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“If God has promised me rivers of living water, why am I content with a mere trickle?”
Jerry Kirk’s question echoed and reechoed in the minds and hearts of the approximately two hundred participants at a Fellowship Renewal Day last October 18. In what has become an annual event for the southern Ontario area, what had started to be a regional event quickly turned into an event that drew people from across Canada.
Part of the reason for this wide representation was the high profile nature of our speaker. Dr. Jerry Kirk has been minister for eighteen years of College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. Drawing over two thousand members to four worship services on a Sunday, College Hill has modelled a renewed community of believers. Its emphases are on evangelistic outreach, nurturing groups, and a commitment to the ministry of the laity in spite of the eleven clergy on staff.
It was in this latter connection that Dr. Kirk spoke to almost eighty ministers and team members of multi-staffed congregations from some twenty-five churches. Not only was a wide area represented – Ottawa to London – but every congregation, with but one or two exceptions, within our denomination that have such staffing situations were represented.
“We have obviously touched a nerve centre of the church,” commented Board of Ministry Secretary Tom Gemmell. His Board co-sponsored the event with the Renewal Fellowship. A wide spectrum of representative viewpoints (many of whom were hitherto unfamiliar with the ministries of the Fellowship) gave the Renewal Fellowship a wide and appreciative exposure.
The emphasis on team ministries on Friday included a stress on the need to involve laity. Dr. Kirk emphasized that rather than creating a dependence on paid professionals, multi-staffed churches needed to use the position of full-time minister to encourage the multi-faceted and multi-gifted ministries of the laity. Clergy as coach, not clergy in control, was his theme.
It was to the laity on Saturday that Dr. Kirk spoke. Addressing the spiritual needs each of us face, he spoke of his own pilgrimage in an open and caring manner. Perhaps most of us will never be able to forget how, having given an address on marriage which elicited a thunderous response to a packed Montreat, North Carolina conference centre, his wife greeted him at the door at one o’clock in the morning with the simple question: “Why can’t we have a marriage like that?”
It was that quality of openness, integrity and commitment to faith and sanctification not as arrival but journey, that characterized Jerry’s warm and human approach as he spoke to laity. Out of that searching question from his wife he shared that there had been healing, seeking the Lord, and a new depth of commitment to their relationship as husband and wife. He challenged each present to have a similar awareness of where others – particularly those nearest to us – are coming from and to provide a listening ear to the often unspoken cries for help within the family, and with that wider family we call the church.
Jerry has also taken the emphasis at College Hill on social action as a legitimate agenda for evangelicals into the area of anti-pornography activity.
Passionately and fearlessly, but with great sensitivity, he shared the call he has from God – and that he wished many of us would also take up as a crusade against the pornography that is engulfing the entire Western world – explicit, escalating and pervasive.
Jerry Kirk, God used you mightily among us, and we sensed as you shared with us, a new dynamism within our Fellowship community, a new sense of the urgency of the task to which God has called us. May many discover the living waters and not be content with a struggle for a trickle.
The momentum of that Renewal Day carried us into an unprecedented response to the Chairman’s Quarterly letter. That letter had been occasioned by awareness that our financial situation was precarious. Returns had been low during the first three quarters of our fiscal year. October elicited a phenomenal response – a “miracle” of giving, with strong affirmation of the Fellowship across Canada.
A Southern Ontario Renewal Day in October is being followed by Renewal Days through Canada as the Fellowship begins to regionalize and respond to local, grass-roots, needs. From Sydney, Cape Breton, to the Peace River country, Renewal Days are being scheduled for the 1985-6 programme year. This magazine will be presented first to a Renewal Day in Ottawa at which Dr. George Ensworth, psychotherapist from Gordon-Conwell Seminary in suburban Boston, will be speaking about a lay counselling ministry.
The climax of our year’s programming, and a chance to bring all our members together from across Canada, will be taking place at Toronto’s historic Knox Church on March 7 and 8, 1986. We will be fortunate to have with us Dr. James Packer, well known author and Professor of Systematic Theology at Vancouver’s Regent College.
Dr. Packer’s article, in this winter issue of Channels, spells out the commitment our brother has to vital renewal within the traditional mainstream of Reformed theology. His vision is of those of us who are grounded in doctrine, bringing our great creedal affirmations aflame as lives, congregations – and denominations – are transformed by the sovereign Spirit of an Almighty God.
After all, it was the founder of our Reformed and Presbyterian church, Jean Calvin, who on October 24, 1540, spelled out the great watchword of our theology: “Je offre mon coeur comme immole, en sacrifice, au Seigneur” (“I offer my heart aflame to You, Saviour, in sacrificial love.”)
We invite you to join with us as we continue the momentum towards renewal within the Presbyterian Church in Canada on those days in March, and as we gather for instruction and inspiration with Dr. Packer.
For 1986, our fourth year as a Fellowship, promises to be one of great excitement and encouragement. Requests from four Boards of our church, and the Synod of the Atlantic Provinces, as well as many presbyteries, give us the vision of a fulltime Director, in place by September 1, who can coordinate these activities. It has always been our hope that, true to the ethos of the Fellowship, this would be a lay person. But we await God’s path into the future with confidence, and know that He is blessing us because the renewal of our church is even more a concern of His than it is ours.