals and joined them in defending the features of evangelicalism. During the 1961-81 period, the gap between conservative and liberal Protestants widened in many respects. Increasingly, powerful currents of modern secularism challenged traditional Protestant beliefs throughout North America, and increasingly the characteristically open and culture-affirming liberal churches more readily accommodated to the changes. Leonard I. Sweet portrays liberal American Protestants as being quite willing to undergo considerable change in response to the spirit of the age: First of all, then, it was primarily for apologetic reasons that there arose the desperate yearning to be "with it," the fear of being "out of touch," and the modish concern for "relevance" - whether social relevance for the church or intellectual relevance for theology. "The modern world will not allow us" was a phrase so excessively used it became almost a kind of religious chant. Whatever seemed alien to the modern mind had to go. While most resisted giving up belief in God, the most conspicuous leaders willingly pulled up the anchor of absolutes so that the church might sail alongside "enlightened" minds ... Christians who had taken this path applauded as whole structures of institutional Christianity were secularized, fervently hoping that now disbe-

252

Pilgrims in Lotus Land

lievers would see that religion was taking the ideals of the contemporary world seriously. Whereas an older liberalism had capitulated to the authority of a modern scientific world view, the liberalizing trend that characterized religion in the first sixties capitulated to the authority of a broader and more encompassing phenomenon of cultural secularization.67

In more restrained language, Martin Marty observed, "The secular perception and paradigm prevailed through the mid-sixties."68 The Canadian mainline churches also expressed a concern to be relevant to the modern world. They evidenced this, for example, in the Anglican Church's commissioning in 1963 of well-known agnostic Pierre Berton to write a very widely distributed critique of the church, in which he slammed its clinging to tradition and its lack of relevance.69 The following year, the United Church adopted its New Curriculum, which created a furore among conservatives by openly challenging traditional views of biblical authorship and authority.70 Observers do not usually use the word "capitulation" to describe the Canadian response to modernity in the 19605 (as Sweet does of the American), probably because the Canadian response was characteristically more cautious than the American. However, even those on the inside of these churches do point to some tendencies among the liberal churches in Canada that were similar to those taking place in the United States. A member of the Long Range Planning Committee of the Anglican Church noted in 1983: "The dominant drift of Anglican change in the last two decades has, in the main, followed the accommodationist-reformulation strategy, given the location of Anglicans in the liberal mainstream of Canadian society and our aversion to sectarianism. Certainly this was the path Pierre Berton pointed to. At the same time, the dangers associated with this strategy have involved increasing problems of maintaining distinct religious purpose and identity."7' Church historian John W. Grant, holding a position at the United Church's Emmanuel College, depicted the posture of that church in the 19605 as one in which "disillusioned leaders cast about feverishly for new sources of meaning, and while gaining some important new insights, the church was exposed to a fair amount of pretentious nonsense." He adds, "A tradition of openness doubtless left the United Church more vulnerable to excess than more conservative denominations. "72 In British Columbia, United Church writer Bob Stewart observed in 1975 some of the effects of the spirit of accommodation on the mainline churches. He wrote not as a critic but as a supporter of his church's tradition of openness. Nevertheless, he noted: "The larger

253 Components of Growth

churches have at present no internal consensus, no basic vision upon which to build their future. They are divided between various configurations of 'old guard' and 'new breed,' and have quite fragmented ideas of purpose and mission, and thus seem to lack initiative and thrust. Many mainstream churches are at present little more than holding operations."73 On the other end of the Protestant spectrum, however, many of the cultural changes had the effect of heightening the conservatives' sense of alienation and broadening the range of values they believed to be under attack. They resolutely rejected the open approach to the revolution in cultural values that was more characteristic of the mainline churches. Grant believes that evangelicals were less influenced by the ferment of the 19605 than they were by the affluence of the 19505, believing as they did that the post-1960 changes in the mainline churches "were further proofs of the long-suspected apostasy of the conventional Protestant churches."74 Many of the evangelicals' concerns of the 19605 and 19705, although often expressed in newer terminology, were continuations of the earlier concerns that characterized evangelicalism. However, new issues rose to the fore in this period, including that of the erosion of traditional morals, or "family values," in the nation. The evangelicals' maintenance and pursuit of such values, new and old, often placed them in a symbiotic relationship with modernity. For example, their strong motivation to evangelize, based as it was on decidedly traditional views of human sin, punishment, and Christ's death, compelled them to accept elements of modernity. Instances of this in British Columbia are legion and in fact can create great confusion among evangelicals and observers alike as to whether theirs is a liberal or conservative expression of faith. British Columbia's Mennonite Brethren often appeared the most culturally "modern" of Mennonite groups in the province, and indeed in Canada, because their stronger adherence to evangelical concepts of outreach led them to abandon or de-emphasize the elements of their culture that appeared more conservative. Thus, they more quickly abandoned traditional practices in matters of language, styles of dress, music, church architecture, and some other doctrines and practices in order to remove impediments to appealing to outsiders who needed to be evangelized. Similarly, most evangelical churches were quick to update, enlarge, and replace church facilities and to incorporate the most modern technological and architectural features into them, the aim being to enhance, they most often reasoned, their capacity for, and effectiveness in, outreach. Almost all the new Protestant church construction in the province after the mid-19605 was undertaken by

254 Pilgrims in Lotus Land evangelicals. In a similar vein, many evangelical leaders attempting to reach certain elements of the younger generation were quick to drop traditional patterns of worship in order to incorporate modern styles of music and even dance and drama into their services. Indeed, evangelism-minded conservatives were frequently subjected to criticism for so readily embracing the latest innovations in church building and sound-system technologies, musical styles, electronic broadcasting, and church-growth techniques. The symbiotic relationship with modernity evidenced itself in other areas too. In the field of education, the conservative motivation of Evangelical Free Church leaders to create an alternative to modern secular liberal arts university education led to the creation of a Christian liberal arts curriculum at Trinity Western College. By this means, they increased the educational levels of many evangelical young people and introduced them, at least in an indirect way, to modern ways of thinking and questioning. In the political realm, disenchantment with what were seen as corrupt and secularizing political leaders led some evangelicals to become politically involved, often with Social Credit. By the 19705, others entered the political realm to do battle on behalf of traditional morals and "family values." In the process, they often became familiar with important aspects of the political process and were sensitized somewhat to modern ways of thinking.75 A fundamental value, which continued to rally evangelicals and which enhanced their appeal to some, was a strong and firm belief in the truthfulness and the supernatural origins of Christian teachings. The continued acceptance of an authoritative, infallible, divinely inspired Bible, the source of absolute certitude about issues of life and death, continued to play the central role in this matter. Several months before Trinity Western College opened in 1962, Presidentelect Hanson wrote: "While students must be encouraged to question and investigate, there are limits to inquiry. We seek not only to evoke questions but to give solid answers to eternal questions. Our philosophy of education grows out of our confidence that the Bible is the inspired and infallible Word of God."7 1J9-35CHAPTER SIX

1 2 3 4 5 6

Orr, Times of Refreshing, 96-114. Ormsby, British Columbia, 439. Clifford, "Religion in the Thirties," 119-30. Canada 1951 Census, vol. 10, table 36. Canada, 1931 Census, vol. 2, table 42; 1941 Census, 2, table 37. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 162-3, ^g8- 3 anc* 4-

294

Notes to pages 123—6

7 Council Minutes, 1932-40, Principal's Reports, Vancouver Bible Training School. 8 Phillips, "The History of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Western Canada," no. 9 EC Evangelical News 4 (March 1946). 10 Brook, Story of a Winter, interview with Miss M. Manley and Mrs L.I. Bennet; and Fraser Papers. 11 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church in Alberta, 114-16. 12 The biographical data is taken from J. Wilson, The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle, 1928-1978, and D. Morton, "The Rise of Metropolitan Tabernacle." 13 Miss Ivy Pepper, cited in ibid., 6. 14 F. Martyn Cundy, secretary of the Fundamentals Fellowship of Liverpool and District, Liverpool, 19 June 1926, cited in Rennie, "Fundamentalism and the Varieties of North Atlantic Evangelicalism, 1900-1939." 15 Richards, Baptists in BC, 101. 16 Cited in J. Wilson, The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle. 17 BC Baptist, July 1928. 18 The Metropolitan Tabernacle: Opening of a New Building (Vancouver 1932), cited in D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 9. 19 Richards, Baptists in BC, 82, 95, 101. 20 J. Wilson, The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle, 3. 21 Interview with Mr James Wilson, Metropolitan Tabernacle historian; also D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 10. 22 D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 7, citing interview with John Robertson, son of W.M. Robertson. 23 J. Wilson, "The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle," 8-9; D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 14. Rennie ("Fundamentalism and the Varieties of North Atlantic Evangelicalism," 31) notes the British character of the congregation. 24 For a discussion of the generally understood role of the Baptist pastor, see John B. Richards, "Baptist Leadership: Autocratic or Democratic?" 225-36. 25 Interview with Mr James Wilson, Metropolitan Tabernacle historian; also D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 10. 26 Elliot, "Studies in Canadian Fundamentalism: 1870-1970," 13-26. 27 The Metropolitan Tabernacle: Opening of a New Building, cited in D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," n. 28 Romans 13:8, King James Version. 29 J. Wilson, The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle. 30 Undated memorandum in financial files, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver; and "No Red Ink for this Church," Daily Province, 17 March,

1951-

295

Notes to pages 127—32

31 The Metropolitan Tabernacle: Opening of a New Building, cited in D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 9 32 The Metropolitan Tabernacle "Doctrinal Statement," (adopted 17 July, 1928), in historical files of Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver. 33 Wilson interview; also D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 12-16. 34 Robertson, The Bible at the Bar, 139-40, 145, 147. Other publications of Robertson attacking modernism include The Bible Vindicated: A Reply to Rev. A.E. Cooke and Crucial Questions. 35 Reilly, "Baptists and Organized Opposition to Roman Catholicism, 1941-1962," 181-98. 36 Wilson interview; also Vancouver Daily Province, 26 March 1965. 37 See, for example, Robertson, Baptism with the Holy Spirit and Fire. 38 Wilson interview. 39 Robertson, Christ or Compromise and The Rapture of the Saints. 40 Interview with Harold Davies. 41 Financial Statements, 1936, 1937, 1938, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver; also James Wilson interview. 42 Davies interview. 43 Interview with Kenneth Smith. 44 D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 13. 45 Membership Rolls, 1928-42, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver. 46 Wilson interview. 47 Interview with Mrs Mary Atkinson; Davies interview; and D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle." 48 Financial Records, 1928-40, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver; cf. Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," 152-9, table i. 49 Atkinson, Davies, and Wilson interviews. 50 J. Wilson, The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle. 51 Membership Rolls 1928-29, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver; Wrigley-Henderson, British Columbia Directory, 1928-29. 52 Membership Rolls, 1928-29, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver. 53 Carpenter, "The Renewal of American Fundamentalism, 1930-1945." 54 Smith, Atkinson, and Davies interviews. 55 Pickford, What Hath God Wrought, 65-6; Eno, Courageous for Christ, 95-108. 56 Pickford, What Hath God Wrought, 83-93 an Courageous for Christ, 114-19, 163-6. 57 Eno, Courageous for Christ, 125-208. Rowell received his Doctor of Theology degree from Los Angeles Baptist Theological Seminary in

193658 The issue is thoroughly recounted in Pickford, What Hath God Wrought, 76-91, and in Richards, Baptists in BC, 103-7. 59 Sowerby, Sapperton Baptist, 24-8.

296

Notes to pages 132—7

60 Compiled from Pousett, 'The History of the Regular Baptists," table 9. 61 Compiled from 1951 Census, vol. 10, table 36. 62 Most of the fundamentalist Baptist churches in Ontario that had separated with T.T. Shields from the mainline Baptist Union of Ontario and Quebec left him to form the Fellowship of Independent Baptist churches in 1933. See Tarr, This Dominion: His Dominion, and Davis, "The Struggle for a United Evangelical Baptist Fellowship, 1953-1963," 237-66. 63 Rawlyk, Champions of the Truth. 64 All figures are computed from the 7951 Census, vol. 10, table 36. 65 Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, 33-78. 66 Compiled from Membership Rolls, 1928-34, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver. 67 Compiled from D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 13, and Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," table 9. 68 Pousett, "A History of the Convention," 239. 69 Compiled from Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," table 17 and D. Morton, "Metropolitan Tabernacle," 13. 70 Compiled from the Baptist Union of Western Canada, Year Book, 1928— 44. For a discussion of the significance of the baptism to membership ratio, see Mikolaski, "Peeking over the Baptist Horizon," Canadian Baptist, May 1979, 4-5 and June 1979, 5-6; and "Baptists on the March," Canadian Baptist, November, 1982, 4-5. 71 Compiled from Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," tables i-

»772 Compiled from Membership Rolls, 1928-44, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver. 73 Western Baptist, February 1944, 1. 74 See Herman, "Flooding the Kingdom," 224-5, where he stresses the clarity and urgency of the fundamentalist message. 75 Compiled from Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," chapter 6, which provides a thorough region-by-region account of the expansion of the PAOC into all areas of the province. Especially useful are figs. 3-5, which are maps indicating the number of new churches established in consecutive time periods. 76 Ibid. 77 Canada, 1957 Census, vol. 10, table 36. 78 Canada, 1957 Census, vol. 2, table 42; 1941 Census, vol. 2, table 37. 79 Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," chapter 6 and conclusion; Burkinshaw, "American Influences on Canadian Evangelicalism," 55-7680 See Stackhouse, "Women in public ministry," 471-85, and Hassey, No Time for Silence, 137-40.

297 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89

90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Notes to pages 137—42

Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 133, 209-10. Cited in Barman, The West beyond West, 290. Townsend, Sodbusters. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," provides numerous examples throughout. See, for example, Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement, 57-60, 172-3; Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited; and Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, 21. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," and Townsend, Sodbusters. Gerard, Converted in the Country, 79. Ibid., 85-6. All figures pertaining to age in this and the following paragraphs are compiled from the 1931 Census, vol. 3, table 20, and 1941 Census, vol. 3, table 15. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 98, 124; Townsend, Sodbusters, 77; and Gerard, Converted in the Country, 74, 92—3. Wacker, "The Functions of Faith in Primitive Pentecostalism," 363. Wacker is citing, in part, Roger G. Robins, "Worship and Structure in Early Pentecostalism" (senior seminar paper, Harvard Divinity School, 1984). Canada, 1941 Census, vol. i, table 13. Ibid., table 8; cf. ibid., vol. 3, table 14. Ibid. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 152-3, 182. Compiled from 1941 Census, vol. 4, table 5. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, 63-4, 218-50; Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement, 65-74, 90-1, 179-81. Canada, 1941 Census, vol. 4, tables 6, 20; cf. 1931 Census, vol. 4, table

4599 Several examples of spontaneous gatherings were Chilliwack, where cottage prayer meetings formed in the late 19205; Penticton, where several Pentecostal families from Saskatchewan began meeting together; and Rutland, where a German Pentecostal group formed (Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 126, 132, 152). 100 Canada, 795/ Census, vol. 10, table 36. 101 The process of settlement is covered in a number of sources. See especially Siemens, "Mennonite Settlement in the Lower Fraser Valley"; Epp, Mennonite Exodus and Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940; and Toews, A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church. In addition, several congregations have published their own histories, which often provide valuable glimpses of local settlement: e.g., Bethel Mennonite Church, 1936-1980; Ratzlaff, The Clearbrook Mennonite Brethren Church; and Harder, The Greendale Mennonite Brethren Church, 1931-1981.

298

Notes to pages 143—6

102 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 289, table 27. 103 Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren, 13-68. 104 Goad, A History of the Brethren Movement, 194-8; Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren, 377-8. 105 Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren, 116; Born, "Evangelism and Social Action," 65-79. 106 Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren, 131-8 and 153-60. 107 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1786-1920, 323, table 7. 108 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 487, table 34. 109 For more of a description of this immigration, see Epp, Mennonite Exodus and Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 269-89, table 27; and Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren, 161-75. no Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1786-1920, 133-58, 239, 294-6, 303-32, and Mennonites in Canada, 1920-40, 274-88; also Engbrecht, "The Americanization of a Rural Immigrant Church," 189-94. i n Epp, Mennonite Exodus, 312. 112 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 87, table 34. 113 Ibid., 403-4 114 Ibid. 402-3, 410, 43gn26. Pannabecker, Open Doors, generally agrees with Epp's assessment of the more accommodating, less evangelistic character of the conference churches. 115 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 250; see also Engbrecht, "The Americanization of a Rural Immigrant Church," 191-4. 116 Minutes of Semi-Annual Council, 27 November 1932, Mennonite Brethren Churches of British Columbia (hereafter cited as MB churches). 117 Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 27 February and 21 November 1937, and 26 February 1939, MB churches; and Minutes of General Meeting, 7 Aug. 1938, ibid. 118 For example, Minutes of Semi-Annual Conference, 2 June 1935, and Minutes of General Meeting, 12 June 1938, MB churches. 119 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 403, 410-14; cf. Minutes of General Council, 19 June 1932, MB churches; Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 23 February 1937, ibid.; Minutes of General Meeting, 12 June 1938, ibid.; and Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, November 1939, ibid. 120 Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, November 1940, MB churches. 121 Penner, No Longer at Arms Length, 17-18. 122 The mission's development is recorded in Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, and especially in his Reaching the Otherwise Unreached. See also chapter 8. 123 Minutes of General Meeting, 21 November 1937, MB churches. 124 Minutes of General Council, 21 June 1931, ibid. 125 Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, 10 November 1940, ibid.

299

Notes to pages 146—52

126 Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, 14 June 1936, ibid. 127 Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 12 August 1934, ibid. 128 Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 23 February 1937 and November 1940, ibid. 129 Toews, History of the Mennonite Brethren Churches, 263-4; Minutes of General Council, 21 June 1931, MB churches, and Klassen, The Bible School Story. 130 Penner, No Longer at Arm's Length, 26. 131 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920—1940, 84-5; Minutes of General Meeting, 7 August 1938, MB churches. The minutes contain an outline of a clearly dispensationalist sermon delivered by A. Nachtigal, founder of the Yarrow school. Students at the Abbotsford school indicate that dispensationalism was taught there as accepted orthodoxy (interview with Mrs Freda Riddle). 132 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 84-5, 471-2, Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 28 November 1938, MB churches; and Penner, No Longer at Arm's Length, 17. 133 Cited in Penner, No Longer at Arm's Length, 24. 134 Toews, "Influences on Mennonite Brethren Technology," as cited in Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 470—1. 135 Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920-1940, 468, 474. 136 Ibid., 472. CHAPTER

SEVEN

1 Tomblin, "W.A.C. Bennett and Province-Building in British Columbia," 45-61; Wedley, "Laying the Golden Egg," 58-92. 2 A fine description of the changes experienced in the province in the postwar boom is contained in Barman, The West beyond the West, 270—96. 3 Barman, "The West beyond the West: The Demography," 6, table i. 4 Barman, The West beyond the West, 365, table 8. 5 Canada, 1941 Census, vol. 2, table 37; 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 43. See also Barman, The West beyond the West, 367-8, table 10. 6 The mainline Baptist Union of Western Canada (to which the BC convention belonged) has been similarly characterized as largely British oriented and middle class (Samuel J. Mikolaski, "Peeking over the Baptist Horizon," 4-6). 7 Carpenter, "From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition," in Marsden, Evangelicalism and Modern America, 13. 8 Woodcock, British Columbia, 238. 9 Both Mikolaski ("The Believers' Church in Canada: The Present") and Stackhouse ("Proclaiming the Word," 40) make much the same observation for Canada as a whole.

300

Notes to pages 153—6

i o Carpenter, "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism," 62-75. 11 Council Minutes, 3 October 1940, Vancouver Bible Training School, and annual photographs, 1939-40, ibid., in conjunction with interviews with Norma Cuthbertson and Mrs A.E. Ellis. 12 Ellis interview. 13 Cuthbertson interview. 14 For example, Joseph E. Harris, in his personal diary entries in 1945 and 1946, makes mention of significant contacts with these churches. See Harris Diary, 1945-46, Harris Papers. 15 Ibid. 16 Council Minutes, 1948 and 1949, Principal's Reports, Vancouver Bible Training School. 17 Minutes of General Council, 22 June 1956, Evangelical Free Church of America, cited in Arnold T. Olson, "A Review of Planning the Proposed School in Canada from June 22, 1956 to Jan. 20, 1961," 18, in Trinity Western University Archives, Langley. 18 See Knoff, The World Sunday School Movement, 2, 35, 41, 64-8, 103. 19 Harris, The Baptist Union of Western Canada, 127-9. 20 Rev. J.E. Harris, Calgary, to Rev. E.I. McPhee, Vancouver, 4 October 1953, historical file, Vancouver Bible Institute. Harris had worked unsuccessfully to have VBI officially recognized as a lay training institute of the Baptist Union of Western Canada (Harris Diary, 30 April 1946). 21 For an account of the impressive growth of Prairie Bible Institute, see Donald Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," VBTS. 22 Harris to McPhee, 4 October 1953, VBTS papers. 23 Ibid. 24 Phillips, "The History of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship," 208-9 and interview with Mr Kenneth O. Smith. Mr Smith, son of Oswald Smith, president of VBTS council, was student president of the IVCF at UBC in the early 19505. The writer's father also was active in leadership of the club at the same time and refers to its vitality and to the size of the audiences that its meetings attracted. 25 Stagg, "A Brief Concerning the Future of the Vancouver Bible Institute in Relation to the Baptist General Conference" (unpublished paper in possession of author); interview with Rev. Robert C. Stagg; Baptist General Conference, 1957 Annual, 50; and Minutes of General Council, 22 June 1956, Evangelical Free Church of America, cited in Olson, "A Review of Planning the Proposed School in Canada," 18, Trinity Western Archives, Langley. Ironically, formal approval of the deal by the annual convention of the Baptist General Conference was not actually gained until 1957, but the trustees of the denomination acted on their own the year before, in anticipation of convention approval.

3Oi

Notes to pages 156—62

26 Stagg, "A Brief Concerning the Future of Vancouver Bible Institute," i and Stagg interview. 27 Adolph Olson, A Centenary History, Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 2-3. The Columbia Baptist Conference functions as the north-west district of the Baptist General Conference. 28 Harris, The Baptist Union of Western Canada, 41, 57; McLaurin, Pioneering in Western Canada, 357-80.) 29 Pousett, "Baptists in British Columbia," 64-5; Carlson, Seventy-five Year History, 140, 262. 30 Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 127; Norris, Strangers Entertained, 124-32; and Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 30-3. 31 Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 39-41, no. 32 Ibid., 48-9, 256; Anderson, "The Beginnings of the Baptist General Conference in BC" 33 V.A. Olson, "The Influence of History upon the Baptist General Conference," 253-7; Carpenter, "The Renewal of American Fundamentalism, 1930-45," 195-6. 34 Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 49, 203. 35 Ibid., 200-1, and Stagg interview. 36 Anderson, "The Beginnings of the Baptist General Conference in BC." 37 Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 50-1, 194, 198, 206. 38 Ibid., 116. 39 Ibid., 195, and Stagg interview. 40 Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 197, 202, 207. 41 Computed from ibid., 116, 140, 193-210. 42 R.A. Thompson, The Evangelical Free Church of America. 43 C.B. Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, 15-76. 44 Marsden, Evangelicalism in Modern America, xv. 45 Ibid., 29, 75-6; Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," 209. 46 Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," 216-24. 47 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church in Alberta, 125. 48 Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," 216-24. 49 Ibid., 223-4; C.B. Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, 97-104. 50 Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, 117-23 and interviews with the Rev. David Enarson, who was moderator of the Fellowship of Gospel churches at the time of the merger. 51 M. Hanson, Fifty Years and Seventy Places, 74. 52 Hanson, Hardship to Harvest, 77-90. 53 Ibid., appendix. 54 Evangelical Free Church of America, 1967 Yearbook. 55 Johnston Heights Evangelical Free Church, A Thanks to God, 1-2; Enarson interviews; and interview with Mrs J.A. Stewart who was one of the founding workers of the Green Timbers Mission, Surrey, which

302

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78

Notes to pages 162—7

merged to form the Johnston Heights church. See BC Evangelical News, 1944-48, and C.B. Hanson, Hardship to Harvest, 91 (but note that Hanson confuses the BCEM with the BCSSM). Enarson interviews. Council Minutes, 3 December 1937, 3 February 1939, i March 1940, and 7 May 1943, Vancouver Bible Training School. Enarson interviews. Interview with the Rev. Ted Handy, who was was the first pastor of the Langley Evangelical Free Church. Norton et al, The Diamond Jubilee Story of the Evangelical Free Church of America, 183-6. C.B. Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, 105-8. Enarson interviews. Enarson was district superintendent of the EFC'S Pacific (i.e., BC) district, 1957-66, when much of the expansion occurred. Enarson and Handy interviews. See also Bethel Mennonite Church, 9-13, for evidence of the cultural conservatism of the Coghlan church. Carlson, Seventy-Jive Year History, 116, 140, 193-210; C.B. Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, appendix. Enarson interviews. Enarson was an instructor at FBI in the early 19505. See, for example, 1931 Census, vol. 4, table 45, and 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 43. Compiled from Pousett, 'The History of the Regular Baptists," table 17, and Convention of Regular Baptist Churches, Convention Yearbook, 1961. Richards, Baptists in BC, 101-3; Daily Colonist, 9 January 1937; and Eno, Courageous for Christ, 164—6. Richards, An Historical Overview: 25 Years of Christian Education, 8. G.R. Dawe, "In Retrospect," in ibid., 21; Richards, Baptists in BC, 113; and Pickford, What Hath God Wrought, 122-7. Cited in Pousett, "Baptist Home Missions," 211. Pickford, "Recognizing the Hand of God," 2-4. Pousett, "Baptist Home Missions," 211-12. Richards, Baptists in BC, 100-7, 11 3~ 1 4> 122-3; Ruhlman, A History of Northwest Regular Baptists, 279-80. Interview with the Rev. J. Yoder, who was a student at the Bible college in Port Coquitlam in the period and was one of the first Regular Baptists to advocate union with the Southern Baptists. See also the Western Regular Baptist, February 1952, 10-11; Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," 130-3; and Richards, Baptists in BC, 114-15. Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," 134. Western Regular Baptist, July 1954. Ibid., July 1955.

303

Notes to pages 167—72

79 Computed from Pousett, 'The History of the Regular Baptists," table 26, 177. 80 Yoder interview. 81 Western Regular Baptist, January 1954 and July 1955; Richards, Baptists in BC, 114-17 and Pousett, "The History of the Regular Baptists," i3°-382 Interview with the Rev. D.W. Reed, who was editor of the Western Regular Baptist in the period. 83 Western Regular Baptist, January 1954. 84 For example, ibid., July and November, 1954. 85 Ibid., July 1954. 86 Yoder interview. 87 Davis, "The Struggle for a United Evangelical Baptist Fellowship," 237-65, provides an account of the formation of the Canada-wide organization. 88 Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 86. 89 See Woodcock, British Columbia, 240-7, and Barman, The West beyond the West, 277. go Cited in Barman, The West beyond the West, 277. 91 Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 86. 92 Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, 33-78. 93 Computed from 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 84. 94 Ibid., Religion by BC Electoral Districts, 901-22. 95 Maddaford and Tennant, A Chronology of Broadway Tabernacle. 96 Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 126. 97 Pentecostal Testimony, i June 1941, i; Klan, "Pentecostal Church Growth," 189-90. 98 For example, more members of the large Six Avenue Pentecostal Church, Vancouver, served in U.S. churches than the total number of Americans serving all the churches in Greater Vancouver from 1920 to 1980 (Burkinshaw, 'The American Influence Upon Canadian Evangelicalism," 69-76). 99 Ross, "James Eustace Purdie," 94-103. 100 Pendray, "50 Years of Growth." 101 "Students, Graduates, Tuition per Year," 1978, Western Pentecostal Bible College files; also Pendray, "50 Years of Growth." 102 Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth in BC," 190. 103 Ibid., 150-60, 167-9, 175~7104 Computed from 7967 Census, vol. 1:3, table 111. 105 Ibid., Population, special volume, 100-5. 106 Rothenburger, Friend o' Mine; Klan, "Pentecostal Church Growth," 183-6. 107 Ibid., 183-4, 186-98.

304 108 109 no 111

112 113 114

115

116

Notes to pages 173—9

For a more complete account, see Riss, 'The Latter Rain Movement." Riss, A Survey of 20th-century Revival Movements in North America, 113. Riss, "The Latter Rain Movement," 76-88. Ibid., 88-100, 122-30. Riss gives, as an example of the wider influence of Vancouver, the case of Mrs Myrtle D. Beall of the Bethesda Missionary Temple in Detroit, Michigan. She attended the Vancouver meetings, returned full of enthusiasm for the new developments, and subsequently saw her church grow from being an Assemblies of God congregation of several hundred members to an independent congregation attracting thousands. Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 158. Ibid., 183-4, 186-98. LIFE (Lighthouse Institute Foursquare Evangelism) Bible College, "Graduates of LIFE Bible College of Canada," unpublished report, 1978, LIFE Bible College papers. Evangelistic Tabernacle, History, 1924-74, and interviews with Mr Fred Nears and Mrs Maryse Ellis. Mr Nears became a member of Evangelistic Tabernacle in 1938 and Mrs Ellis in 1946. Larden, Our Apostolic Heritage, Evangelistic Tabernacle, History, 1924-74." CHAPTER

EIGHT

1 The two older denominational accounts of Simpson's life and work are Thompson, The Life of A.B. Simpson, and Tozer, Wingspread: Albert B. Simpson - A Study in Spiritual Altitude. For a new denominational work, which re-examines many aspects of his life and thought, see Hartzfield and Nienkirchen, The Birth of a Vision: Essays on the Ministry and Thought of Albert B. Simpson. Elliot, in his critical "Studies in Canadian Fundamentalism," 87-105, places Simpson in context in the fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements. 2 Stoesz, "The Doctrine of Sanctification in the Thought of A.B. Simpson,"107-24. 3 Sawin, "The Fourfold Gospel," 1-28. 4 Charles Nienkirchen, "Albert B. Simpson: Forerunner and Critic of the Pentecostal Movement," 125—64 and Elliot, "Studies in Canadian Fundamentalism," 100-2. 5 "Report given by Rev. John Woodward, first pastor of Beulah Tabernacle, Edmonton," 3-11, transcript of tape recording in Canadian Bible College/Canadian Theological Seminary Archives, Regina; also Beulah Tabernacle, i8th Anniversary of Radio Gospel Broadcasting. 6 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church in Alberta, 123. 7 Ibid., 35, 125.

305

Notes to pages 179—81

8 Ibid., 122; Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," 220-32; and Enarson interview. 9 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church in Alberta, 30, 32, 34. 10 This is a rather mysterious affair, for the denomination's provincial office can find no records concerning this attempt, yet the WrigleyHenderson Amalgamated British Columbia Directory lists a Christian and Missionary Alliance Hall on West Eleventh Avenue for the year 1925. 11 Again, the denominational records contain no mention of this church until 1939, when it became officially recognized by the society, yet it is listed in the provincial Wrigley-Henderson directory from 1929 onwards as "c & MA Alliance Gospel Tabernacle" with Rev. D. Walker as pastor. 12 Church Records file, Canadian Pacific District, in district office of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (hereafter cited as CMA). 13 Ibid. 14 BC Evangelical News, November 1949; "Kamloops Celebrates Mortgage Burning," Canadian Alliance News, February 1982, 7. The Capitol Hill Church, Burnaby, begun as a Sunday school in 1914, became the Capitol Union Church in 1921, undoubtedly in anticipation of the formation of the United Church. Congregationalist Rev. A.E. Cooke and the president of the BC Methodist Conference both preached at the organizing service. However, the congregation declined to enter the United Church in 1925. The records do not explain why, but they do provide an indication of the congregation's conservative theological orientation. The Rev. Walter Ellis, principal of VBTS, was requested to preach once per month before he became minister of Fairview Presbyterian Church. In 1926 the church secured a returned CMA missionary as pastor, and an informal affiliation with the CMA developed, which culminated in its formal affiliation in 1947. See Council Minutes, 1922 and 1923, Vancouver Bible Training School; and Brentwood Park Alliance Church, A Brief Historical Sketch. 15 Church Records file, Canadian Pacific District, CMA; and Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 49. 16 "Some Historical Information on loth Avenue and Vancouver Area Churches," unsigned, undated notes in Canadian Pacific District office, CMA. 17 Computed from 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, tables 41, 51, 52. 18 "Chilliwack Alliance Church," supplement to Chilliwack Progress, 16 June 1982, 2-3, 6, 10. 19 Ibid., 7-8; "Some Historical Information on loth Avenue and Vancouver Area churches," CMA. 20 Carpenter, "From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition,"

!321 Petersen, Planned Migration, 92-118.

306 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

Notes to pages 181—6

Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 126. Ibid., vol. 1:2, table 44. Ginn, 'The Dutch and Dairying," 117-38. Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 127. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America, 1-7. Petersen, Planned Migration, 187. Ginn, "Rural Dutch Immigrants in the Lower Fraser Valley," 30-4; Petersen, Planned Migration, 176-9. VanderMey, To All Our Children, 27-74. Cited in Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 246. Cited in Petersen, Planned Migration, 187. Petersen, Planned Migration, 188. Published in New Westminster by Covenant Publishing, 1987. Christian Reformed Church, 1982 Yearbook. Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 44. Van Oene, Inheritance Preserved; Vandergugten, "The Canadian Reformed Church"; and Canadian Reformed Church, 1985 Yearbook. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America, 14-15. First Christian Reformed Church, Abbotsford, History, 3. Ibid., 101-19. Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 250-1. Ibid., 247. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America, appendix, 222-3. Moerman, "25 Years of Christian Witness in Canada," 8-13. Ibid. First Christian Reformed Church, Abbotsford, History. Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 246-7; First Christian Reformed Church, Abbotsford, History, 93, 97, 113. Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 276. Evangelicals varied in their degree of acceptance of Calvinism. Some Plymouth Brethren and Regular Baptists would accept much more than most. It should also be noted that the nineteenth-century secessionists in Holland were influenced by Pietism but remained more confessionally oriented than most European Pietists. See Bratt, Dutch Calvinists in America, 3-13. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America, 131-4; Carpenter, 'The Renewal of American Fundamentalism," 196-7. Canada, 1951 Census, vol. 10, table 36; 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 86. Stackhouse, "The Protestant Experience in Canada since 1945," 227. Penner, No Longer at Arm's Length, 37-8, recounts how most Mennonite students rejected their own denominational student organization in favour of supporting the IVCF. Computed from 1941 Census, vol. 4, table 2, and 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 44.

307 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

Notes to pages 186—9

Siemens, "Mennonite Settlement," 63-5. Epp, Mennonite Exodus, 351-447, especially tables 25, 36, 37. Ibid., 257-60, 409-47. Ibid., 444. Compiled from Siemens, "Mennonite Settlement," 73, map 10, appendix c, table 17. See the excellent depiction of the urban concentration in Ibid., 127, map 17. Friesen, "Mennonite Brethren Church Planting in Vancouver," 27, table I. Mennonite Brethren Church, 1961 Yearbook of the fifty-first Canadian Conference; Pannabecker, Open Doors, 152-3; and the Mennonite Encyclopedia. See, for example, Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, November 1944 and November 1947, Mennonite Brethren Churches of British Columbia (hereafter, cited as MB churches).

61 J.A. Toews, A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, 266. 62 Ibid., 263-4; Klassen, The Bible School Story, 1913-63.

63 John E. Toews, "Theological Reflections on Mennonite Brethren Church Membership Profile, 1972-1982," 67. Toews suggests this shift was occuring among Mennonite Brethren in much of North America. 64 Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, November 194465 Ibid., November 1946. 66 Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 151. 67 Henripin, Trends and Factors of Fertility in Canada, 194-201.

68 69 70 71

Canada, 1961 Census, vol. 1:3, table 86. Klassen, The Bible School Story, and Klassen interview. Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, May 1945, MB churches. Klassen interview; Born, "Evangelism and Social Action," 114-6. Significantly, the change to the English language did not come in Vancouver for five more years. Because of the compact nature of the Mennonite settlement in the city and the continuing immigration into it, from Paraguay and Europe, its MB church was culturally more conservative than those in the more rural central Eraser Valley. See Friesen, "Mennonite Brethren Church Planting in Vancouver," 28-31, 44, and Driedger, "Urbanization of Mennonites in Canada," 143-55.

72 Ibid.; Penner, Reaching the Otherwise Unreached, 23-4.

73 The mission workers reported on such activities at every semi-annual meeting of the Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches of British Columbia. 74 Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, June 1946, MB churches. 75 Ibid., May 1945, November 1947, and June 1952. 76 Klassen interview. Dr Klassen was a member of the group.

308 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86

Notes to pages 190—3

Penner, No Longer at Arm's Length, 47. Penner, Reaching the Otherwise Unreached, 30, i oo. Ibid., 19, 31 (maps). Born, "Evangelism and Social Action," 103. Minutes of Semi-Annual Meeting, November 1951, MB churches. "Evangelism and Social Action," 53-62; and J.A. Toews, A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, 13-19. Born, "Evangelism and Social Action," 72-4. Minutes of Semi-Annual meeting, May 1950, MB churches; and Penner, Reaching the Otherwise Unreached, 34-40. Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 83—4, discusses these isssues at length but seems to discount somewhat the effect of ethnicity upon evangelism. Interviews with Klassen and the Rev. Nick Dyck. In 1952, Dyck became, the full-time worker at the McConnell Creek mission station (near Mission City), which soon developed sufficiently to become a focal point of the debate. See also Penner, Reaching the Otherwise Unreached, 112-22.

87 The MB conference spent a great deal of time agonizing over a complex array of issues related to the missions stations. See Penner, Reaching the Otherwise Unreached, 112-22. 88 Brunk's campaigns and methodology are described in Dickey, "The Tent Evangelism Movement of the Mennonite Church." 89 Ibid., 18, 80-8, 96-105, 115. 90 Epp, Revival Fires in Manitoba. 91 Klassen, Revival Fires in British Columbia. 92 Ibid. 93 Mennonite Observer, 5 September 1958. 94 Klassen interview. It was also at this time that many reports at the semiannual conferences began to be delivered in English. 95 List of Mennonite Brethren Churches of British Columbia, including date of organization and of being admitted into the Mennonite Brethren Conference of British Columbia, MB churches; Dyck interview, 25 June 1987. 96 Pannabecker, Open Doors, table 15, 152-3, 164-5. 97 Most observers agree with this assessment, whether they be Conference Mennonites or Mennonite Brethren (e.g., Klassen and Dyck interviews). The fact that both groups began jointly to operate Columbia Bible Institute in Clearbrook in 1970, a highly unique development in North America, is a later indication of this. 98 Bethel Bible Institute, Echoes of Bethel, 49-51. 99 Klassen, Revival Fires in British Columbia; Klassen interview; and Conference of Mennonites in British Columbia, Churches in Profile, 105.

309

Notes to pages 194—7

100 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church, 13, 35. 101 Canada, 7961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 42. 102 Mann, Sect, Cult and Church, 9-10; McLaurin, Pioneering in Western Canada, 325-56; Woyke, Heritage and Ministry of the North American Baptist Conference; and Pousett, "Baptists in British Columbia," 65-6. 103 Canada, 1941 Census, vol. 4, table 5, and 1967 Census, vol. 1:2, table 42. 104 Rudnick, Fundamentalism and the Missouri Synod, 75-90. 105 Threinen, In Search of Identity, 27. 106 Gabert, "Lutherans in British Columbia," 128-35. 107 Carpenter, "The Renewal of Fundamentalism," 197. See also Ellingsen, "Lutheranism," 222-44. 108 Canada, 1941 Census, vol. 2, table 37; 1961 Census, vol. 1:2, table 42. 109 W.E. Ellis, "Some Aspects of Religion in British Columbia Politics," computed from appendix 4, 301-9. no Ibid., 84. 111 Nyman, "The Mennonite Vote." 112 For discussions of secularism and the CCF, see Young, The Anatomy of a Party, 186, and Regenstrief, "Some Aspects of National Party Support in Canada," 59-74. In Grassroots Politicians, Blake et al. call the New Democrats, successor of the CCF, "the party of no religion." For Mennonite fears of communism in the CCF, see Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 186. 113 Wilson interview. 114 Rothenburger, Friend o' Mine, 33—4. 115 Barman, The West beyond the West, 276. 116 It must be noted, however, that not all evangelicals in Alberta approved of Aberhart's foray into politics. He lost the support of Maxwell of FBI, for example, when he began incorporating political ideas into his radio broadcasts. See Goertz, "The Development of a Bible Belt," 204-8. 117 Voting was complicated by the transferable ballot system used in this and the 1953 election. Social Credit received only 27 per cent of the first-choice ballots, but the percentage increased as second-choice ballots were counted. See Barman, The West beyond the West, 275—6, and 360, table 4. 118 W.E. Ellis, "Some Aspects of Religion in British Columbia Politics," 170-89. 119 Ibid., 203-4.

310 Notes to pages 198—210 CHAPTER NINE

1 Alberta's population, fuelled by an oil boom, also grew very rapidly and, with an increase of 68 per cent, was only slightly less than British Columbia's 68.5 per cent in the 1961-81 period. 2 The 1981 combined population of the four Atlantic provinces stood at 2,234,000, and that of Manitoba and Saskatchewan at 1,995,000. 3 See, for example, Davis and Hutton, "The Two Economies of British Columbia," 3-15. In addition, Barman (The West beyond the West, 28196, 299, 322-7, 336-8, 348-9) provides some perceptive description of the changes in the various regions. 4 Some of the most helpful summaries of population growth and changes in its geographic distribution appear in Barman, The West beyond the West, 371-5, tables 14-18. 5 Ibid., 313-14, and 363, table 5. 6 Stewart, "The United Church of Canada: Knocking on Heaven's Door?" provides an informal but devastating statistical depiction of various aspects of the decline of the United Church in British Columbia from 1960 to the mid-1970s. 7 Stewart, "Knocking on Heaven's Door?" 11. 8 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 87-91. 9 Canada, icjSi Census, vol. i, 92—912, table i. 10 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 27-31.

11 See, for example, Bloesch, The Evangelical Renaissance. Kelly, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, graphically documents the trends. Richard Quebedeaux, The Young Evangelicals and The Worldly Evangelicals, comments perceptively on variations within American evangelicalism. Other important works are Hunter's, American Evangelicalism and Evangelicalism. Sweet, "The Evangelical Tradition in America," 80-6, describes many additional relevant works. 12 Stewart, "Knocking on Heavens Door?" 10. 13 Canada, icjSi Census, vol. 2:5, table 5. 14 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 28, table 2.1. 15 Hiller, drawing upon concepts used by Sandeen, develops the distinction between parallel and alternative institutions in "Continentalism and the Third Force in Religion," 183-207. 16 The story of the college's development until 1974 is told in a popular, inspirational manner in Calvin Hanson's, On the Raw Edge of Faith, and it is continued in a similar vein in his Hardship to Harvest, 125-65, 177-88. Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word," 184-95, analyses the college's development largely for the purpose of putting it in the context of the wider Canadian evangelicalism. Guenther, "A Case in Policy Making," examines some of the later developments

gn

Notes to pages 210—14

as a case study in the making of provincial government education policy. 17 The Vancouver Sun and Province gave extensive coverage, particularly during July and August 1979. Guenther, "A Case Study in Policy Making," analyses the opposition as part of the political process. 18 Guenther, "A Case Study in Policy Making." 19 Richmond College, near Toronto, never attained viability and closed in the early igSos. 20 C. Hanson, On the Raw Edge of Faith, 47. 21 Olson, "A Review of Planning the Proposed School in Canada from June 22, 1956 to Jan. 20, 1961," 6, Trinity Western University (hereafter, TWU) Archives. 22 Ibid., 3-7. 23 C. Hanson, On the Raw Edge of Faith, 31—7, 46—56, graphically presents some of the fears of the constituency. 24 Enarson interviews. Enarson had taught at FBI and another smaller Bible school in Alberta but was one of the very earliest and staunchest supporters of the liberal arts college. 25 Cited in Olson, "A Review of Planning," 10, TWU Archives. 26 C. Hanson, On the Raw Edge of Faith, 50, TWU Archives. 27 Cited in Olson, "A Review of Planning," 12. 28 Aspects of this development are traced in Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word," 184-95. 29 Kenneth R. Davis, "Academic Freedom," statement by the vice-president of academic affairs submitted to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, copy in TWU files. 30 C. Hanson, On the Raw Edge of Faith, 80-100; Trinity Western College, Registrar's Reports, 1970-80, TWU. 31 C. Hanson, Hardship to Harvest, Olson, "A Review of Planning," 7. 32 Trinity Western College, Registrar's Reports, 1975-80, TWU. 33 C. Hanson, Hardship to Harvest, 146-7. 34 Guenther, "A Case in Policy Making," 29; interview with Mrs Eileen Dailly, who was minister of education in the NDP government of 197275 and who served as the opposition education critic during the controversies. It should be noted that the NDP was not fully unified in its opposition. For example, the Hon. David Barrett, who was premier in 1972-75 and leader of the official opposition during the late 19705, did not oppose the concept of private colleges, having himself studied in a private Roman Catholic university in the United States. He did not join with the six NDP members who voted against the 1979 bill granting Trinity Western College power to grant degrees. 35 Guenther, "A Case Study in Policy Making."

312

Notes to pages 215—16

36 For example, Harvey Schroeder, Chilliwack, and Elwood Veitch, Burnaby-Willingdon, were known as evangelicals. 37 Cited in Guenther, "A Case Study in Policy Making," 27. 38 The BC Research Council reported that students transferring from TWC to UBC achieved grades "substantially higher than that achieved by students from other BC Colleges" (cited in Guenther, "A Case Study in Policy Making," 20—1). The college did received $1.8 million in the late 19705 from federal government grants to the province for university education. The BC government had included TWC enrolment figures in its applications for the funds since 1972, then granted on a per-student basis, and for that reason was finally persuaded to pass on the money. No further public money was received since that time because of a change in federal government granting policy (C. Hanson, Hardship to Harvest, 178-9). 39 Blake, Two Political Worlds: Parties and Voting in British Columbia, 86-8. Blake's definition of "Fundamentalist" includes all groups defined as "conservative Protestant" in this study, with the significant exception of the Baptists. Intriguingly, he found that Baptist support for Social Credit was much lower than among other conservatives in that election. No reasons for this are provided, but perhaps the greater working-class orientation of his small sample of Baptists, the more heterogeneous theological outlook of Baptists, and the historical affinities of many Baptists for the CCF - led for years by ex-Baptist minister T.C. Douglas — help explain the differences. My own informal observations also indicate that a small minority of evangelicals became uncomfortable with the greater orientation of the Social Credit party towards big business interests, especially after 1975- Unquestionably, however, most observers would confirm Blake's findings and agree that the great majority of evangelicals, whether enthusiastically or very quietly, supported Social Credit. 40 Boyle, Elections British Columbia, emphasizes that an increasing number of provincial ridings in the 19705 were won or lost by very thin margins. Thus, the evangelical population was large enough in many areas of the province to make a crucial difference to the outcome. 41 Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word," 196-210, provides a helpful summary of the college's history and is especially useful in locating it on the spectrum of Canadian evangelicalism. He provides the enrolment figures, citing reports of full-time equivalent enrolment to the Association of Theological Schools in 1986. These put Ontario Theological Seminary (established by Ontario Bible College in 1976) second in size in Canada (with 220 students), and the United Church's Emmanuel College, Toronto, third (with an enrolment of 195).

313

Notes to pages 216—19

42 See, for example, McLaren, 'The Triple Tradition: The Origins of the Open Brethren in North America." 43 Goad, A History of the Brethren Movement, 139—290. 44 Several Vancouver and Victoria assemblies began changing this practice somewhat, beginning in the late 19605, by hiring administrative and pastoral staff. They were still wary of formal clerical titles, however, and termed some such staff "teaching elders." 45 Goad, A History of the Brethren Movement, 193. 46 "British Columbia, 1858-1958: The Growth of a Work of God," Calling, March 1959, 12-14; Atkinson and Sheppard interviews. 47 Gear interview; and Harris Diary, 4 March 1946, Harris Papers. 48 Interview with Mrs A.E. Ellis. 49 Telephone interview with Dr Ian S. Rennie, and Ellis interview. Rennie became a Regent College board member soon after the founding of Regent and thus, was closely associated with Sheppard. 50 Sutherland, "Historical Development." It should be noted that in some North American centres, including Toronto, Montreal, and Chicago, some Plymouth Brethren were highly supportive of the university group. See Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word." 51 Phillips, "The History of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Western Canada," 53-4, 75, 83, 93. 52 Ibid., 208-9. Philips notes that the SCM was declining and ceased to function on many campuses, especially after 1965. 53 The other president was Kenneth E. Burkinshaw, father of this writer. He frequently recalls the size, activities, and denominational breadth of the club. He was not involved in the founding of Regent College, having moved out of the Vancouver area in 1962 and out of the Brethren assemblies in 1968, but he had been part of the group of young Brethren assisting Smith with Calling magazine in the late 19508 and early 19605. 54 VBI, Minutes of Council, 1940-49, Vancouver Bible Training School collection; Sutherland, "Historical Development"; Wilson interview; and interview with Mr Kenneth Smith. 55 For example, the Copp, Sheppard, Funston, and Rae families, all Plymouth Brethren, controlled much of the shoe business in Vancouver and Victoria. 56 Interview with Dr Carl Armerding, principal of Regent College. 57 Sutherland, "Historical Development." 58 John Cochrane, "The Effect of Increased Education - and a Proposal!" Calling, Fall 1965, 9-11; James M. Houston, "A New Venture in Christian Education," Calling, Fall 1967, 16-8. 59 "An Act to Incorporate Regent College" (chapter 68, 1968), Regent College records.

314

Notes to pages 219-23

60 Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word," lorn, helpfully discusses the nuances of the term. 61 Seven of the first board members were from Vancouver and four were residents of Victoria. 62 Regent College Registrar's Reports, 1972-73 to 1979-80. 63 According to the "Agreement Between Regent College and the Baptist Union of Western Canada," in the Baptist Union of Western Canada Yearbook, 1979-80, the Baptist school would provide courses in practical theology and Regent would provide biblical, theological, historical, and other courses and would grant the Master of Divinity degrees. 64 Interviews with Dr Roy Bell, principal of Carey Hall, Vancouver. Dr Samuel Mikolaski, Pioneer McDonald Professor of Baptist Studies, Carey Hall, and the Rev. Phil Collins, Carey Hall, were of considerable assistance in providing an understanding of the theological changes and continuity in the BC convention of the Baptist Union of Western Canada. 65 Richards, Baptists in BC, 110. 66 Baptist Union of Western Canada, Yearbook, 1960-61 and 1980-81. 67 Sunday School Times, 11 November, 1950. 68 Harris, The Baptist Union of Western Canada, 107, 129, and interview with Mr and Mrs George Davies. 69 Phillips, 'The History of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Western Canada," 258-9. 70 The college used the doctrinal statement of the World Evangelical Fellowship, which the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada also used (See Sutherland, "Historical Development," and Stackhouse, "Proclaiming the Word," 236—44). In a carefully nuanced section, Stackhouse highlights some of the differences between Regent College and the relatively nearby Trinity Western University. 71 Society of Christian Schools figures obtained from Federation of Independent Schools Association, "Enrollment Statistics; British Columbia Federation of Independent Schools," Vancouver 1987. Exact figures for the other independent schools are not possible, given the lack of centralized data collecting, but the figure presented was derived from both the Federation of Independent Schools Association, "1986-87 Directory of Independent Schools," Vancouver, 1986, and the Federation of Independent Schools Association, "Enrollment Statistics; British Columbia Independent Schools." For a description of the philosophy of education of the more Calvinist-oriented schools, see Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 250-63, 285-6. 72 Northwest Baptist Theological College, "25 \ears of Christian Education," 2, Baptist Historical Collection. Convention of Regular Baptist Churches, Convention Yearbook, 1979-80.

315

Notes to pages 223—8

73 "Students, Graduates, Tuition," internal report, 1981, Western Pentecostal Bible College files. 74 Interview with Dr A.E. Wolf, president, LIFE Bible College, Burnaby. 75 "Registrar's Report," 1981, Okanagan Bible Institute. Interview with Dr Wesley Affleck, who came from Winnipeg Bible College to assist with the new school in 1965. 76 'The Historical Development of Columbia Bible Institute," Columbia Bible Institute. Minutes of the June Conference of the BC Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 1970, 53-6, MB churches. Schmidt, "Columbia Bible Institute: Paradox of Brotherhood and Walls." In 1982 the status was changed from joint operation to joint ownership ("Terms of Reference for the Ownership, Development and Operation of Columbia Bible Institute," 1982). 77 Also rather ironically, the Baptist General Conference and the Evangelical Free Church, along with the Regular Baptists, began in the late 19805 a seminary consortium on the campus of Trinity Western University. 78 Interview with Rev. G. Schroeder. 79 Jubilee Bible College, Catalogue, 1982-83. 80 In addition, by 1981 an increasing trend towards less formal, shorterterm and part-time Bible schools was evidenced by new schools operated by Glad Tidings Tabernacle, Vancouver, and Torch Bearer Schools, England, on Thetis Island in the Strait of Georgia. CHAPTER TEN

1 By 1911, 22 per cent of Albertans had come from the United States, and by the 19205 it was estimated that up to 50 per cent of the farmers in southern Alberta were Americans. In contrast, about onethird of BC residents in 1911 were recent British immigrants, and the proportion of American immigrants was less than one-half that in Alberta, and it was even less in regions outside the mining towns in the province's southeast. See Palmer and Palmer, Alberta: A New History, 83, and Canada, Department of the Interior, Atlas of Canada, 94. 2 "From the President's Pen," BC Regular Baptist, April 1980, 3. 3 Copies of BBM reports obtained from Terry Winter Christian Communications, Vancouver. Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 31-6, provides figures that indicate that a small proportion of Canadians regularly watch religious television broadcasts. 4 "Hundey Street Covers the Nation," Faith Today, November-December 1968, 58. 5 This was part of a larger study, described in note 35 of this chapter. 6 Burkinshaw, "American Influences," 47, 70.

316 Notes to pages 228—31 7 For example, in 1967 the twenty Southern Baptist Churches in Canada received approximately j6o,ooo in aid from the United States (Hood, Southern Baptist Work in Canada, 48). 8 By the late 19705 the proportion of American students at the college had dropped to between 11 and 13 per cent of the student body and the proportion from Canadian provinces outside British Columbia had risen to between 17 and 22 per cent. BC students comprised between 61 and 64 per cent of the student body in the late 19705 and early igSos (Trinity Western College, Registrar's Reports, 1965-1981, TWU). By 1980, the key administrators, the majority of the faculty, and most of the financial support came from within Canada. 9 Man waring, From Controversy to Co-existenser, Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 259-61. 10 See Stackhouse, "More than a Hyphen," and Rennie, "Fundamentalism and the Varieties of North Atlantic Evangelicalism." 11 The literature dealing with the charismatic movement, especially in the United States, is very extensive. For example, see O'Connor, The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church; Synan, Aspects of PentecostalCharismatic Origins; Poloma, The Charismatic Movement; and Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics and The New Charismatics II. See also Mills, Charismatic Religion in Modern Research. 12 Many observers emphasize the highly "respectable" origins of the movement in Episcopal and other mainline Protestant churches in the United States. See, for example, Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics, 182—3, 23°~31> and The New Charismatics II, 162—5, 219-20; and Gerlach and Hines, People, Power and Change, xxi. 13 Bebbinton, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 240—5. 14 Reimers, God's Country, 11-13, 3°~5> interview with Rev. Bob Birch; and Pettigrew, 'The Charismatic Renewal Movement." Pettigrew based her work on interviews with many of the early participants. 15 Pettigrew, 'The Charismatic Renewal Movement," 5, and Birch interview. 16 Reimers, God's Country, 30-9. 17 For the origins of the strong British wing of the charismatic movement, see Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics, 59-63 and The New Charismatics II, 67-72, and, especially, Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 229-48. 18 See, for example, Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 131,133-5, 150. 19 Somewhat paradoxically, the origins of the association lay with a small group of independent Pentecostal congregations known as the Evangelical Churches of Pentecost, an offshoot of the Apostolic Churches of Pentecost. The new Charismatics and the older group of independents found that they shared a common desire to belong to an association,

317 Notes to pages 231—4

20

21

22 23

24

25 26

or "fellowship," without denominational "controls" (interview with the Rev. J.M. Hunt, who has been secretary of the association since its founding in 1977). "Christian Ministers' Association, Church Directory" in conjunction with Hunt interview. In addition, documents such as Dixon's, "Study and Plan for the West Coast Mission Council" (unpublished United Church document) confirm the strength of the independent charismatic congregations in certain areas relative to mainline churches. An example of reorganization in order to focus better on establishing new churches is found in the Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. In 1961 the work of the West Coast Children's Mission formally became part of the denomination in order to make church planting a more integral part of the denominational task (Minutes of the Spring Conference of the Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, June 1962, 14, MB churches). It should be noted that, in addition, denominational offices acted as "clearing houses" for millions of dollars sent to the national offices for foreign missions. Convention of Regular Baptist Churches of British Columbia, ^.gth Annual Convention, 1976, 14. Noll, "Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influences in North Atlantic Societies," stresses the adaptability and success of evangelicals in the face of changes wrought by political revolutions. Post-World War II British Columbia certainly did not face a revolution of the type Noll describes, yet as the fastest-growing Canadian province and the one that led the way in certain social and demographic changes, it does present a reasonably close analogy. For this, and the examples to follow, population figures are from the Canada, 1961 Census, vol. i, table 6, and 1981 Census, 93-910, table 6. The number of congregations and average attendance figures are gleaned from denominational yearbooks, directories, and telephone books. Calculated from 1981 Census, vol. 1:3, table 5. A 1992 study revealed an astounding growth in the number of "Pacific Rim" Asian evangelical churches in the Lower Mainland. It found 103 Protestant churches among these groups, 91 of which were associated with explicitly evangelical groups, led by Mennonite Brethren, Baptist, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and Pentecostal, and including most other evangelical groups. The remaining twelve churches belonged to mainline Protestant denominations, but it has frequently been noted that such congregations are far more conservative and evangelically inclined than the sponsoring denominations (Robert N. Thompson, "The Impact of Pacific Rim Development on Churches in the Lower Mainland").

318 Notes to pages 235—9 27 George Epp, "Growing Churches Help Small Groups," Mennonite Brethren Herald, 10 September, 1982, 18. 28 Convention Minutes, 1977-1982, Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, MB churches. 29 Minutes of the fall conference of the Mennonite Brethren Churches in BC, 1947, ibid. 30 See chapter 7 for a discussion of the transfers of several such stations. 31 They officially became a joint charge in 1979. I am grateful to Bob Stewart of the United Church Archives, Vancouver, for researching this for me. 32 Much of the information for this illustration is drawn from the experience of the author's parents and those of his wife who, between them, lived in Hope for twenty-five years. Mrs Vera Anderson, a founding member of the independent charismatic congregation, also provided information. 33 Klan, "Pentecostal Assemblies Church Growth," 155-82, mentions several such incidents. 34 The 40 per cent "non-transferers" includes those who moved within their denominational groupings (e.g., Regular Baptist to Baptist General Conference, or Mennonite Brethren to General Conference Mennonite). These are included because, significantly, few respondents were able (or thought it important enough) to make such a distinction. 35 This survey began almost spontaneously in the form of a questionnaire, the result of a brief discussion between the author and the editor, in the February 1984 issue of Christian Info, a newspaper distributed biweekly in nearly every Lower Mainland evangelical church. Respondents were asked about the ethnic and religious history and the country of origin of themselves and their children, parents, and grandparents. Surprisingly, several hundred people responded initially, enough to pursue that source of information more seriously. Contact with pastors and other leaders from a broad range of evangelical churches resulted in a total of 1,300 completed questionnaires being returned. Unfortunately, neither the wording of the questionnaire nor the informal means used for eliciting responses allows for any claim to scientific accuracy for the results. On the other hand, the magnitude of the response and the age, sex, denominational, and geographic distribution of the respondents is close enough to what is known about Lower Mainland evangelicals for the results to be presented here - though in a tentative way, as illustrative rather than conclusive evidence. 36 W.E. Ellis, "Fragmented Baptists." 37 See, for example, Bibby and Brinkerhoff, "Circulation of the Saints," 253-62.

319 Notes to pages 239-48 38 Ellis, "Fragmented Baptists," 10-15. 39 Bratt, "Adam, Eve and the Christian Reformed Church," Christian Century 109, no. 26 (1992): 808. 40 See Hadaway, "Changing Brands," 262-8. 41 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modem Britain, 229-48, most helpfully links the charismatic renewal with the culture of modernism. 42 See Stackhouse, "Women in Public Ministry in 20th-century Canadian and American evangelicalism." 43 Gerlach and Hine, People, Power and Change, 69-73. 44 Mackey, "Born Again Business Network," 15-20. 45 Pickford, What Hath God Wrought, 321. 46 Barman, The West beyond the West, 324-5. 47 Lim, "Solid Growth in British Columbia,"i 1-15. 48 These ministers were part of the survey described in note 35 above. The 72 ministers represented seventeen evangelical groups. 49 Carpenter, 'The Renewal of American Fundamentalism," 194. 50 Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 157. 51 "Mennonite Brethren Churches of British Columbia," a list of churches indicating name, organization date, and date of joining the conference, produced in 1987 by the Conference of Mennonite Brethren churches in British Columbia, MB churches; Redekop, "Denominational Pride," Mennonite Brethren Herald, 3 October 1969, reprinted in Redekop's Two Sides, 10-11. 52 No Longer at Arm's Length, 154-5. See a'so Toews, Conrad and Dueck, "Mennonite Brethren Church Membership Profile, 1972-1982." John H. Redekop, despite his desire for a name change to reduce ethnicity as an identifying factor, also was concerned that Mennonite Brethren retain some Anabaptist distinctiveness along with their evangelicalism. 53 Calculated from the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 66th through 7151 conventions, 1977-82, MB churches. Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 155-6, in particular views the readiness to accept other evangelicals into full membership as a dangerous sign of loss of identity. 54 Penner, No Longer at Arm's length, 72. 55 Ibid., 152-3. 56 Dyck interview. 57 The Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 66th through 7 ist conventions, 1977-82, MB churches. 58 Calculated from church records, Canadian Pacific District, the Christian and Missionary Alliance. 59 Calculated from the Evangelical Free Church of America, Yearbook 1982-83. 60 Pousett, "Baptists in British Columbia," 65-6.

320

Notes to pages 248—56

61 Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America, 204-21, describes a trend within the Christian Reformed Church in the United States towards identification with evangelicalism after the mid-igSos. 62 Van Brummelen, Telling the Next Generation, 280, refers to such cooperation. 63 For example, Burnaby Christian Reformed Church was altered somewhat by charismatic members and the large independent charismatic Burnaby Christian Fellowship received many members of Reformed background. In the large Christian Reformed population in Abbotsford, members with charismatic tendencies began gathering by 1980 at the First Christian Reformed Church's little outreach Sunday school in a nearby rural area, and in the mid-ig8os it began a separate, charismaticinfluenced and rapidly expanding Christian Reformed congregation. 64 Dehaas, And Replenish the Earth. 65 Bibby, "Why Conservative Churches Really Are Growing," 136. 66 Ibid., 134. 67 Sweet, "The i g6os: The Crisis of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism," 33. 68 Marty, "Religion in America since Mid-Century," 53. 69 The resulting Comfortable Pew, which strongly criticized the Canadian churches as being lazy and irrelevant, stirred up a storm of controversy and sold over 200,000 copies. It provoked The Restless Church: A Response to the Comfortable Pew, edited by William Kilbourn. 70 Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, 187. 71 George Egerton, "Mission, Long-Range Planning, and the Use of Scholarly Research Findings," 32. 72 Grant, "United Church: Pioneer of Union," 249. 73 Stewart, "Knocking on Heaven's Door?" 11. 74 Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, 201. 75 Hunter in both American Evangelicalism and Evangelicalism, explores important aspects of this symbiotic relationship. 76 C. Hanson, "Trinity and Higher Education," Evangelical Beacon, 16 January 1962, cited in Hanson, On the Raw Edge of Faith, 53-4. 77 Berton, Comfortable Pew. 78 Berger, "The Relevance Bit Comes to Canada," 79. 79 Stewart, for example, attributes it to "the cultural anarchy of the age" ('The United Church of Canada in British Columbia," 212). 80 Figures from Stewart, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door?" 3, 5. 81 C. Hanson, From Hardship to Harvest, 158. 82 Lorrie Kirby, cited in Reimers, God's Country, 36. 83 Marty, "Religion in America since Mid-Century," 160. 84 United Church of Canada, Committee on Christian Faith, The Charismatic Movement: Problem or Promise? 6.

321 Notes to pages 256-64 85 Stewart, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door?" 11. 86 Pentecostal Testimony, September 1967, 3, cited in Redbourn, "The Emerging Social Consciousness of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada," 18. 87 Similarly, overseas involvement focused primarily on perceived spiritual needs. Relief and development work did become important by the late 19705 and early 19805, as evidenced by the $40 million in humanitarian aid directed in 1980 by twenty-six Canadian evangelical agencies. However, political issues were generally side-stepped as much as possible by evangelical workers. See Faith Alive (June-July 1985): 10-35. 88 Alan Reynolds, "An Evaluation of the Vancouver 'Reachout,'" indicates that a 1976 mass campaign in Vancouver by Leighton Ford was not as successful as his earlier one in 1965. 89 Numbers of foreign missionaries as presented by Stackhouse ("Proclaiming the Word," 2) were Plymouth Brethren, 238; CMA, 190; Associated Gospel, 184; United Church of Canada, 129; Presbyterian Church in Canada, 43; and Anglican, 9. 90 Reynolds, "An Evaluation of Vancouver 'Reachout,'" 178, tables 4-7. 91 Bibby, "Why Conservative Churches Really Are Growing," 133, table 3. 92 Packer, "Local Church Survey of Port Moody Pentecostal Tabernacle," and Stallman, "A Church Growth Analysis of Maple Ridge Pentecostal Assembly." Copies of both these unpublished class essays were kindly provided by Professor David Lim. 93 Calculated from the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, Convention Minutes, 66th throught 7ist conventions, 197782, MB churches. 94 Bibby, "Why Conservative Churches Really Are Growing," 132, table i. 95 Marty, "Religion in America," 153-6. 96 Stewart, "That's the BC Spirit! "11. EPILOGUE 1 All membership figures are from published denominational sources for 1991 or from denominational officials. 2 Ritchie, 1991 Christian Resource Directory.

3 For some of the controversy over John Wimber and the Vineyard movement, see Christianity Today, 14 January 1991, 18-22; 11 March 1991, 29-33; and 9 March 1992. See also Coggins and Hiebert, Wonders and the Word. 4 Lipset, "Revolution and Counter Revolution in the United States and Canada," 21-64, and Continental Divide, 74-89. 5 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 86-91.

6 Ibid., 153-64.

322

Notes to pages 266—8

7 Compiled from 8ist Annual Convention of the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 1991, 36-7, MB churches. 8 Klassen, The Church in the Heart of the Valley, 4-5. 9 Minutes of the Annual Convention of the British Columbia Conference of the Mennonite Brethren Churches, 1992, schedule 2, MB churches. 10 Telephone interview with Dr. Kenneth R. Davis, Dean of Graduate Studies, Trinity Western University. 11 Telephone interview with the Rev. John Opmeer, who chaired the committee that facilitated the acceptance of the new congregations.

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343 Bibliography VanderMey, Albert. To All Our Children: The Story of the Postwar Dutch Immigration to Canada. Jordan Station, Ont.: Paideia Press 1982. Wacker, Grant "The Functions of Faith in Primitive Pentecostalism." Harvard Theological Review 77, nos. 3-4 (1984): 353-75- "Uneasy in Zion: Evangelicals in Postmodern Society." In Evangelicalism in Modern America, ed. George M. Marsden. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1984. Ward W. Peter, and Robert AJ. McDonald. British Columbia: Historical Readings. Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre 1981. Weber, Timothy P. Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming. Grand Rapids: Academic Books 1983. Wedley, John R. "Laying the Golden Egg: The Coalition Government's Role in Post-war Northern Development." BC Studies 88 (winter 1990-91): 58-92. Western Pentecostal Bible College. "Students, Graduates, Tuition per Year." Unpublished report, 1978 (in college files). Wilson, Bryan R. Religion in a Secular Society: A Sociological Comment. London: C.A. Watts 1966. Wilson, James. The History of Metropolitan Tabernacle, 1928-1978. Vancouver 1978. Woodcock, George. British Columbia: A History of the Province. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre 1990. Woodward, Rev. John. "Report Given by Rev. John Woodward, First Pastor of Beulah Tabernacle, Edmonton." Transcript of tape recording in Canadian Bible College/Canadian Theological Seminary Archives, Regina. Woyke, Frank H. Heritage and Ministry of the North American Baptist Conference. Oakbrook Terrace, 111.: North American Baptist Conference 1979. Wright, Robert A. "The Canadian Protestant Tradition 1914-1945." In The Canadian Protestant Experience, 7760-1990, ed. George A. Rawlyk. Burlington, Ont.: Welch 1990. Wrigley-Henderson Directory Company. Wrigley-Henderson British Columbia Directory. Vancouver: Wrigley Henderson 1918-45. Young, Walter. The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, 7932 to 1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1969. Zeman, Jarold K., ed. Baptists in Canada: Search for Identity amidst Diversity. Burlington, Ont.: Welch 1980. - ed. Costly Vision: The Baptist Pilgrimage in Canada. Burlington, Ont.: Welch 1988.

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Index

Abbotsford, 101, 119, 146, 147, 157, 172, 175, 180-1, 184, 18690, 214, 222-3, 265; centre of Reformed and Mennonite strength, 142, 186-7, 233, 266 Aberhart, William, 166, 197 Aboriginal people, and evangelicalism, 171 abortion, 264-5, 27° Ahlstrom, Sydney, 12 Airhart, Phyllis D., xiii, 7, 38 Alberni, 39 Alberta, 6, 22-3, 92, 96, 97-8, 121, 144, 154-5, 160-3, 166, 167, 17881, 186, 189, 194, 197, 227, 246, 258, 3ioni, 3i5m Aldergrove, 72, 148, 159, 160, 231 American influences on BC evangelicalism, 20, 74- 9 2 > 95-9. 151' 165-8, 2 1 2 , 226-g,

259. 3°3n98

Anglicans, 5, 14, 23, 26, 31, 42, 56, 57, 109, 215, 239, 242; and charismatic movement, 230, 255; and Walter Ellis, 58-60; and Oliver campaigns, 42, 58; pre-1917 in BC, 28-9; and Regent College, 219—20; relative decline of in BC, 150, 200-1, 203, 237, 241, 252, 258; and VBTS, 69,

153-4 Apostolic Church of Pentecost, 174, 224, 242, 3i6nig Asian immigrants, 199, 233-4, 243' 262, 266, 268, 3i7n26 assimilation of immigrant groups, and evangelicalism, 141-3, 147-8, 156-8, 160-4, 177, 184-5, 186, 188-94, 244-8, 253, 260, 265-6, 268 Associated Canadian Theological Schools, 267

Auvache, F.W., 88, 90, 113 Baker, A.F., 79, 83-4, 95, no, 112-13 Baker, Lorimer G., 79 baptism in the Holy Spirit, 35-7, 66, 11417, 128, 230, 237, 262 Baptist Bible Union, 88, 96, 167, 289nioo Baptist Convention of British Columbia, 30, 77, 87, 89-93, 135157, 165, 166, 175, 220, 230; and VBTS, 64-5. 152-3 Baptist General Conference, 77, 151, 155-60, 165, 195, 238; and Canadian Baptist Seminary, 267; and VBTS, 152, 156, 159, 163-4, 175. 212, 2234, 227-8, 242 Baptist Herald, 80, 82-6, 108, 113 Baptist Ministerial Association of Vancouver, 77, 80, 90, no

346 Index Baptists, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 19. 23, 29-31. 38, 55. 56, 57, 64-5, 68, 72, 76-9, 186, 188, 196, 2OO,

2 1 2 , 223, 238-9,

240,

241, 247,

248,

2761149; and Chinese immigrants, 233-4; anc^ Oliver campaigns, 42, 46-9. S3! and Pentecostalism, 107-10, 112-16; pre-i 917 in BC, 29-30; and Price campaigns, 107-10, 112-15, 293n73; and VBTS, 64-5, 69, 79-80. See also British Columbia Baptist Missionary Council; Convention of Regular Baptist Churches in British Columbia; Fellowship Baptists; North American Baptist conference; separatist Baptists; Southern Baptists Baptist Union of Western Canada, 14, 77, 81, 84, 86-7, 89, 92, 98, 112, !3i> !33. 135. »54» 216, 238, 242, 29gn6, 3oon2o; and Regent College and Carey Hall, 219—22, 3i4n64; and Swedish Baptists, 157 Barman, Jean, 7, 197 Bebbington, David, 9, 10, 15

Bella Coola, 171, 231 Bennett, Bill, 199, 214 Bennett, W.A.C., 199, 214 Bennett, W. Arnold, 778, 81 Berton, Pierre, 252, 254-

5

Bibby, Reginald, 3, 5, 202-3, 205, 239, 250, 257-8, 264, 27ini5 Bible: evangelical views of, 10, 17-18, 38, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 127,

162, 182, 194, 240, 251, 254-5, 272n26, 287n5i; liberal views of, 11, 28, 45-6, 73, 77-8; Pentecostal views of, 16, 65, 100, 113, 115. See also biblicism; scripture Bible institutes and colleges, 15, 57-75, 79-80, 107, 123, 128, 147-8, 152, 156-9, 163-6, 171, 175, 187, 189-90, 223-4, 244, 3i5n8o; compared with liberal arts education, 201; influence on Baptist Union of Western Canada, 221; influence on Mennonite Brethren, 147-8, 187, 189-90, 246. See also under individual institutions biblicism, 9-10, 14, 227, 251. See also Bible; scripture Birch, Bob, 229-30 birth rates, 139-40, 170, 188-9, 248-50 Bishop Latimer Hall, Vancouver, 29, 48, 589 Black Creek, 142, 187 Bond, Ida, 72 Booth-Clibborn, William, 117 Brandon College, 77-8, 80-1, 83-9, 94-5, 98, 112-13, 125. iS1' 22O-1

Braun, George, 246 Brethren. See Evangelical United Brethren; Mennonite Brethren; Plymouth Brethren Brewster, H.C., 48 Briercrest Bible Institute, 147, 189 British Columbia Baptist, 89 British Columbia Baptist Missionary Council, 88,

9°. 93' 94- 96' 97.

285n2 British Columbia Bible Institute. See Western Pentecostal Bible College British Columbia Evangelical Mission, 15, 60, 71-2, 123, 129, !3 2 > !53. !59' l62-3, 175, 180, 217, 285n82 British Columbia Sunday School Mission, 123, 129, 153; merger with Canadian Sunday School Mission, 156 British immigration and immigrants, 23, 26, 29, 3 1 - 33-4- 38-9, 92-3. 3!5ni British influences on BC evangelicalism, 13, 74, 92-3. 96-9. 1Q2, 124, 126, 130, 131-2, 217, 226, 227—9, 230, 259, 265, 20,on3 British origins of provincial population, 92-3. H9. *99. 201 Broadway West Baptist Church, Vancouver,

47. 49. g2. 94. 97.

276n49; and affiliation with Baptist General Conference, 159; and independence, 132 Brown, A.J., 90 Brunk, George R., 191-2, 193 Bulkley Valley, 181, 183 Burnaby, 130, 159, 180, 191, 265-6, 268, 3°5ni4 Burrard Bible Institute. See Okanagan Bible Institute Calling (magazine), 218J 9 Campbell, J. L., 44, 46, 49, 51, 68, 79

347

Index

Campus Crusade for Christ, 227, 257 Canadian nationalism and evangelicals, 168 Canadian Reformed Church, 14, 183, 250 Canadian Sunday School Mission, 123, 156, 175, 223 Carey Hall, 216, 220 Cariboo region, 164 Carlson, J.D., 161, 179-80 Carpenter, Joel, xi-xii, 67, 130, 151, 153 Central Baptist Church, Victoria, 91, 131 central interior of BC. See interior of BC charismatic movement, 6, 15, 200, 203, 224, 226, 228, 229-31, 237, 240, 242, 248, 255-6, 259, 265, 32on63 Chilliwack, 101, 119, 142, !?3. !?5' 180-1, 18990, 192, 194, 197, 238, 297 China Inland Mission, 15, 48, 57, 60, 63, 66, 6871, 74, 132, 146, 154, 284n77, 285ng2 Chinese immigrants, 199; as evangelicals, 233-4, 266, 268 Christian and Missionary Alliance, 6, 14, 36, 151, 178-81, 201, 203, 214, 220, 223, 236-7, 238, 241-2, 259, 261-2, 266-7, 3O5nnio, 14; appeal to ex-Mennonites, 180, 186, 188, 247; and Chinese immigrants, 233—4; and foreign missions, 257; and high rates of financial contributions, 210, 267 Christian Brethren. See Plymouth Brethren Christian Ministers' Association, 230

Christian Reformed Church, 6, 14, 20, 151-2, 181-5, 195, 201, 222, 238, 239,

247-8, 260, 265, 266,

267, 32on63 Christian schools (day schools), 183-4, 1 ^7> 201, 222, 224, 248, 269, 3^71 Church of the Nazarene. See Nazarene, Church of church planting, 18, 19, 136-8, 140, 141, 152, !56> !57. !59. 161, 163-4, 165-6, 171, 189-90, 226, 231-41, 243, 260, 266-7, 269. 3i7nai Clearbrook, 188, 214, 222, 223 Columbia Bible Institute, 223, 3o8ng7, 315^76. See also Bible Institutes; Conference of Mennonites in Canada; Mennonite Brethren Conference of Mennonites in Canada, 142—5, 148, 164, 187, 192, 193-4; evangelical character of, compared with Mennonite Brethren, 142—5, 148, !93~4. 298nii4; numerical strength in BC compared with Mennonite Brethren, 142-3, 144, 193-4 Congregational Christian Churches in Canada, 263, 264 Congregationalists, 27-8, 29, 53, 102 Convention Baptists. See Baptist Convention of British Columbia; Baptist Union of Western Canada Convention of Regular Baptist Churches in

British Columbia (later known as Fellowship Baptists), 5, 13, 64-5, 77, 122, 124, 130, 131-5, 148, 151, 157,

165-9, 22 8> 230, 238, 240, 242-3, 259, 2612, 267, 3o6n47; and church planting, 231— 2, 234-5; formation of, 91-9; and Mennonite Brethren mission church in Hope, 191, 235-7; numerical strength relative to Convention Baptists, 91-2, 165, 166, 169, 175, 288nn73, 74; and Pentecostalism, 112-13; and Southern Baptist challenge, 166-9; anc^ VBTS» 64-5, 79-80, 154, 165. See also Northwest Baptist Theological College Cook, Ramsay, 7 Cooke, Rev. A.E., 28, 42, 45, 48, 109-12, 3°5ni5 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 196-7, 3ognii2 Coquitlam, 159 Croucher, Charles, 28, 53-4 Davies, Harold, 112 Dawson Creek, 140, 181 Delta, 162 Dimmick, J.F., 105-6, 111 Dimmick, Ruby, 105-6, 111 dispensationalism (dispensationalists), g, 16, 30, 37, 43, 46, 50, 63-4, 69, 113-14, 128, 143, 147, 155, 196, 216, 218, 273n38, 274n5O, 285ni, 287n5O, 2g2n64, 29gni3i

348 Index Dutch immigrants, 140, 150, 181-5, 201, 265, 267 Dyck, Nick, 246, 3081186 East European immigrants, 150, 195 East Kootenays district, 136. See also Kootenay district economic status of evangelicals. See socialeconomic status ecumenism, evangelical, 152, 214, 230, 235-9 Elliot, David R., xiii, 7, 126 Ellis, Walter (18831944), 58-75, 123, 128, 153-4, 163, 217, 219, 221, 282nn, 28gn87, 3O5ni4 Ellis, Walter E., 94, 1967, 238-9, 28gn87 Epp, Frank, 144, 148, 2g8ni14 ethnic diversity: of BC population, 16, 14950, 199, 233; of evangelicalism, 13, 16, 19, 151-2, 176, 233-4 European immigrants, 56, 149-50, 177, 186, 196 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 14 Evangelical Free Church, 6, 14, 151, 152, 156, 160-4, l65. !75. !?9. 195, 203, 220, 223, 227-8, 237, 238, 247, 255. 259' 261-2; appeal to ex-Mennonites, 164, 186, 188; and Trinity Western (College) University, 209, 211-15, 224, 254; and Trinity Western Seminary, 267 Evangelical Mission Covenant Church, 161-2

Evangelical United Brethren, 194 evangelism: liberal Protestant views of, 25-6, 45, 50; as priority of conservative Protestants, 9-10, 18-19, 41, 43-4- 495°. 53. 55> 58-9. 6o' 61, 66, 67, 74, 84-5, 94-5' 99. i°2-3. 134. 137, 141, 143, 145-6, 152, 161, 178, 186, 188-93, 232, 245-6, 251, 256-7, 253-4, 260, 263-4 Evangelistic Tabernacle (originally Pyramid Temple), 117, 174, 224, 242 evolutionism, 11, 62, 102, 187, 277n6i Fairview Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, 58, 60—1, 129, 130, 219, 242 Fallis, G.O., 108-11 "family values," evangelicals and, 253, 254 Fellowship Baptists. See Convention of Regular Baptist Churches in British Columbia Fellowship of Evangelical Baptists in Canada, 168 Fernie, 33 First Baptist Church, Vancouver, 44, 46, 48— 9, 51, 68, 82-3, 85-6, 89-9°. 93. 1 1 2 > 115. 287n4i, 293n73 Ford, Leigh ton: Vancouver crusades (1965), 256-8; (1976), 257-8 Fort Nelson, 181 Fort St John, 180-1 Fosmark, Lee, 161 Foursquare Gospel Church. See Interna-

tional Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Fraser, Margaret, 123 Fraser Valley, 55, 72, 91, 101, 118, 164, 172, !99> 209, 214-15, 223, 233, 247, 266; and Dutch (Reformed) immigrants, 181—5; an S6, 102 > 105-6, 274n53, 275n22; and Oliver campaigns, 42, 44, 46-8, 53; and Pentecostalism, 101, 105-9, 1 1 2 > 293n87; pre-igi7 in BC, 23-7 Metropolitan Methodist Church, Victoria, 1034, 107 Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vancouver, 122, 12431, 134-5, 15L 153. 155, 218, 242 Mission City, 91 missions, 55, 61, 88, 94; foreign, 56, 57, 60, 667, 69, 70-1, 74-5, 166, 178,

189, 212,

221,

257, 32in8g; home, 56, 57. 67, 71-2, 89. 97, 164, 221,

178, 189, 212,

231

modernism, 12, 13, 15, 27, 29-30, 77, 82, 89, 91, 94, 101, 102, 11516, 120, 124, 125, 127, 168, 277n6i. See also liberalism Moody Bible Institute, 63, 147, 161, 163, 230 Moore, T. Albert, 105

Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, Vancouver, 68, 77. 79. 83. 93-4- 9597. iS 1 * J 3 2 ' !34> 2 4 2 ; affiliation with Baptist General Conference, 156—60; and independence, 132; and Metropolitan Tabernacle schism 122, 1247, 129; and Price campaign, no, 112, 115-16 Nanaimo, 33, 39, 101, 119, 172, 175, 265 Nazarene, Church of the: and Pentecostalism, 107; pre-igi7 in BC: 32, 34-5; and Social Credit, 196-7 Nelson, 33, 119, 172 Netherlands Reformed Church, 183 New Brunswick, 22, 136, 169, 175. See also Maritime provinces New Democratic Party, 199, 214, 270, 3im34 New Westminster, 25, 27, 33-4- 39. 43. 72, 117. 130, 132, 154, 162 Noll, Mark, xiii, 6, 8 "no religion" census response, 201, 203 North American Baptist Conference (also referred to as German Baptists), 151, 194, 232, 238, 247-8 northern BC, 39, 149, 141, 165, 169, 175, 243 North Vancouver, 115, 158 Northwest Baptist Theological College (formerly Northwest Baptist Bible College), 166, 223; seminary, 267 Norwegian immigrants, 160, 162. See also

Scandinavian immigrants Nova Scotia, 22, 35, 94. See also Maritime provinces Okanagan Bible Institute (originally Burrard Bible Institute), 223 Okanagan-Boundary region, 101, 136 Okanagan Valley, 91, 138, 140, 180-1, 183, 194, 198, 223 Oliver, French E., campaigns, 41-54, 556, 57. 58-9' 67. 96, 112, 217, 28on5o; role in polarizing BC evangelicalism, 41, 457, 53-4- 55. 75. 76, 78-9 Ontario, 23, 26, 29-30, 31. 33, 34-6, 38-9, 97, 121, 132, 143-4, 1678, 174, 179, 184, 211, 22O, 246, 258, 263, 285112

Orr, J. Edwin, 121-2, 148 Orthodox Calvinist churches, 152, 182-5. See also Canadian Reformed Church; Christian Reformed Church; Netherlands Reformed Church Oxford Group, 122 Peace River district, 42, 169, 180-1 Penner, Peter, 188, 2456, 3o6n50, 3^53 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 118-19, 122, 135-6, 148, 200, 228, 229, 243, 258, 259; development of provincial network of churches, 122, 128, 135-41; institutional development, 169-75; and social issues, 256;

351 Index worship attendance compared with United Church, 262, 277n77 Pentecostalism (Pentecostals), 5, 8, 15, 16, 19, 55- 65-6, 76> 85-6, 148, 151, 169-75, 1789, 185, 196, 203, 214, 220, 2 2 2 , 228, 232, 236-7, 238 241, 262, 2

77n77; and charismatic movement, 229— 31; first Bible institute, 107; high birth rates of, 139-40, 170, 248; independent Pentecostalism, 117, 172-6, 3i6-i7ni9; "Jesus Only" controversy, 117, 174; Latter Rain movement, 172; pre-1917 in BC, 35-7; and Price campaigns, 100-20. See also Apostolic Church of Pentecost; baptism in the Holy Spirit; charismatic movement; International Church of the Foursquare Gospel; Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada; tongues, speaking in Penticton, 91-2, 101, 119, 174, 175, 189, 297n99 Pickford, J.H., 166, 243 Plymouth Brethren (also known as Christian Brethren), 5, 14, 24, 130, 151, 159, 203, 228, 236, 238, 240, 241-2, 247, 265, 3o6n47; and cooperation with mainline conservatives, 57, 72, 73' 123. !53. 216-18, 3i3n5o; and foreign missions, 257; and Oliver campaign, 42, 48> 53. 56; pre-ig^ in BC, 32, 37-9,

3i3n44; and Regent College, 216-20; Vancouver and Victoria as centres of, 39, 21618, 278n87 Port Alberni, 171 Port Coquitlam, 166, 174 Pousett, G. H., 30, 86, 93- 95- 287n 4 i, 293n73 Prairie Bible Institute, 67, 128, 147, 179, 211; influence on immigrant churches, 155, 160—4, 189 prairie immigration, 6, 149-50, 177-8, 180-1, 186, 196 premillennialism 56, 64, 70, 128, 195 Presbyterians, 4, 5, 14, 23- 31. 38, 56, 57. 9 1 96, 178, 258; and Walter Ellis, 60-2; and Oliver campaigns, 42, 45- 48, 53> 96; pre1917 in BC, 26-9, 31; and Price campaign, 105, 109-10; and Regent College, 21920; relative decline of in BC, 150, 200-1, 203, 248-9; and VBTS, 58, 60-1, 68-9, 153-5 Price, Charles S., 65, 85, 2gon3; Vancouver and Victoria campaigns, 101-20, 137, 230, 2&7n4i Prince Edward Island, 178. See also Maritime provinces Prince George, 39, 137, 183, 189, 194, 198, 232 Prince Rupert, 39, 101, 119 Purdie, J.E., 171 Pyramid Temple, Vancouver. See Evangelistic Tabernacle

Quebec, 167, 179 Quesnel, 232-3 radio evangelism, 161, 179-80, 185, 189-90 Rawlyk, George A., xii, 7, 262 Redekop, John, 245, 3i9 n 52 Reformed Church in Canada (previously Reformed Church in America), 184, 264, 265, 267-8 Reformed Episcopal Church, 29, 53, 105, 229-30, 255 Regent College, 6, 15, 57, 215-22, 269 Regular Baptists. See Convention of Regular Baptist Churches in British Columbia Rennie, Ian, xiii, 219, 3i3n49 Revelstoke, 33, 180 revivalists (revivalism), 14, 17, 26, 30-1, 33-5, 54, 101, 103, 106, 108, 120, 142, 144, 157, 158, l 6 l , l 8 l , 185, 189, 191-2, 193

Richards, John B., 87, go, 92, 95, 98, 125, 287n4i, 293n73 Richmond, 72, 194, 268 Robertson, J.R., no Robertson, W.M., 97, 116, 124-31, 134, 197, 218 Roman Catholics, 4, 128, 131, 196, 201, 203, 214, 215, 238-9; and charismatic movement, 229-31; and evangelicals, 262, 2645 Ross, J.J., 86, 89-90 Rossland, 33 Rowell.J.B., 78, 80, 91, 131-2

352 Index Ruth Morton Memorial Baptist Church, Vancouver, 81, 86, 93, 109, 114-15, 119, 129 Rutland, agyngg Saanich, 103 St Mark's Hall, Vancouver, 29, 58-9 Saltspring Island, 174 Salvation Army, 33-4, 56, 238, 277n6g Sandeen, Ernest, 6, 66, 273n38, aSsm Sanford, O.M., 44, 57 Saskatchewan, 6, 22-3, ?8, g2, 97, 98, 133, 142, 143, 146, 155, 160-3, 1 7 2 > 1 7^> 180i, 186, i8g, 192, 198, 31002 Scandinavian immigrants, 140-1, 150, 160, 194. See also Norwegian and Swedish immigrants scripture: view of evangelicals, 62, 84, 100, 116, 152, 162, 185, i87n5i; liberal views of 256, 272n26. See also Bible separatist Baptists, 55, 6 4-5> 76-99' 100' H5122-3, »34, 148> 151' 156 Shantymen's Christian Association, 60, 71, 284n8i Sharpe, Robert W., 68, ?i. !56 Sheppard, Marshall, 153, 217 Shields, T.T., 81, 85-6, 88, 95-7, 99, 113. 124, 127-8, 165-8, 28gmo2, 2g6n62 Simpson, A.B., 36, 178-9, 201 Sinclair-Faulkner, Tom, 28in6o Sipprell, Rev. W.J., 25,

47, 103, 107, no, 2gonio Sixth Avenue Pentecostal Tabernacle, Vancouver,

Swedish immigrants, 1569. See also Scandinavian immigrants

117-19 Smith, Kenneth O., 218, 3Oon24 Smith, Oswald, 128, 153, 218 Social Credit, 149, 199, 3ogni17; and BC evangelicalism, 3, 8, i6g, 172, 196-7, 21415, 254, 3ognii6, 312n39 social-economic status of evangelicals, 8-g, 37-8, 47-8, 57, 61, 62-3, 74, 76- 93-5, 118-19, 1293°, J 34> 138-41- l69~ 70, 218-19, 226, 231, 241-4, 249-50, 293n87 social gospel, 17, 185, 197; and Baptists, 77, 85, 96; and Oliver campaigns, 41, 43, 4750, 53; pre-ig^ in BC, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31 Sointula, 231 Southern Baptists, 14, 77, 166-8, 227-8, 266 southern interior of BC. See interior of BC speaking in tongues. See tongues, speaking in Spurgeon, Charles H., 95, 96, 126 Stackhouse, John G. Jr, xiii, 7, 56-7, 73, 186, 257, 283n38, 299ng, 3i2n4i, 3i4n7o Stewart, Bob, xii, 7, 200, 203, 252-3, 259 Summerland, 30 Sunday schools, 5, 67, 72, 135-6, 145, 154, 159, 162, 167, 168, 171-3, 180, 188, 200, 202, 205, 208, 217, 250, 255- 259, 288n74 Surrey, 72, 159, 162-3, 174, 224, 233, 265, 268

Taylor, H.B., 116-17 television evangelism, 227-8 Terrace, 164 Thomas, Ernest, 25, 46-8 Thomas, W.H. Griffith, 29, 31, 50, 66 Thompson region, 91, 164, 169 Toews, J.B., 147 Tofino, 231 tongues, speaking in, 35— 6, 114, 116, 237, 262 Toronto Bible College, 64, 66 Townsend, Arthur, 137-8, \39 Trail, 175, 180 Trinity Western University (originally Trinity Junior College, then Trinity Western College until 1985), 6, 15, 209-15, 221-2, 228-9, 269, 3i2n38, 3i6n8; opposition to degree granting and university status, 210—11, 214—15, 264, 3iin34; Trinity Western Seminary, 267

United Church of Canada, 5, 27, 31, 150, 179, 184, 220; and charismatic movement, 230, 255—6; new curriculum of, 252, 255; and ordination of homosexuals controversy, 261, 263, 264, 268; relative numerical decline in BC, 200—1, 203, 232-3, 237, 255, 261-2, 3ion6; voting patterns, 196, 215; vulnerability in ig6os and 19708, 252-3

353 Index Vancouver, 4, 19, 22, 25, 27-3L 33-4. 7°> *2i2, 137, 149, 157, 162, 164, 165-6, 167, 180, 182-3, 1^5' *94> 21O > 212, 238, 242-3, 247, 265; as centre of Baptist controversies, 77-80, 92-9, 134; as centre of charismatic movement, 228-31; centre of mainline conservative activity, 55-75; centre of Plymouth Brethren strength, 39, 216-18; economic dominance in province 41—2, 121, 198; growing ethnic diversity in, 233-4; Mennonites in, 146-7, 148, 186-7, 1^9'> and Metropolitan Tabernacle, 124-31; Oliver campaign in, 41-54, 55; and Pentecostal developments in, 36-7, 116-20, 170, 172-5; Price campaigns in, 101-2, 108-18; and Regent College, 21522; suburbs of, 233, 242-3 Vancouver Bible Training School (also known as Vancouver Bible Institute and Vancouver Bible College): closure, 223-4; constituency compared with Regent

College, 217-21; as a mainline conservative institution, 15, 57-75, 79-80, 123, 128, 163, 164, 165, 211-12, 230, 267, 282ni3; transfer to Baptist General Conference, 152, 156-9' !75> 21112, 223 Vancouver Daily World, 43— 4, 109 Vancouver Evangelistic Movement, 59, 68, 282ni2; and Oliver campaign, 42-8, 58-9; and origins of VBTS, 59. 69 Vancouver Island, 101, 118, 131-2, 136, 142, 149, 169, 174, 175, 181, 183, 187, 198, 268, 284-sn8i Vancouver Ministerial Association, 107—10 Van Die, Marguerite, xiii, 7, 277n6i Vernon, 91 Victoria, 19, 24, 27-9, 33. 35. 39. 42, 49. 121-2, 131-2, 137, l62, 165, 171, 174-5,

l8o,

198, 22O, 228,

231, 242; centre of Plymouth Brethren strength, 39, 216-18; and Oliver campaign in, 41, 51-4, 71, 91; and Price campaign in, 101-7, 1O9

Victoria Evangelistic Movement, 53 Victory Temple, Victoria, 107, 119 Vineyard movement, 262, 265 West Coast Children's Mission, 146, 159, 189-90, 235-6, 246 Western Methodist Recorder,

24-5' 105 Western Pentecostal Bible College (previously British Columbia Bible Institute), 171, 223 West Kootenays, 101, 136. See also Kootenay district Westminster Hall, Vancouver, 27-8, 45 White Rock, 162 Williams Lake, 232-3 Winter, Terry, 228 women: as workers and leaders in evangelicalism, 72, 137, !23> J38-9> 229-30, 240-1 World War I, 13, 22, 25, 28, 29, 39, 28on5o; role in polarizing BC Protestantism, 50—2 Wycliffe College, Toronto, 29, 58, 66, 171 Yarrow, 142, 145, 147, 186-7