A quarter of an hour before midnight on June 9, 1925, in Knox Church, Toronto, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was reconstituted by 79 dissenting commissioners to a General Assembly that had just voted itself out of existence. The majority had chosen to form, with Methodists and Congregationalists, a new United Church of Canada. The 90th anniversary of that traumatic event provides a time to celebrate and reflect. Doomsayers suggest we may not be in a position to celebrate our centenary given the precarious state of mainline churches across North America. But for those of us for whom the so – called “continuing Presbyterian Church” has been an important and much – loved part of our lives, it is a time to acknowledge our history and be grateful.
Focusing on the event itself rather than looking back (hindsight is always 20/20) we find a complex set of issues as we attempt to recreate what was going on in 1925: business efficiency, post – war longings for strength, theological uncertainties, a rekindling of mission and purpose. The struggle had been long and bitter. In honesty and with some objectivity, neither side came out of the imbroglio with altogether clean hands. In 1925 my father, then a student at Princeton Seminary, was appointed to a mission charge in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. Riding horseback from one schoolhouse to another conducting services, he became an enthusiast for consolidation. On the prairies, Union seemed the only sensible move. The following summer, appointed by the minority mission board to Sussex, N.B., he shared the anguish of a small group who had left Chalmers Presbyterian—now United—Church. With the nearest continuing Presbyterian minister 250 kilometres away, Dad was on his own as he navigated his way around angry tales of ruptured friendships and what was described to him as denominational betrayal.
Not much seemed to have changed 37 years later when on ordination I was assigned a five – point charge in rural Pictou County, N.S. There I found it impossible to avoid conversations, pro and con, about Union, much as I would like to have moved on. On my first night I stayed at the home of a “mixed” marriage, the husband a Presbyterian elder and the wife a die – hard Unionist who often recounted the court case 30 years earlier of her home congregation, St. Luke’s, Salt Springs, which was only finally settled by the Privy Council in London nine years later.
None of this could have been anticipated in 1902 when a recent Presbyterian import from Scotland, Principal William Patrick of Manitoba College, Winnipeg, acknowledged as an official Presbyterian representative, addressed the Methodist General Council meeting and commended the union two years earlier in Scotland of a new United Free Church. Thus began 23 years of torturous negotiations.
Winnipeg remained a centre of Union aspiration with the minister of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian, Charles W. Gordon, its persuasive advocate. (Under the pseudonym of Ralph Connor, Gordon’s inspirational fiction had become bestsellers.) Moderator of the 1921 General Assembly, he took an aggressive lead for Union in spite of growing opposition.
Acrimony surrounding Church Union would impact the credibility of the Christian faith in Canada. Before 1925, Presbyterians were the largest Protestant denomination. Their ugly squabbles over Church Union were a very public spectacle. Church Union, instead of advancing the cause of a Christian Dominion of Canada, Gordon’s great vision, became yet another factor in the erosion of a Protestant Canadian consensus that was true of an earlier generation. Recent studies by Phyllis Airhart and Kevin Flatt have documented the dramatic change, which accelerated in the 1960s, from the prevalent Protestant and popular religious conservatism of 1925 to today’s realities.
There were other implications. After 1925, the Presbyterian Church in Canada struggled in an ultimately losing battle to be a national denomination. Church Union had swept the Prairies, divided Ontario, and greatly impacted British Columbia and New Brunswick. After 1925 there was a valiant effort to keep the flag flying across the country so that every population centre could have a Presbyterian congregation. Pioneering clergy and committed laity set a selfless example of sacrificial service in lonely outposts with limited resources. Recovering lost territory became a mantra of the continuing church. The 1929 financial collapse impacted that recovery as financial realities curbed expansion. Two decades later in the high water mark of Canadian institutional Christianity, Presbyterians proved slow to join the surge, latecomers struggling to catch up with a United Church that was visible in every new subdivision.
Then the culture changed and the vision of becoming a truly national church became unattainable. Today, in a savage irony, the trophy – large edifices that Presbyterians were so proud to keep have become a millstone around the neck of declining congregations no longer able to maintain them. In addition, abandoning the ordained missionary year requirement for ordination in 1980 meant that congregations from Whitehorse to Corner Brook, kept alive by a steady infusion of recent ordinands, no longer had a future.
Who exactly were these who went into Union in 1925? As the late Allan Farris would say, there was more doctrinal cohesion among those entering the United Church who represented the middle ground than the Presbyterian minority which brought together both ends of the theological spectrum. The 1875 union in Canada of the Free Church and the old Kirk had never completely gelled. It was the majority Free Church element in that merger that became dominant and went on to spearhead Union negotiations. Culturally and theologically they represented the piety of Thomas Chalmers, Horatius Bonar and Alexander Whyte, a warm conservatism challenged by the onslaught of so – called higher criticism of the biblical text. In many ways joining Methodists suited them well and caused little dissonance. Generally, other than some Baptists, Protestants in Canada avoided the acrimony in the United States between modernists and fundamentalists. But the need to import clergy (a majority of ministers having entered Union) assured a wide diversity as Presbyterians regrouped after 1925.
Theological education became a battleground for the soul of the new church. Negotiations over the future of both the Montreal and the Toronto colleges became heated. The magnificent 1915 Knox College, ceded to the continuing Presbyterians by the Ontario legislature in 1924, was a place where faculty appointments provided a testing ground for new identities. An effort the year before to make J. Gresham Machen, feisty author of the classic 1923 Christianity and Liberalism, the new principal of Knox College had fizzled and instead the name of Thomas Eakin was placed before the 1926 General Assembly. In the debate that followed, A. B. Winchester of Knox Church, Toronto, a self – styled dispensational premillenialist (hardly a classic Reformed position), described Eakin as “an advanced modernist.” The appointment went through when Eakin reassured the Assembly that he stood by the Westminster Confession. His subsequent leadership proved otherwise. Likewise Montreal’s Presbyterian College under Principal F. Scott MacKenzie was no champion of confessional theology. It was only later with Principal Walter Bryden of Knox College, as John Vissers has pointed out, that the Presbyterian Church in Canada found a neo – orthodox theology that prepared it for 15 years of post – war growth.
As the majority of the 51st General Assembly voted themselves out of existence late on June 9, 1925, the 79 dissident commissioners huddled in a corner of the host College Street church. At the request of Charles Gordon, the organ was being played at full blast as they attempted to read their protest over the Hallelujah Chorus. “In humble dependence on God’s grace and the aid of the Holy Spirit,” they declared. They sought to maintain the “confession of faith and the standards of this church.” They had courage and they had conviction: “Nec tamen consumebatur” was their motto. They were anxious that a witness to the Reformed faith not be consumed in Canada. Was it really worth it? Ninety years later in a Canada that has changed beyond all recognition their courage and commitment, and the legacy they left us, should encourage a renewed dedication to their faith and sacrifice.
