In this episode we talk with our resident historian and archivist Jim Craig about the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada from the very early years all the way up to today. Specifically, we look through our 100 year history as it relates to church multiplication in our movement.
In this episode we talk with our resident historian and archivist Jim Craig about the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada from the very early years all the way up to today. Specifically, we look through our 100 year history as it relates to church multiplication in our movement.
Transcript of Podcast by Multiply Network
Created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-making communities across Canada
23 August 2019 - Jim Craig
Hi there. Welcome to another podcast of the multiply network. My name is Paul Fraser, host of the Multiply Network Podcast. Hope you’re having a great summer. Did you know that the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada is a hundred years old, a hundred years young, and we’re ending with a party with the Pentecostal World Conference in Calgary at the end of August? So we as the Multiply Network decided we’re going to take a focus and look at our hundred year history specifically as a church multiplication Movement. Who better then than to have our resident historian and archivist, Jim Craig. With him we cover a hundred years of history in about forty-five minutes with stories, we talk about the pioneering passion to reach Canada, the changes in church how we organized and we even dabble a little bit even talking about what we need to do as we move forward into the future. I think knowing how we started can help us navigate our future. You’re going to love this conversation that we had with Jim. It’s coming up right now.
Q. Hi Jim. Welcome to the Multiply Network Podcast.
A. Hi Paul. How are you doing?
Q. Good. So glad that you are here. I’m excited about this for lots of reasons. I’ve been reading through some of our history, some of our founding fathers and mothers who have just kind of led the way for PAOC and it’s fascinating. But all of that is because of you and others like you that have taken the time to record it and to file it away in ways that we can find it.
How did you get into this? Maybe talk about the importance of archiving and maybe some of the process that happens with that.
A. I became an archivist in 2000 when my friend and former Bible School classmate Bill Morrow said that we need to professionalize our Archives Program. It was started in the late seventies and early eighties by Dr. Ron Kydd who started to organize some things. And there was some staff, some volunteers, some part-time, but not a great deal of space or anything like that. It kinda went along doing the best they could for a number of years under Doug Ruud. But when we moved into this new building we’re in now, Bill said to me that we really need to step it up in the Archives and get a proper facility and so forth. He said I want you to design the facility and get the training you need and so forth. So I was given three weeks to design a state-of-the-art Archives not knowing anything about that.
Thankfully archivists are really good at sharing information.
Q. Yes.
A. I had a couple of them in Toronto who were tremendously helpful. The Aussies, God bless them, had just published an entire book on the building of their new National Archives with pages and pages on what kind of fire suppression system do you use and all this technical stuff from someone who knows what they are doing. So we got designed and put together and when the building was built the day we moved in our collection grew by about four hundred bankers’ boxes because we had done a records management thing before we moved to make sure we threw out the right stuff and kept the stuff we shouldn’t throw out, which had not happened when we moved from Overlea Boulevard to Century Ave. But this move it worked out real well. We got an archivist to do that.
So anyway, long story short, I took something like a dozen weekend courses with the Archivist Association of Ontario to get enough theory to sort of know what I was doing more or less and then started the journey full-time for three years of figuring out how to apply that to our organization, our collection and our resources.
So we are very blessed. We have a state-of-the-art facility. The actual Archives room is about 860 square feet, so it’s not that big. But with our high-tech movable shelving we will have – we’ve got one more shelf to put in there; they are about ten grand apiece – we will have a kilometre of shelf space in that room.
The big thing about an Archive is temperature and humidity controls because we have two things we’re supposed to do. Very simple; preserve it and make it available. If you don’t do the first we can’t do the second.
Q. Right, right.
A. I am fanatical about preservation. We have a $20,000 furnace that covers just this little room. That’s about the size of your basement but your furnace in the basement didn’t cost that much I don’t think.
Q. I hope not.
A. It very accurately maintains that room at 20C and 45% relative humidity. We actually have a $1,500 scientific instrument that creates a written record every day of every month to show us that we have been on track and that the stuff in there has been kept properly. So an ordinary piece of paper today will last two hundred years in that room no problem.
Q. Wow!
A. Yes, which is well beyond my concern!
Q. Yes, that’s incredible.
A. Archiving is a lot of fun. I have a background. I have two degrees in history besides my ministry training. And I also just enjoy information and learning. That’s my favourite thing in life. I don’t know if you can see it behind me here. You can’t see it because this is a podcast but I have about one hundred fifty binders in this room that I don’t have room for at home. It is my personal research because I have written ---
Well, my writings in the Archives occupy two shelves, forty-four inch shelves. So I’ve got a lot of curriculum and Bible College courses and other studies and stuff. I’m just interested in far too much. Anyways, I’ve got a history personally of collecting information so it fits pretty well. You’ve got to be a bit of a pack rat to some extent.
Q. Oh, totally. My first day at the office, you know, walking me around, touring me around, I remember bumping into you. I think it was maybe a self-guided tour like hey, I’m Paul, what do you do. I couldn’t believe we had this high-tech room that would protect these documents.
But they are also on digital, right? We have most of them scanned. Would that be true?
A. No, not most of them. We scan things to distribute them which is really amazing. So we can put it on a photocopier and in two minutes it is scanned and shows up on my desktop and I send it. We send nothing out by mail. We used to have to photocopy hundreds of pages a year and mail them to people so this is a wonderful way to distribute things. So anything that has gone out that way has been scanned. We’ve also done some purpose scanning; all the General Executive Minutes up to a certain point, General Conference Reports, our dear friends in the Archives of the Assemblies of God in Springfield have scanned the entire Pentecostal Testimony for us.
Q. Wow.
A. And we have kept up with the new editions as they are made digitally before they are published. So we have about twenty-five thousand pages of documentation there. The Testimony is amazing, especially the early years. You would get two or three pages of small print reports from a missionary. Details and stories. It was fantastic because people read. That’s all they had. Right.
Q. Yes.
A. As time went on of course, as of about twenty, twenty-five years ago, there is hardly any news in the Testimony at all. It’s more stories, which was the purpose. It had to change, too. And we have all kinds of other stuff. It’s a really fascinating job on a number of levels because I have to look at all sorts of things. For example, people ask me that question: Are you going to digitize your Archives? I say well, if you have $500,000 you don’t need, and oh by the way, once it is digitized it will disappear spontaneously on some schedule nobody knows because at some point that PDF will not open in which case you have lost the record.
Q. Yes.
A. If it’s paper: two hundred years. If it is digital: who knows.
Q. Interesting.
A. You can convert it. Do you want to convert 2 million files on a regular schedule using software that doesn’t exist yet?
Q. Yes.
A. Lots of fun. It’s a challenge. And audio-visual makes life even more interesting. If I put the camera around the room here you would see I’ve got shelves full of things like slide projectors and 16mm film projectors. I’ve got four hundred 16mm films I could digitize if you have a hundred fifty grand you don’t need. Also, I’ve had two requests for films in twenty years so probably not a good investment. But on the other hand there will come a day when we can’t access them. Hollywood has already had this problem even with big famous films. If they had not thought about it and digitized them they’re gone for good.
Q. Yes.
A. And then of course the story ---
Q. Obviously we’re not going to talk about the process of archiving and all that. I’m not sure everyone would be as interested as maybe I would be.
But I do want to dive into one of the things we’re focusing on for the Multiply Network is the centenary of the PAOC. You have read through what I would only guess to be thousands of documents. But specifically as I sent you the email saying, hey, would you consider doing a podcast as it relates to church multiplication through the early history of our Movement, I know you’ve done a bit of research on that. You’ve read a bunch of things.
Why don’t you take us through a little bit of kind of the church multiplication, church planting. At that point it was called Home Missions, if you remember. Why don’t you kind of take us through a little bit of our history as it relates to church planting?
A. Sure. Happy to. It is a fascinating subject and a complex one but I did spend some time and tried to condense a lot of material.
Basically the impulse for church planting, and we know this, came from our theology. We believe in evangelism because everybody needed to be saved and Jesus was coming at any moment. Our eschatology fired our evangelistic zeal. Of course that’s not the case so much today but regardless it is still there.
The real question is how did they do it? What was the method? How did churches get planted and started? So I divided the PAOC’s history up into probably three periods. The first would be what I would call the entrepreneurial approach. There are some wonderful examples of this, churches that were started mainly by individual initiative. If someone heard from God or they really felt a call to go to a little town somewhere they started out. Often they would get a few people together, maybe they would have what was called a cottage prayer meeting which would be local interested Christians getting together to pray for revival or to start a new church. There would be a lot of commitment to prayer and fasting as part of that initial process. You can read about this in the very first issue of the Testimony. If this was visual I was going to hold up an authentic original copy of the first issue of the Testimony. We actually have three of them. On page 2 there is a long description by William Draffin, who signed the PAOC Charter, of a revival in a little place called Mille Roche. Mille Roche isn’t there anymore. It’s under the St. Lawrence River.
Q. Oh really?
A. It was one of the towns that disappeared when they expanded the Seaway so big ships could get into Lake Ontario from the ocean. It’s an amazing story of God’s power moving, healings and people being drawn to Christ and so forth. I won’t take the time to go through it but it is not atypical of the earliest days and how they went about it. So it was very much driven by someone hearing from God and taking the steps necessary. And I see some of this coming back but I’ll touch on that later.
So this process ---
There were several people in different provinces who were church planters and did a lot of this early stuff. J. E. Barnes who became the Superintendent of BC. He did a lot of this. So did some others out there. Walter McAlister in Saskatchewan, for example. John T. Ball in Ontario who started off in Owen Sound and then he went to Markham. Markham was actually our first church building; not Kinburn. It still stands.
And then there’s Ray Watson. Ray Watson was a bank robber in the United States who got saved. Isn’t that a great line if you’re an evangelist? Former bank robber.
Q. Former bank robber and great church planter. C’mon, I love it!
A. He blew through the Maritimes and started churches in several communities there. You know, the evangelist coming into town. Of course back in the day, the twenties and thirties, you could advertise an evangelistic meeting and people would come.
Q. Yes.
A. I mean today they would say let’s run them out of town, you know, whatever. And they would gather a crowd and people would get saved and healed and filled with the spirit and so forth and he would bring in a pastor and move on to the next town. He did some church planting also in Ontario in places like Brockville. So that was the entrepreneurial approach. It held sway in various ways for some period of time. You had some people who spent most of their career as church planter pastors like Art Bell. I love Art Bell’s story from BC. I don’t know if you know that story.
Q. No, I don’t.
A. Art graduated from the Bible School out west in about ’47, pastored for a little while in central northern BC. Then he went up that whole corridor there for about fourteen years and planted about six or seven churches, two or three years at a time. My favourite story is the church at Kitimat which he was responsible in one respect for starting. Kitimat was an Aluminum Company of Canada town. It was just a tiny village, Indian village or First Nations village to begin with. When they were building the town he wanted to go in and see about getting property to start a church. Nobody was allowed in except the construction workers. They were building a smelter. They were also drilling a hole through a mountain to build a hydro-electric plant to power the smelter. There was no way he could get in. So he contacted a guy by the name of Warnier in a nearby town who was a PAOC guy who was a trapper with a 400-acre trap line. He walked with this guy through the bush and the mountains for two solid days in the winter. He had never done anything like this before. There were cabins the trapper had where they stayed for a couple of nights. When they arrived in Kitimat they were the only outsiders there of course and Bell was a mess. His feet had been bleeding and all that stuff.
So he walks into the superintendent’s office and says he wants to talk to him. The secretary takes one look at him and says absolutely not and throws him out. So Art goes around to the back of the building and goes in the back door, gets into the guy’s office and the his friend out front, Warnier, is just waiting for him to get thrown out the front door again. Instead forty-five minutes later Bell walks out with a free plot of land and a pledge for the company to supply materials to build a church. What a guy!
Q. Wow.
A. So I guess they walked back after that.
Q. Yes.
A. The determination of some of these guys was remarkable. There’s the story of Jacob Fehr. He worked in Winnipeg. He actually refurbished an old boat --- You know the gospel boat stories?
Q. Yes, yes.
A. Okay. This was just after the war, this guy had been a Medic in WWII, wounded a couple of times. He was on staff at Calvary Temple at the time. So he and he rebuilt an old boat and sailed around the shores of Lake Winnipeg. On his first trip he had a hundred conversions in various little First Nations villages. Lake Winnipeg has a huge shoreline. So he did that for a while. And then he got frustrated because the lake freezes over in the winter. Right?
Q. Yes.
A. So Fehr decided to build his own snowmobile from scratch. He was featured in Time magazine as the snowmobile preacher with a photograph of his big honkin’ hand-made snowmobile so he could reach these communities.
Q. That’s amazing.
A. That kind of determination and creativity was characteristic up until the forties and some even in the fifties. John Spillenaar flying up in the north and some of the guys who worked with him; unbelievable stories they had to tell about their determination.
So the second approach that characterized a large chunk of the PAOC’s history is what I called the systematic approach. We could use other names for it but to my way of thinking and I’ve done quite a bit of work on this, is it grew out of our cultural context. Our cultural context was saturated with something called functional rationality. Functional rationality is the idea of technique. If you have the right technique anything has to work and it is predicated upon a mechanistic view of the universe which of course is not accurate at all. I’ve done some work on this for my theology of organizational change because it really has a lot to say with how we get things accomplished and how we change things. Because if you’re trying to change a machine as opposed to trying to change an organism it’s a completely different process. Anyway, I won’t go into those details. That’s theoretical.
So there’s a societal shift that increasingly is trying to apply scientific principles, sociology, behaviouralism and all that kind of stuff to things whether it’s running a successful business, doing marketing, raising your kids or having great sex with your wife. I mean there are manuals that were created for all that stuff.
Q. (Laughter)
A. I am sure other cultures look at us and say who are you people that you would think of those things like that. Who are you people?
Q. Seriously.
A. St. Paul is turning in his grave. But anyway, in about 1954 Donald McGavran, which of course is a name many know, became the father of the church growth movement. He wrote a book called The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions. It was a very important book because what he said was we should be trying to reach people groups not places.
Q. Okay.
A. Focus on people groups and their culture and understand it, etc. Tremendous insight. What is interesting is that this work grew out of the overseas missions context. In the Pentecostal Testimony the first reference to the phrase, “church planting,” comes in 1952 about a missions conference in Kenya and it was coined by George Upton who was the head of the Missions Department at that time. He was a very effective leader. His two sons Roy and Gordon are well known from our earlier days.
In a later article he makes the case that the church planter should move on once the church is started and let a pastor take over. He uses the example of Paul who didn’t stay around very long. He cultivated local leadership and then he left them in the hands of the Spirit, trusting that would work.
Q. Yes.
A. We don’t take that attitude and maybe we should be thinking about the fact. I wonder how many church planters have ever thought about the fact they should do this again and again as opposed to staying to pastor the fruits of their planting.
Q. Yes, interesting.
A. The reason they pioneer I think is because they have an apostolic as opposed to a pastoral gift. They are very different.
Q. Sure.
A. The pastor is a doctor who runs a hospital.
Q. Yes.
A. A church planter is the one who starts hospitals. Very different.
Q. Interesting. Very cool.
A. Over the next twenty there are only seven references in the Testimony to church planting and they all have to do with overseas missions. So interestingly the whole church growth movement started with an overseas insight. So our language around church planting was applied overseas to begin with. So the first domestic use comes from George’s son Roy Upton.
Q. Okay.
A. And it is with reference to the PAOC national evangelism initiative in 1974. They used it alongside terms like evangelism, pioneering, etc. So McGavran’s work spawned a revolution in North America and then around the world about how we think about the church and how to grow the church.
Q. Yes.
A. And of course then Peter Wagner and other people got involved in that and jumped on the band wagon as consultants and so forth. Now at this stage new churches were often mothered by other churches or sponsored by the district. That’s the PAOC context.
Q. Yes.
A. What’s interesting is our church planting started out on a pioneer basis.
Q. Entrepreneurial, let’s go for it, we’re creating ski-doos, we’re making boats, we’re walking trap lines because there’s people that need Jesus and we’re going by ourselves. But that shifted.
Did the language shift from -- like did we see Home Missions show up after the seventies or was it pretty much church planting by then?
A. Well, Home Missions --- Yes, church planting came later.
Q. Okay.
A. Home Missions would have been the title of the department and the function. Home Missions was about unreached peoples in Canada primarily. Right?
Q. Okay.
A. The north, Quebec – which is still one of the the largest unreached mission fields – and other niche areas, First Nations and so forth, all came under Home Missions. So we really didn’t think of it in terms of reaching the Canadian population at large, the average population.
Q. Oh, I see.
A. We had these special ---
Like it is now with the “gaps” being reached through Mission Canada.
Q. Okay.
A. So the church planting language came to be used in the church growth movement language and that ethos began to pervade our thinking and our efforts. So there was a Church Growth Committee struck in ’73 that evolved into the PACE Program: Pentecostal Assemblies Church Extension Program. And this was because there was a big concern or a growing concern at the national level about an over-emphasis on programs in the local church, a dearth of individual soul winning, an attractional strategy (of course we’ve never heard of that in our day!) at the local church level and fewer new churches being started.
Interestingly, if you look at the statistics, the PAOC grew by a hundred and sixty churches between 1940 and 1950. The next ten-year period it grew by, let’s see, about the same; 156 churches.
Q. Yes.
A. The next ten-year period however was only 70 churches in 10 years.
Q. What decade was that? Was that the seventies?
A. That was 1960 to 1970.
Q. Sixty to seventy. Okay.
A. Sixty to seventy; 40% lower than the decade of either of the two decades before it. Right?
Q. Okay.
A. So it had already started to slow down significantly before they started to do a lot about this. The result was a more systematic approach to church growth using the methods of setting goals, graphing growth, doing studies, all this kind of thing and of course that led into a little bit later on to the Decade of Destiny.
Q. In the nineties.
A. Ironically this did produce some results going back to the seventies with a net growth in numbers reaching a 105 new churches between ’70 and ’80.
Q. Okay.
A. A 189 between ’80 and ’90. But between ’90 and 2000 the growth rate was much, much smaller, like half that, despite the Decade of Destiny.
Q. Really!
A. Which is interesting.
Q. Very interesting.
A. And a little frustrating to National Office.
Q. Yes, sure.
A. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Then you had I think an intensification over time of this technique idea so I looked at the 2001 Western Ontario District Church Planting Manual, which is about a hundred pages long. I looked at the feasibility study you had to write. It was three pages of single-spaced requirements for that feasibility study. It would take you probably a year because they want to know every other church in your area and their programs and their budgets and their staff and all this kind of stuff. You had to produce a twenty-five page document which is probably a little bit overkill, I think.
Q. Yes.
A. Interestingly today if you go on the WOD website there’s a single page, what is it, eight or nine blue dots, a little phrase in each.
Q. Yes.
A. A lot of it is about who are you and why do you want to do this as opposed to the detail down to the grass blade level.
Q. And if I can jump in there too, I actually like that now that we’re discerning the calling more as opposed to ---
The gifting, the skill set, you need that. You need the character pieces. All those are important. What I like today about what we’re doing in assessment for planters is I think we’re spending a little bit more time on discerning the person, their calling and developing relationship because in the end that’s what is going to get them through the tough times; having relationships and family around them pushing them forward. But that’s a fascinating catch, you know, that it was really a bit more about systems thirty years ago. You need to know this and you had to have this “i” dotted, this “t” crossed. Yes, fascinating.
A. Those approaches can tend to take over as they have done in every area of life. But thankfully we have moved away from that a little bit. We have to keep in mind even those numbers that were discouraging, those were net figures so we have to ask the other question: Why were churches closing? Churches are always closing. Why are they closing? They are closing I suspect in record numbers now. But part of that is demographics. So if you go to Newfoundland the PAON is in big trouble.
Q. Yes.
A. Because they are closing out ports. Some of these small places the government goes in and says here’s three hundred grand for your house. I’m sorry, we’re closing your town. We can’t provide hospital service, ambulance service or anything like that. It’s just not viable. And with the loss of the oil revenues they are struggling with right now they are closing towns all over the place which had churches in them. So the same is happening in other parts of Canada depending on the economic stuff and whatnot.
That’s something we need to do a more systematic study of that but it hasn’t been done.
So there is space opening up as you already have said for the return of some sort of entrepreneurial model. We see this now in the stories of our Mission Canada workers, many of the stories that you are telling. At chapel here in the office two weeks ago we had Anna Morgante from Winnipeg.
Do you know Anna?
Q. Yes, I think so.
A. She’s a Mission Canada worker in downtown Winnipeg. It is fascinating for me to hear her tell the story of how meeting poor people pulled her into helping them find housing, helping them with stuff with their kids, which is how she contacted them. She sort of said I didn’t expect to be doing this but these doors opened and I couldn’t not walk through them.
Q. Yes.
A. That’s the leading of the spirit where I find he has something in mind that kind of gets us going in the right direction and then he refines ---
Q. I love it.
A. --closing and opening doors as we go along. We end up someplace where we think how on earth did I ever get here? But it’s wonderful!
Q. I feel the same way. That’s kind of my story where I’m at right now and maybe you’re in the same boat too.
A. Yes, exactly.
So the other question is the Millennials that are taking over leadership right now, as you yourself noted, the need to bring them into leadership more quickly and trust them and give them real leadership because of the demographic issue involved. So that’s important and of course the need for mentoring because they very much want that as well. And of course the spiritual factors behind this which you can’t really, or I haven’t tried to document. That’s another whole process, those sorts of issues. But at least it’s a bit of a sense that we started off entrepreneurial, every person for themselves, just trusting Jesus, go and do it, see great things happen, to a more systematic approach motivated by the fact that we weren’t getting it done as much as before, I think.
Q. Of course. Right. Yes.
A. And then it began to take over and now we’ve moved away from that hopefully back to our roots of saying what is the Holy Spirit saying to you. Right? That should be who we are, I think.
Q. And I think we’ve learned some lessons along the way hopefully too. Because I remember talking with someone who was planting in the eighties and they were saying basically the District or whoever, you know, was kind of overseeing, their senior pastor sending them or a District or whatever. It’s like here’s $1500 and a town. Go.
A. Exactly.
Q. And a lot of them burnt out. A lot of them didn’t have the support mechanisms. There was no assessment. There was no funding. There was no training. There were hardly any books on it at that point, as you have noted. It was just starting to become a term that people were using. So it’s this idea like okay, I love that entrepreneurial heart again. I think we need to recapture it. I was reading ---
We were talking about this just before the podcast about this idea of pioneering. We have to get back to that pioneering. But that doesn’t mean you have to pioneer alone, like you’re in a field pulling rocks by yourself!
A. The Lone Ranger.
Q. The Lone Ranger. No, no. You pioneer as a team. We pioneer as a Movement. We work together and we look at those places and see what God is leading us to do. So I’m just excited about this future, as you made mention, the Millennials. I think there’s a heart and certainly the Gen-Zs have a heart to like just try something new and we need to engage that.
Any other thoughts about our history because I do want to talk about where you see us moving forward?
A. Well, I mean it’s never been a more challenging time. Of course every generation says that.
Q. Yes.
A. But if you look at the trajectory of Western society we are the only place in the world where Christianity is not growing. I’ve done some work on this and some thinking on this from sort of the 30,000 foot level because until recently I was teaching church history at our Bible College in Peterborough. I discovered the work of a man called Andrew Walls, who you may have heard of. When I was in the Missions Department years ago I knew his work. He’s retired now. Andrew is a Scottish missiologist and global church historian who started to notice some things that I think are incredibly important for us to understand.
Q. Yes.
A. He talks about the fact that the advance of the Christian religion is serial. In other words it starts in one place. It spreads to the periphery, it grows and flourishes there and then begins to die in the center and replant itself on the periphery.
Q. Interesting.
A. Think of the Greco-Roman world and then Europe. Of course Europe was a Christian continent for a long time and Europe is also responsible for the modern missionary movement. Catholics, two hundred years before the Protestants started, and then the Protestants that spread the gospel around the world. But the least Christian place on earth now is Europe and the most Christian place on earth is Africa and Asia. So we’re part of that process because we’re Western and we’ve had those advance society challenges that of course some amongst us are trying to export, you know, along with everything else. And that’s another whole bigger issue.
But I taught my students about seven ears of church history and seven principles that help us understand something really important. When the gospel enters a new cultural space we learn something we never knew before about the gospel. So when the gospel goes into, for example, the Greek culture we start to think about who God is in philosophical terms, in terms of essences. And the Nicene Creed is a Greek document for Greek-thinking people, which we are because of our education.
Q. Yes.
A. But when it goes into Europe then the idea of Christendom comes along because Europe was a tribal society and there was no pluralism in the tribe. You had the same religion as your chieftain or you were gone. That was it. So that whole idea of Christendom which had a lot of problems was inculcated and brought into the gospel there. So my point in teaching my students was look guys, I’ve been in the ministry for forty-five years and I do not live in the same country I was born in. I lived in the States for three and one-half years but the rest of the time I’ve been here.
Q. Okay.
A. It’s a totally different country. I believe in your lifetimes that will happen again. So we better know how to translate the gospel into a new cultural space without losing the gospel, but seeing a new expression of it. That’s part of the process I hope we’re beginning to see with the younger generation. That’s another whole conversation.
Q. Yes, fascinating. So why don’t you ---
Because one of the things we talked about before the podcast just kind of prepping, the impact that has had on you, this PAOC history, this entrepreneurial ---
It has actually led you to do something a bit different. Why don’t you take a few minutes and talk about what God has maybe pushed you into. Maybe it’s an open door here and then we want to talk about maybe where we’re headed in the future.
A. Well, I mean it wasn’t simply archives work but other factors in my life. But first of all my archives work has given me an appreciation for my spiritual family. I didn’t grow up evangelical or in a born again family. I was United Church. I got saved when I was 17. So the more I’ve learned about our Fellowship the more I’ve appreciated that I belong to an amazing family. And it is my family.
Q. Yes.
A. Every time I turn around ---
I was talking to somebody the other day and they were looking at pictures from Stone Church. I pulled out this big file. And I’m showing him. Oh, there’s brother so-and-so. I remember him. He was, you know, this guy was there when I first started. All these people I knew personally because after you are around for a while you get to know a few people.
Q. Sure.
A. There is a tremendous sense of family that I think is important. And the other thing that is important about knowing about the past is your past is your identity. If you’ve ever seen the movie Concerning Henry. It starred Harrison Ford in a very unusual role. It was the story of a man who was a real arrogant selfish individual who goes to buy a pack of smokes at the store, then gets shot in the head by a guy robbing over a bodega and he loses his memory. He doesn’t know who he is. He turns out to be an amazing gentle loving person because he has forgotten who he was. But if we forget who we are we’ll stop being what we are. Our whole identity is about where we come from. Who are we?
Q. Yes. As a Movement ---
A. As a Movement. Yes, and as individuals within that movement. So that’s part of the foundation of it.
Where that led me and through other circumstances, one of which was actually getting laid off as the archivist after three years, along with eleven other people in this office and ending up in a spiritual wilderness for a long time. There’s those who have written books on this stuff, but often the prelude to something fresh and new is a very difficult time of testing in your life where you literally say that my Lord knows the way through the wilderness and all I have to do is follow. But sometimes it’s pretty hard to follow. There’s nothing on the horizon but dryness and death and pain and struggle. That may well be a shaping experience for some of our future church planters. But don’t discount what God can do with your life just because you go through a struggle. Quite the contrary. I don’t find any leaders in the New Testament who didn’t start out that way.
Look at Moses and so forth. That’s all part of it.
Where it has led me in my own life was involvement with the community. I was doing different things, putting together different types of work and so forth and ministry work but really felt a call to begin to pray for my City of Mississauga, a city of about three-quarters of a million people, sixth largest in the country. I has an amazing spiritual heritage – won’t go into the details now – a remarkable spiritual heritage unlike any other place in the country in my opinion. We actually had a First Nations chief who was a spirit-filled Methodist minister and he was training and sending out evangelistic bands to other First Nations communities in the 1720’s!
Q. Nice.
A. You will never find that anywhere else in this country, I guarantee it.
Q. That’s nice.
A. That’s the soil we’re sitting on. So I got involved with the community and started to learn about how communities function and governments and so forth and just became aware of needs that I saw, one of which was a facility in the little town of Streetsville within Mississauga where I lived for twenty-six years, of people on the streets. I mean, it’s a beautiful little community. It’s upscale but it had street people. Who are these people? They turned out to be mental patients who lived sometimes up to twenty of them in seven rooms in a filthy old house giving their entire ODSP cheque to the guy who owned the house who became a millionaire. We looked into him. And lousy food, nothing to do all day long but bounce off each other in this home. Police were called three times a week and so forth. Just hell on wheels. I discovered some loving Christians who were going in to be friends with these people because they had no family, they had no friends. When you have a serious mental illness the family is long gone. They cannot cope with that.
Q. Yes.
A. So they would take them out for coffee. They would celebrate their birthday. They would just talk to them. And I said to them are you guys meeting to pray for them? And they said, “Well no.” I said, “Okay, c’mon, let’s start praying for them.” So we started a prayer meeting. Long story short a year ago last summer the Peel Region gave an amazing Christian organization in Hamilton called Indwell Christian Homes, $21.5 million to build a six-storey residence with sixty-six rooms for these people to live in, as long as they want, at about less than half of their monthly cheque.
Q. Wow.
A. Indwell is an amazing organization. How does that happen? It wasn’t all me by a long shot but how do you start with a prayer meeting and end up with a residence. And that’s one of three that they plan to build.
So what God can do is so way beyond what you can imagine.
Q. That is such a great story too because it’s entrepreneurial, being spirit led and while we believe in strategy, while we believe in, you know, good work and good research and doing our homework, there’s this other aspect where God just says if you’re willing to walk I’ll take care of all that. If you’re willing to step forward in obedience, if you’re willing to push forward ---
This is what I’m praying for in our Movement honestly as we think about moving forward.
A. I don’t know how many times I’ve told people, Paul, I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t want to lead anything. I call myself a chief sneezer because what I do is spread idea viruses! I also connect people with each other, which is an amazing ministry in itself. But because of that I’ve gotten involved now with the mental health needs of First Responders.
Q. Amazing.
A. And their families. The Lord has connected me with these incredible people who are just accepting me, which is remarkable, because First Responder communities tend to be very closed because they have a life experience different from other Canadians.
Q. Yes; 100%.
A. The average Canadian will experience a few real traumas in their life. The average police officer will experience 200 to 400 in a twenty-year career.
Q. Wow.
A. And the mental health effects –
Q. Who is helping them?
A. Well, I believe the church of God should help them.
Q. C’mon, yes.
A. So the doors God has opened, the funding he has provided, I literally lie in bed every night and say God if I’m messing this up just give me a slap on the side of the head and get me to line up again because I do not know what I’m doing. But it’s wonderful. The people I’ve met and the favour of God on things I’ve done is just utterly remarkable. So I just stumble on ahead and say okay Lord, don’t let me miss anything important.
Q. And that’s one of the things that I love about the language of our Movement starting with our General Superintendent and the General Executive is that we didn’t say we’re just going to plant churches. We want to start new disciple-making communities that don’t always look like a church.
A. Absolutely.
Q. The stuff you’re doing doesn’t always look like a church. The stuff that Mission Canada is doing doesn’t always look like a church. Our Global Workers, our churches that are starting new campuses and satellites don’t always look like a church and that’s okay. I love that disciple-making community where it’s like it’s actually about making disciples and it’s okay if it looks different. Because here’s the thing. I think the models that we love right now twenty years from now won’t be the predominant models.
A. No, they won’t.
Q. Things are shifting.
A. People are listening to podcasts now. I try to be the eyes and ears of the church in the sense that if you read my business card it says helping churches find new ways to love their neighbours because churches don’t love their neighbours. They spend all their money on themselves, by and large.
Q. Yes.
A. Now that’s changing. We have some remarkable churches that are opposite.
Q. That’s true.
A. We need to embrace what I call Kingdom Mission, which is loving your neighbour. If you don’t love your neighbour, Jesus said, you don’t love God. The way to shine the light is not by talking. It’s by loving because good works will cause them to glorify God, which could be works done in the power of the spirit supernaturally or they could be helping a First Responder’s family find the support they need to cope with the fact that dad comes home very night a vegetable because of what he has dealt with every day on the job.
Q. It is so hard.
A. And will people come to Jesus? Of course they will. Do I walk in the door talking about winning people to Jesus? Absolutely not because every door would shut in my face. I walk in saying how can I help, how can I care, how can I love? No questions asked. We leave the results with God.
Q. Yes. This has been so good, Jim. We’re running out of time but I do want to give you a chance to maybe with the full kind of picture – you wouldn’t have all the picture but you would have a fuller picture certainly than I would – of where we’ve been, what we’ve done through, you know some of the vision, you work at National Office, where we’re moving ahead, why don’t you just speak to our group but I’m sure there’s other people listening that are part of other groups, part of other tribes, they are all in kind of the same boat that we are, what would you say to the church in Canada moving forward.
A Well, you’ve raised the issue of leadership training and that’s part of it. Our leadership training ---
I teach in our Bible School. I love it. But it needs to be experiential learning. If we want urban church planters they should be trained in an urban setting. For years and years and years I’ve suggested this that we should set up a home and get something like an apprenticeship residency type thing. There are so many ways to deliver the factual part of education by distance learning. What they don’t have is the hands-on part. There are places in the world where a Pentecostal pastor doesn’t get his credentials until he has planted a church!
Q. That’s true.
A. It may only be a house church but who cares! He knows what he’s doing. So wouldn’t it be amazing if, you know, 50% or more of our Bible School graduates had planted a church, a small cell group or something for new believers in downtown Toronto or in Winnipeg or Vancouver or somewhere else like that. They would have the confidence to do that for the rest of their career instead of starting from ‘how do you do this?’ This is really scary. I come from a small town. I have to go to Toronto, you know, etc. So there’s that aspect of the change in the leadership approach and finding ways to do that with much more hands on, much more local church based and other based things.
I think in the future we’re going to have to work harder at understanding how to speak to the culture because they’re not listening now and it’s actually probably good because some of the things we would say would cause more trouble than opening doors for us.
Q. Yes.
A. We do have to work on the other side. There’s been a conversation about possibly training apologists, people like Ravi Zacharias. Let’s multiply those guys because there are people who are quite willing to answer and to listen to the answers to spiritual questions, like my generation was, and the younger generations. But they need someone who will give them good answers. Those people are there and they are doing an amazing job but we need to multiply some of those people because they are laying the groundwork for people to go to the next level of spiritual questioning in their own life as opposed to the false barriers the culture has thrown up in front of them.
So finding ways to move forward with that I think would be part of it.
And I think we need more places and opportunities where we can learn from each other, where we can be together. I am so much for bringing people together. When I started in this calling for First Responders I thought we should get all these little agencies that are doing stuff together. They’ve got help lines and support groups and all kinds of them, and they’re kind of doing their thing, mom and pop, but I’m saying to myself I want to get these guys in a room for a day. But I don’t even know them. I know two of them out of twelve or so. The Lord hooks me up with this guy, who used to be a Baptist youth pastor actually, and he’s a former medic with PTSD, and this was his vision. He said, “I want to have a think tank.” I said, “I’m with you man. Count me in.” We spent a whole day together, about thirty of us. I was sitting beside nurses and paramedics, a serving Lieutenant Colonel in the military, all these amazing people, talking about problems, issues, opportunities and so forth and we’ll do this more because there is more to be done. So we can actually work together.
I think we should be having some of those kinds of conversations much more with ourselves and with others in our communities and with other leaders and other faith leaders in terms of Christian faith leaders elsewhere and learning from each other.
Q. Yes. I’ve got a question for you and then we’ll ---
A hundred years as a Movement, so this is more specifically related to PAOC, and maybe some of your study and just maybe some initial kind of gut feelings, one of the things I’ve been hearing people say is when a Movement is about a hundred years old, or somewhere around that age, the ability to change is more difficult. Now we’ve got more responsibilities, we’re kind of a bigger fish now in the pond and there may be more to lose. So what do you think we need to do to bring about the change that is needed so that we can see the growth that we saw in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, to see that percentage of growth, what do you think we need to do to change?
A. Well, I mean if our goal is to simply replicate growth of the past that may not be the right goal because growth may well look different than it does today.
Q. Correct.
A. I go to a missional community and they say you don’t have a building. Even in the fifties, sixties and seventies Western Ontario had a church planting fund of a million dollars that you could borrow for 2% to build something. It wasn’t to build a church but to build something. Okay?
But the change process ---
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this because of going through frustrations with organizations. I won’t go into detail which organizations within our Movement, but I have given it a lot of thought. But the change process has two poles. The first pole is identity because if you change everything you cease being who you are and you lose, like the guy who got shot in the movie, you know, you lose your personality. In that case it was good but normally that is not the thing to go for, not normally so.
Understanding who you are and then understanding your context properly and see how those two things have to work together. I can’t go into the details. As I said, I wrote a hundred-page manuscript on it trying to think this through. But there is a lot of good information in scripture how the change process works. We’ve just never identified it because a lot of the people who wrote the books looked at it from a business mindset and tried to fit the strategic planning and stuff into a few little Bible verses. I studied the life of Moses and the change he brought Israel through. I studied the life of Jesus and the incredible change he had to bring as the non-Messiah Messiah that he was. I studied the growth of the early church and the whole Jew-Gentile issue and so forth and how that all unfolded and some of the characteristics of that. I think we have to give more serious thought to what that looks like but in the context of conversations.
Q. Yes.
A. Face-to-face conversations that are generational, not just the District Superintendents. I love those guys. They are awesome. They do an amazing job. They have an incredible burden that they carry. I really appreciate them. But what about the guy who is two years in the ministry and is just starting to figure things out? He may well have insights today because, see, you heard the story of the guys who stand up and say oh, well, we have to think differently because our culture is non-Christian and the answer of the professor was sir, I grew up in that culture. I’m good with it. You’re not but I am. This is my culture.
Q. Yes.
A. They are teaching us a little.
Q. Yes.
I think it is important that you make a good point. I think part of it for us is probably rediscovering who we actually are, not maybe who we’ve kind of you know, our initial pioneering who we were when we started as a Movement, when they signed the document saying we’re going to be a group, we’re going to be a family, this is what we’re going to be about, I think recapturing some of that I think will be helpful but also you make a good point about understanding it contextually. Man, we could talk about this all day.
Jim, we’ll get you back on another time. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today.
A. My pleasure. Thank you.
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