Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review, an instructor of
Liturgy in the Anglican Studies Program at Regent College, Vancouver,
and pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Hope, B.C.

Historian Kevin Kee has produced a book that might surprise many
21st-century Canadians, whether or not they are members of Christian
churches. He brings to our attention one team and three individuals who
had the sort of “crusade” or “revival meetings” ministry that
most associate with the American church scene. Then he examines the
surprising faith–culture interface that takes place in mass evangelism
in a Canadian context to produce a valuable book on how Canadian
Protestantism has changed over time.

The team consisted of Hugh Crossley and John Hunter, the official
evangelists of the Methodist church in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The individuals were Oswald J. Smith, founder in the 1920s of
the non-denominational Peoples Church in Toronto; Frank Buchman, founder
of the Oxford Group in the 1930s (and later of Moral Rearmament); and
Charles Templeton, missioner for Youth for Christ in the 1940s and for
the United Church of Canada in the 1950s. All shared a common passion:
to lead men and women to the point of making a conscious decision to
follow Jesus Christ by repenting of past sin and committing to a new
life and new lifestyle under the Lordship of Christ.

Kee finds that more than the passion and the evangelical Protestant
message are similar. All were adept at using the media for free
publicity. Each carefully studied the popular entertainments of the
time—music halls, radio, movies, jazz, clothing fashions—to present
the old-time gospel message in ways that attracted, entertained,
edified, and motivated their contemporaries. All were more concerned
with changing lives than with the finer points of doctrine. Each
believed that the way to a changed, Christianized Canadian society was
through spiritually changing the lives of individuals, a stance that
separated them from the more liberal Protestants of their eras. The
results of their work can be seen today in the growth of evangelical
denominations and independent community churches that has accompanied
the decline of the mainline Protestant churches.