posted on April 30, 2010 in Letters

Share :

Your article is quite unbelievable! I will still lock my door whenever I go out and will not walk alone after dark even in my small city. And for good reason!

posted on April 26, 2010 in Caught Dead, Features

Share :

I routinely spend Fridays fine tuning my Sunday sermon. Like most of my goals that holiday week, my plans were sidetracked.

posted on April 26, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

Share :

The dark-haired young man with his grandpa’s blue eyes turned and kissed his lovely bride.

My heart stopped. This was a reenactment of a wedding 25 years earlier.

posted on April 19, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

Share :

One of my earliest memories is of arguing with some girlfriends during the war years. They insisted that God didn’t like the Germans.

posted on April 19, 2010 in Caught Dead, Features

Share :

“I need to talk to you.” Jamming her arms into her coat, Paige Pepperfield hurried after us. The high heels of her tall leather boots sank into the snow with each step.

posted on April 15, 2010 in Columns, Wondering Wanderer

Share :

It certainly doesn’t vibrate with Christian compassion but, let’s face it, there are some people we just don’t like.

posted on April 15, 2010 in In Song

Share :

When I was seven years old, I lost my faith in organized recreation.

posted on April 12, 2010 in Caught Dead, Features

Share :

Wind drove freezing rain under the edge of the funeral awning. Ice pellets stung my face and stained the onionskin pages of my Bible. I wiped the paper, trying to clear the print.

“The Lord is my shepherd…” I forced the words past the lump in my throat.

posted on April 12, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

Share :

Our first winter in an RV park in the States was a unique experience. There is a lot of “togetherness” in an RV. Living in about 200 square feet of space was cozy, and with neighbours almost on your doorstep many previous personal experiences were now shared with strangers.

posted on April 5, 2010 in Caught Dead, Features

Share :

“Is there supposed to be a car in the graveyard?”

My book, Hermeneutics for the Twenty-First Century, hit the floor with a thud. I knew I should have chosen a mystery to keep me awake.

posted on April 5, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

Share :

“I’m sorry but we’re going south … it’s your turn to look after Mom now.” With those words our lives changed considerably.

posted on April 1, 2010 in Columns, Wondering Wanderer

Share :

I’ve often wondered whether we all must diligently travel along the same path, desperately seeking God. Is the only truth our truth, the legacy that was recorded in the Old and New Testaments?

posted on April 1, 2010 in In Song

Share :

Looking for contemporary songs in contemporary language? Here are some—surprise, surprise—in the Book of Praise.

posted on April 1, 2010 in News

Share :

John Baird, minister of transport and infrastructure, shakes hands with Christopher, a resident of Covenant House, with Ruth daCosta, executive director, and Dr. Rick Tobias, president and CEO of Yonge Street Mission. Photo courtesy of Yonge Street Mission.

With a possible one million dollars in government funding announced on Feb. 2, Toronto’s Covenant House and Yonge Street Mission are stepping up plans to renovate and improve their downtown buildings.

The missions will cover 50 per cent of costs, with the government matching funds up to a combined $1.09 million. But the centres must complete the renovations by March 31, 2011.

Covenant House, which provides shelter and support for homeless youth, will provide $627,500 from their capital fund. Yonge Street Mission, which provides a wide range of services and support to the poor and homeless, is seeking $465,000.

Rose Cino, head of communications for Covenant House Toronto, said the government funding will be “a huge help” and allow the youth shelter to “do some major repairs that have been on the books for a long time” including work on the roof and stucco of two historic buildings constructed in the early 1900s. There are also plans to create a commercial kitchen for teaching cooking, budgeting, nutrition and other life skills to youth.

“The important thing is, this kind of funding allows us to direct more of our donors’ dollars toward programs for the youth, but really helps by getting us the kind of renovations that we need,” she said.

Rev. Karen Bach, a Presbyterian minister and mission program and ministry officer for Yonge Street Mission, said staff are moving quickly to seek out necessary funds from individuals and foundations that are likely to invest in brick and mortar.

“We’re stepping a little bit out in faith,” she said, noting that the mission had only its operating budget to draw from.

Two of YSM’s five buildings need new roofs, and there are plans to renovate the second floor of the community centre, turning it into more program space and enlarging the computer lab. The mission is currently renting trailers to provide extra storage for the used clothing store, but construction of a storage building was planned to begin as early as March.

posted on April 1, 2010 in Features

Share :

photo by Giorgio Fochesato / istockphoto

Any article on attitudes to racism in the Christian church’s foundational period would be necessarily short. There simply was none. The matter is far different for foreigners and strangers in general.

Racism was absent in the earliest church and in the non-Christian society surrounding it. Christians and other subjects of the Roman Empire simply did not make distinctions based on race. In fact, mentions of a person’s skin colour are so rare as to be insignificant. For instance, the Christian Bardesanes in early third-century eastern Syria mentioned the fact that people come in different colours as an example of what everyone agreed was inconsequential.

The only discriminations were based on cultural factors. Jews divided the world into themselves and Gentiles, while for Greeks the distinction was between themselves and “barbarians” — people who did not share Greek language or culture. The Romans divided people between citizens and non-citizens, and then among various economic classes of citizens. The main Roman xenophobia was of hostile peoples outside the Empire.

In each case, however, individuals could cross the divides by joining the preferred group through financial or military achievement or by changing religion. Any antipathy was cultural, not ethnic, and was directed most against “oriental cults” or “superstitions,” of which Christianity was one. In fact, there is only one ethnic slur by a Christian in the whole of the New Testament, and even that is a quotation from a member of the maligned group (Titus 1:12).

On the other hand, scripture and other ancient Christian writings say much about how to regard individuals new to a community, whether they come for employment, business opportunities, or conditions in their homelands. The term “immigrant” appears nowhere in the early literature because strict separation into nation states did not yet exist, with its restrictions on travel, employment and trade; the ancients did not generally think much about the reasons why newcomers had come, other than military invaders.

The use of the term “stranger” in the early Christian period was thus wide enough to include all persons new to a locale. Christian writers before AD 200 encouraged welcoming and generous treatment of immigrants and other strangers.

The earliest instruction about strangers is Christ’s preaching that they be welcomed and protected, and whoever does so to the least of strangers does it to Jesus himself (Matthew 25:34-45). One apostle wrote that Christians are loyal to God when they render any service to newcomers (3 John 1:5).

A description of Christianity for heathens written around AD 125 in Athens reported that it was the Christian custom to take strangers into one’s home and rejoice over them as if brothers and sisters. A similar book by a Christian teacher who was martyred for the faith in Italy around AD 165 records that local Christian congregations used their funds to provide for orphans, widows, the sick, the needy and strangers. It also details that among the effects of conversion to Christianity was that “we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them.”

In showing how elevated were Christian ethics, a moderator in France in the AD 180s included giving lodging in one’s own home to “the roofless stranger” and to “give rest to those that are shaken,” which would cover a newcomer experiencing culture shock from moving to a new country. About the same era, the moderator of Antioch in western Syria wrote similarly. Both clerics quoted Zechariah 7:10 in support.

Clement of Alexandria in Egypt was clean of the world’s foremost Christian educational institution from AD 192 to 202. He wrote, “Akin to love is hospitality, being a congenial art devoted to the treatment of strangers … Hospitality, therefore, is occupied in what is useful for strangers; and guests are strangers; and friends are guests; and brethren are friends.” Even more universal is his statement, “Those are strangers, to whom the things of the world are strange.”

Christian morality, wrote Clement, obliges us to love strangers not only as friends and relatives, but as ourselves, both in body and soul. Accordingly, it is expressly said, “Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, for thou wast a sojourner in Egypt;” designating by the term Egyptian either one of that race, or any one in the world.

These authors lived so early and were so geographically widespread that their sentiments could have originated only with Jesus himself. Because they predate the division into present-day Christian denominations and before racism and immigration were subjects of controversy, well before Christianity was a state religion, their comments are relevant to Christians of every shade and hue in Canada today.

posted on April 1, 2010 in Features

Share :

photo by Don Bayley / istockphoto

Canadians seem to have forgotten that multiculturalism didn’t begin with Pierre Trudeau. He extended policies begun by Lester B. Pearson and opened wide the immigration doors to non-Europeans like myself (I arrived in Canada from Pakistan in 1971). The heavy infusion of pigment into the Canadian cultural landscape has forced our nation to look at ethnicity and culture in significantly different ways. It has forced us to give it names — multiculturalism being the most benign; postmodernism, the most baffling — and to create public policies and funding streams. But a century ago, when Canadian multiculturalism was often a matter of white on white, of determining the not-so-subtle differences between Finns and Scots, for example, this country was rife with racial prejudice, cultural strife and the battle for identity.

Those are also known in the world of church as “the good old days;” before our identities got confused and we had to share space with folks (like me) who do not share primary cultural assumptions. So, it is only fitting to challenge the ethnic and cultural identities within the Presbyterian Church.

Rev. Dr. Stuart Macdonald, professor of church and society at Knox College, Toronto, is an affable fellow. His once bright red hair that spoke of his Scottish heritage is fading to a more neutral colour. One look at him and it would be hard to believe him a subversive, but through his research (published in a chapter in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, University of Toronto Press) he turns upside down the imagined identity of the Presbyterian Church. “The origins of [the PCC] were largely American. [They] brought a particular kind of evangelical and revivalistic faith to these areas …” Next came a wave of Scots — but, Macdonald cautions the reader to not be too general in using that phrase: “Most Scottish Presbyterian immigrants to British North America were Lowlanders, people who came from the more fertile southern regions of north Britain … Lowland immigration is often overshadowed by the emigration of Highland Scots, perhaps because Lowlanders were more similar in language and culture to English an American immigrants.”

They didn’t always get along, these Lowlanders and Highlanders. Macdonald quotes a prominent secessionist minister, Rev. William Proudfoot: “These ignorant Highlanders are a hindrance to improvement wherever they go — about them there is an obstinancy which nothing can move and then the Gaelic — alas for the Gaelic!” While these two groups wrangled with each other, Macdonald notes another important body of islanders that travelled to the new world. “The Irish, largely (though not exclusively) from Northern Ireland, comprised a significant group, establishing congregations. … In Kingston, Ont., there was an Irish Presbyterian church alongside two ethnically Scottish churches, and Cooke’s church in Toronto was also an ethnically Irish church.” The pattern of ethnic separation is set early, based as much on the comfort of the incoming immigrants as it is on the prejudice of those already in Canada. The church, then, inadvertently becomes the house of ethnic identity.

A diverse group at the Forum for Ethnic and Racial Minorities in the PCC , held at Crieff Hills in April 2008. It was organized by the church's Justice Ministries department. Photo by Andrew Faiz

As it turns out, the Highland Scots win the battle for identity within the burgeoning church. And even though by the early 1960s most Presbyterians are born in Canada, in the long tradition of immigration, subsequent generations invent new traditions to assert their heritage. “These celebrations would include Robbie Burns suppers, Tartan Sundays, and the celebration of ‘Kirkin of the Tartans,’” writes Macdonald. The last of these was the invention of the Scottish-American minister Peter Marshall during the Second World War. It is a curious mixture of tribal colours (known as tartans), bagpipes, God Save the Queen, tartan covered Bibles and the national anthem.

With this subsequent assertion of the Scots identity, other ethnicities — Dutch, American Revivalist, Northern Irish, Korean, French, Hungarian — that contributed to the Presbyterian Church get squeezed out, even though some of them had tens of thousands of members. They either formed their own denominations or isolated congregations within this denomination. And while many of those congregations have today a proud legacy for their members and families, they have existed alone — one might go so far as to say lonely — within the Presbyterian Church in Canada.This is a quick history of this denomination’s ethnic identity, which casts a long shadow through to today.

Yeon Wha Kim. Photo by Andrew Faiz.

Paulette Brown. Photo by Andrew Faiz.

Rev. In Kee Kim was a reluctant convert to the Han-Ca presbyteries; but once converted he led the charge in the mid-1990s to have two Korean-speaking presbyteries initiated within the polity and structure of the Presbyterian Church. Kim, who is minister at St. Timothy, Toronto — which is one of the larger congregations in the denomination and is profiled in Macdonald’s chapter — was born in Korea. As an immigrant and as a minister, he wanted very much to find a balance between his birth and his adopted culture. But he came to believe that Korean Presbyterians could secure their voice only by having a separate-but-equal structure within the denomination. It was a matter of self-preservation.

By the mid-1980s, Koreans were the largest visible minority within the Presbyterian Church. Though the first Korean-speaking church within the denomination had been established in 1965, there was heavy immigration of Koreans to Canada a decade later. By 1999, there were about 250 Korean-speaking congregations in Canada; but only a fifth of them were linked to an established denomination. The rest were largely independent. As Kim explained in an article in the May 2009 Record, the largest Protestant denomination in Korea is Presbyterian, within which category are many other denominations. The largest Presbyterian church in the world is in Seoul.

But despite their numbers, the Koreans weren’t seen to have a voice within the church. (This is what led Kim and others to lead the charge for the Han-Ca presbyteries.) Some would call this racism. I call it institutional indolence. It’s not that the church doesn’t want to be inclusive and it’s not as if the church doesn’t know what the right thing is to do; it’s just that the church doesn’t know how to go about being inclusive, given the established structure, the traditional shorthands, the smug tribalism, the comfortable pews. In other words, it is not a matter of racism — an active hatred — but of laziness, a comfort in doing things the way things have always been done. (This theme of tradition versus change was the deferentially muted clarion call of Rev. Cheol Soon Park, moderator of the 2008 General Assembly. His pastoral voice was likely the first contact many Presbyterians have had with the Koreans in their midst.)

Hoosik Kim and In Kee Kim. Photo by Andrew Faiz.

And if the very large Korean population within the denomination cannot crack the well established, traditional Highlander identity, what hope do the other ethnic cultures have? The answer is self-evident. I witness this every month as managing editor of this publication. In my five and a half years here, we have never received a People and Places or other submission from the Ghanaian churches in Toronto and Montreal, both of which are amongst the largest churches in the denomination. I don’t mean to pick on the Ghanaians — I could easily choose the Chinese, the Koreans, the Hungarians, and many others. I sense they do not feel a sense of ownership within the church. That is, they think of themselves mostly as ethnic congregations and not as full members of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

Conversely, there are congregations which send us submissions because their choir got new robes — they feel such a strong sense of ownership within the denomination that they want to share every bit of congregational news. That’s great; since this publication is a monitor of the denominational voice, the more engagement the better. But there are some deafening silences within the national choir. And only by listening for those silences can we identify the missing voices: they are mostly the ethnic congregations, but they also include our rural and western members and our more evangelical churches.

The barrier to greater involvement and engagement seems to be a perceived identity — Highland Scots. But, Macdonald argues that the Presbyterian Church is ethnically Canadian. He further argues that identity is constructed. It is a self-creation. Let me take his points a bit further: to be an ethnic Canadian, that is, somebody born in Canada, is to choose one’s own identity. Identity in the Canadian context is a totally malleable thing; this is Postmodernist Studies 101. My face may hint at my Pakistani birth, but Pakistan was a construct less than 15 years old when I was born. I haven’t lived there in 40 years, I barely speak any of the native languages, I don’t know the slang, and I don’t know the hidden cultural references, those subtle markers and shortcuts by which people live and negotiate daily activity. I am a Canadian — I speak the language of this country. And within that context, I am a Canadian Presbyterian.

Tamiko Corbett. Photo by Andrew Faiz.

But even though I have been a member of the PCC since I arrived in Canada, even though I have been an elder of the church for about a quarter century, even though I went to church camps in my youth (Stuart Macdonald was my counselor), even though I have worked for the church at various stages in my life, even though I have a fairly prominent position within the church today and even though I speak with an authoritative voice of “Our Church,” I don’t feel — I emphasize that word — wholly comfortable. I am willing to admit the problem may be of my perception. But I had a very curious experience two years ago this month when I was at a weekend conference at Crieff Hills, outside of Guelph, Ont., of “ethnic and racial minority Presbyterians.” I felt I belonged. I belonged in that room of ethnically diverse people — people like me.

With nary a hint of a Highlander, with only active ethnic elders and members from across Canada, there was a freedom of conversation and recognition felt by all the participants. We all belonged there; we weren’t poaching on somebody else’s turf, ingratiating ourselves into somebody else’s church. It was a very strange and powerful sensation; and by the end of the first day we all wanted to rush straight from the meeting space to the nearest General Assembly and declare in one loud voice that we were tired of feeling like second-rate citizens within the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

This should have come as no surprise, and for two reasons. This was the first time for all of us to be in the midst of such a gathering of the like-pigmented. And secondly, Rev. Paulette Brown gave the keynote address the first night. She can do that to people.

I first met Paulette about 15 years ago when I profiled her for a CBC radio broadcast. (It can still be found on the CBC website.) She has since become my congregational minister at Gateway Community Church, Toronto. Then she was minister at a Presbyterian church in the notorious Jane-Finch neighbourhood in Toronto. Jamaican by birth, she had studied economics and Spanish in university and found her calling several years after arriving in Canada. She went to Knox College in the 1980s and found it a strange and unwelcoming environment. She recently told me that at the end of a week of school she needed to speak in her heaviest patois to a friend back in Jamaica. That is, after a week of feeling extremely estranged, she needed to touch base with her birthroots. (By many accounts our colleges have learned from the experiences of Paulette Brown and others.)

Similar stories were told at the Crieff Hills retreat, feeling as if there was an active collusion to dissuade pigmented folk from participating in the church. “No meaningful changes can be made without dealing with the structures,” Brown told the gathering on Friday night. “We must focus on where the power is concentrated in our church, who sits at the table of power and authority, influencing how decisions concerning the overall ministry of the church are interpreted and implemented. We must ask whether there are spaces at these tables that reflect the true diversity of the church’s racial and ethnic makeup. We must raise questions about ways in which we can support the church in hammering out its journey with God within the context of the general ‘culture of sameness’ that characterizes its executive offices and its educational institutions.”

Powerful stuff, and it rang loud bells for action within every faithful, lonely, Presbyterian heart in the room. No wonder we were riled up for action that night. There were excellent workshops the next day, but Brown’s words still rang inside of us. By Saturday night we were calmer in our mood and tone — what is this general culture of sameness? It is amorphous. Like the wind, we feel it but we can’t touch it. We don’t know where to apply pressure to push it away, to overturn it. What exactly were we asking for?

After reading an earlier draft of this article, Macdonald wrote this to me: “I think in recent years some Canadians have been very glad to have the Scots ethnicity so prominent, because we can then blame the failings of the denomination and its fate on them. We are a Canadian denomination. But, if we’re not doing too well it’s easy to blame that failure on one ethnicity or the fact that we’re tied too closely to them. So, if I had any solution I wanted to offer it would be this — recognize that we are a Canadian denomination and give fair space to the multiplicity of the denomination.”

The Presbyterian Church in Canada today is no more really Scottish than it ever was. It is, as always, an ethnically diverse denomination; but with a patina of Highlander. And that’s all it is, or ever has been. A thin layer of manufactured identity that can easily be reconstructed, redrawn, but hasn’t always been. It all comes back to the comfort zones, the traditions, the status quo. This theme reverberates through the denomination, as recent articles in this magazine have shown — from issues of depression or rural ministry, the barrier seems to be neither theology nor polity but that our very traditions have become ossified. We’ve lost their meaning and we seem incapable for a variety of reasons to refresh them for our times.

And my former camp counselor is correct — demonizing Scots is a form of reverse-racism. It’s too easy; and worse, it doesn’t work. Let them be proud of their heritage; and they have much to be proud of having, according to one account, invented the modern world. (Perhaps we need to import the Presbyterians who invented the postmodern world.) There is plenty of room for a multiplicity of cultural and ethnic traditions to be celebrated.

photo by Francesco Rossetti / istockphoto

But it seems to me that ethnicity is the wrong brand for a denomination or a congregation. In feeling usurped or rejected, many feel compelled to preserve their heritage and we the church have let them do so as long as they pay their membership dues. But isn’t an honest desire to walk with Christ meant to be the cost of membership, instead of skin colour and the ability to roll R’s? It’s a naïve question and I’ll leave it at that.

Naivety aside, our ethnicities do matter. They are important, as is our faith. The two become conflated; and we call that tradition. So, what can we do? Many things. I think everybody should make an effort, at least once every two years, to go to an ethnic worship near you. If it happens to be Presbyterian, so much the better. My favourite is the Ghanaian: it’s the same liturgy, in English, but by the time most of us are rushing to our cars to leave the church grounds, the Ghanaians haven’t even finished the lectionary readings. The worship is over three hours long, feels shorter than most worship experiences and is absolutely energizing. Experience their joy in being at church and with each other; experience their hospitality, the way you are greeted half a dozen times by the time you get to a pew; learn of another way of experiencing God. Make certain to join the line of dancers during the offertory. You may not feel comfortable doing that the first few times you go, but once you’ve done it, you’ll be undone forever.

Go to a Korean worship. You may find its tone closer to your own comfort zone and there are many services in English. Listen closely to the voice of God speaking to you through that community. There are Presbyterians worshipping in many different languages, from many different ethnic traditions, within a driving distance from your church. Go join them in worship. Just do that and you will be transformed. Once that happens to you, the rest will follow.

Look at who is sitting beside you in your own pews. They are the new pioneers, like your ancestors, hewing their futures by working below their expectations and education just to make ends meet. They need you to be a part of their family, to know that somebody in this strange new country is praying with them. They are also amongst the estimated 75 million Reformed Christians worldwide — they have come from an exciting if different Presbyterian culture. When they are comfortable enough (your friendship will help), ask them to bring their traditions to worship. We all have as much to learn as we have to teach. Both roles are equally important.

One of the most memorable experiences for me was at the 2008 assembly when Rev. Cheol Soon Park, as moderator, spoke about healing and reconciliation to a few native representatives. On the one hand he was the titular leader of the offending institution. On the other, as a Korean, he personally identified with the legacy of pain and suffering because of what his ancestors had suffered a century earlier. And in that moment the identity of the Presbyterian Church in Canada was Korean, and aboriginal, and we were powerfully jerked out of our comfort zones into a new potential. It can happen again if we will it so.

posted on April 1, 2010 in Mission, News

Share :

The participants follow in the steps of migrants in the Sonoran Desert

On Nov. 12, 2009, Greg Wagland stood vigil near a pile of trash in the Sonoran Desert, one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America. He was one of almost a dozen participants in a 2009 mission trip who stopped for a moment of silence beside the piles of discarded backpacks and clothing, the forlorn remains of Mexican peoples’ journeys toward the U.S. border.

“Migrants dump things as they approach the border so they look less like they’ve spent days in the desert,” he explained to staff at national offices during a December presentation. He called it “holy trash” because it represented “people leaving behind memories to embark on a new life.”

A set of sneakers abandoned in the desert.

Wagland, of Glenview, Toronto, was one of five Presbyterian delegates on a nine-day study tour that exposed participants to the plight of refugees in Canada through a visit to Action Réfugiés Montreal, and then to the journey of Mexican migrants through a tour led by Border Links, a bi-national non-profit organization. The group spent five days in various towns along the Mexico-Arizona border learning about the work of churches and organizations that are providing assistance to those who seek to migrate to the United States, or who have been deported back to Mexico. The tour ran Nov. 6 to 14, 2009.

There were about 11.6 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S. in 2006, making them the largest single immigrant group in the country, accounting for 30.7 per cent of all immigrants. According to the Office of Immigration Statistics, about 6.6 million were in the country illegally.

During the trip, the delegation met with former E. H. Johnson award-winner Rev. John Fife, a retired PC(USA) minister who co-founded No More Deaths, a migrant rights group that provides food, water and medical aid to undocumented or deported immigrants. They also visited Café Justo (“Just Coffee”), a coffee co-operative created by PC(USA) minister and author Rev. Mark Adams to help local farmers profit from their Mexico farms, thereby addressing one of the root causes of labour migration — an inability to make a living in one’s home country.

But Wagland said the group was especially inspired by Jose Ramirez, a man who plans to teach trade skills to Mexicans to encourage them to stay in Mexico. The delegation “had mixed reactions” as they left DouglaPrieta Works, Ramirez’s shabby teaching centre. “Some of us said, ‘He had great idealism, but all he has is a shack and some sewing machines.’ But one of the delegates crackled to himself and said, ‘Don’t you get it? He’s a crazy person with 12 followers! Doesn’t that remind you of someone?’ We all came out of that thinking, let’s not count Jose out just yet.”

A mural on the wall that divides Mexico and Arizona.

The trip taught Wagland that migration issues are always more complex than they seem. “All of those interests and viewpoints crystallized for me,” he told the staff. “You can’t see any borders from space. It’s just land; it’s just earth. I think I’m getting closer to seeing the world the way God sees the world — full of people who are equal who may be struggling against each other.” — with files from the Migration Policy Institute

posted on April 1, 2010 in Letters

Share :

Re Letters, January

I was shocked and appalled to read the paragraph on “overdependence on ministers” in Rev. Chuck Congram’s letter.

I agree with the statement, “We still all believe the minister is a leader.” What upsets me is the statement that approximately 92 per cent of ministers do not believe they have the gift of leadership.

Well, who is going to steer the ship if the leader of the congregation absents himself from doing so? Lay leaders have always been a strength of our church and will continue to be, but they need to be treading in the footsteps of, and inspired by, their leader, the minister.

Leadership is a skill, and can most certainly be taught and learned. If Congram has this right, it becomes an urgent call to those in charge of the curriculum in our theological colleges. Let us give help where it is needed by providing training on leadership practices and principles.

With heavy demands coming at us from all directions, our future depends on this.

posted on April 1, 2010 in Letters

Share :

Unbelievable, by Helen Beaugrand, Penticton, BC

Needed: Leaders, by Gordon Coyne, Mississauga, Ont.

More Concerns About the Record, by Donald W. Heggie, via email

February’s Odd Notes, by Fraser McKee, Glenview, Toronto

Take the Narrow Road, by Jon Wyminga, Nazko, B.C.

The Spirit Passeth Understanding, by Bud Craig, Ottawa

Kairos Needs Time in the ENI Limelight, by B. L. Hart, via email

Testify, by Teresa Wilson

Thank You for the Music!, by Chris Fischer, Director of Music Ministries, Knox, Guelph, Ont.

Christianity and Hindu History 101, by William Duthie, Aurora, Ont.

Thanks for the Insights About Esther, by Marc Buist, Toronto

Help Needed, by Sam Copenace, Emo, Ont.

A Cry to a Dying Denomination, by Rev. David Crawford, Canmore, Alta.

By the Numbers, by Rev. Peter Bush, Winnipeg

Plea for pity, by Jean Park, Tillsonburg, Ont.

Repent!, by Ann Roberts, Elmvale, Ont.

The Reconstruction of Christianity, by Stuart Coles, Toronto

Our Apologies, by James H. Knott, Embro, Ont.

Raise Voices for Kairos, by Debra Drainie

posted on April 1, 2010 in Letters

Share :

Re Concerned About the Record, February Letters

I too am concerned with what passes for theology in the pages of the Record.

As a Christian and a Presbyterian, I expect to find Reformed Christian content in the publication of the Presbyterian Church, not the near-heretical writings of Dr. McLelland and of Rev. Zander Dunn.

Rev. Doug Swanson really hits the nail on the head in his letter when he states that it is perception of many of us that our denominational publication is straying from God’s truth and from credible Christian witness in the world.