There are three names on presbyteries’ ballots for moderator of this year’s General Assembly. The three nominees took some time out of the busy Advent season to tell the Record about themselves and their hopes for the church.
Ballots were sent out to presbyteries in December and the votes will be tallied on April 2. The chosen nominee will likely be installed as moderator when the 2014 General Assembly begins in Waterloo, Ont., on May 31.
Rev. Calvin Brown came to the church, he said, “before I was conscious of making decisions.” He was baptized as an infant and raised in a Presbyterian home. He became a leader in his synod’s Presbyterian Young People’s Society and his university’s Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. And during a faith crisis, he “realized the irrevocable call of God to a teaching ministry.”
As a minister, Brown served for 15 years as executive director of the Renewal Fellowship, a group within the Presbyterian Church in Canada. He also ministered for 20 years in the Presbytery of Kootenay. He has served as moderator of the Synod of British Columbia, and of Kootenay and Waterloo-Wellington presbyteries, and is a contributing editor to the Presbyterian Record. He returned to pastoral ministry in 2010 and serves Knox, Palmerston, and Knox, Drayton, Ont.
“My passion is to see the Presbyterian Church and the whole Christian church vigorous and healthy by fulfilling Christ’s mandate described in Luke 4:17-19,” he wrote to the Record.
“The theme that has always gripped me is ‘being a people of bold integrity.’ I think that is both our heritage and our destiny and it is what we most need to put into practice now to ensure a faithful future in God’s kingdom work.
“Our thriving depends not on conforming to what people think is right but in living out the abundant life Jesus in his Spirit came to give. This life draws all who want to be fully alive and will humble themselves to imitate him. Joshua calls God’s people to be strong and very courageous! That is what we need to be.”
Rev. Stewart Folster didn’t expect to become a Presbyterian minister. He grew up in the care of his paternal grandparents on the Ojibwa Nation’s Brokenhead Reserve in Manitoba, attending the Anglican church where his grandfather was an elder. “On some Sundays, I remember that there were only four of us in church (the minister, my grandparents, and myself),” he said.
As a young man, he worked in a few Native friendship centres in Winnipeg, including the Presbyterian Church’s Anishinabe Fellowship Centre. “I had no idea what God had in mind! I didn’t know how to run Bible studies or how to write prayers, but I knew how to direct recreational programs and how to play the guitar for the Sunday school teacher,” he said. He served as a lay missionary at the centre for 11 years.
With support from his wife, Terry, and “good Christian friends” in his congregation, Folster embarked on a course of theological study and sought ordination in the Presbyterian Church. Today he serves as executive director of the Saskatoon Native Circle Ministry.
“The theme I would choose, if I am elected moderator, would be spirituality,” he wrote to the Record. “My grandfather, Jim Folster, taught me a lot about spirituality. He taught me that it is okay to follow the spirituality of my ancestors and to follow Christ at the same time.”
“My vision for the church would be to have many strong and healthy Native leaders in the church and to eventually have strong and self-sustaining Native congregations. We need to walk our journey of faith together, not just First Nations and Caucasians, but Koreans and Afro-Canadians, and all nations. But hey, I don’t have all the answers! I don’t know how we are going to do this. I just know that it has to happen. And we have to work together in order to make it happen.”
Read more from Stewart Folster.
Rev. Dr. Stephen Farris is a preacher’s kid. His father, Allan Farris, was a professor and principal of Knox College, Toronto, and would often bring his son along when he was guest preaching—and he would quiz him about the sermon on the ride home. “I suppose I was already being prepared for my later work,” Farris said.
Farris has for the past decade been the dean of St. Andrew’s Hall, the Presbyterian College on the campus of the University of British Columbia, and professor of homiletics with the Vancouver School of Theology. Before that, he served for 17 years as professor of preaching and worship at Knox College, Toronto. He has ended up doing “many different jobs, many of which have surprised and stretched me.” But at heart, he said, he is and always will be a preacher.
“The church is changing now and will change in the near future beyond all recognition,” he said in an email. “We cannot confidently predict the future of the church nor what it will become. But I am quite sure it will need faithful, creative, effective leaders, some of whom will be ministers. Some of them, on the other hand will be elders or other persons in the church. I am convinced we need to rethink and re-imagine the way we prepare all those future leaders for ministry. … Imagining new possibilities for shaping effective leaders is my calling, whether or not I am elected to this position [of moderator].
“I also have a particular passion for a gentle, respectful and intelligent outreach with the gospel. I live on a very secular campus in a province where only 45 per cent of the population even claims the name Christian. I believe that any Christian institution, including a college, located in that setting must think of itself as an outpost for mission. What is true here is also true of the national church. We need to see ourselves as part of the mission of God to the world.”
