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Given at the John Stott Memorial service at St Paul’s Bloor St Toronto on 18 March 2012. I will be giving a paper titled “John Stott Theological Educator” at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Milwaukee on 15 November at a John Stott tribute along with Alister Chapman, Andy LePeau, Greg Scharf, and Carl Trueman
 As I state in my biography of C Stacey Woods, John Stott arrived in Canada for the first time on 10 November 1957. He and Wilber Sutherland, who had met him when his boat, the SS United States, docked at New York, had taken the overnight sleeper from New York. Wilber Sutherland as General Secretary of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada had invited John Stott to come to Canada to conduct evangelistic meetings in several universities, an invitation which was subsequently broadened to include the United States.
The next day. here at the University of Toronto, John Stott began his memorable North American tour. He went on to the Universities of Western Ontario and Michigan, spent Christmas with the Billy Graham family in Montreat, and then resumed his Canadian tour, starting at Winnipeg and on to UBC, concluding in February at McGill for a weekend. There a future moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada was converted. The impact of his visit was long-lasting and gave a strong boost to InterVarsity’s student ministry. His lectures, under the title “Christianity Is Christ,” were published as Basic Christianity and made his name familiar across Canada and around the world.
Stott’s next exposure to Canadians came with his visit to Urbana Illinois in 1964. For five of the next six Urbana’s, as the InterVarsity missionary conference grew from five thousand to nineteen thousand (including several thousand Canadians), he was the featured attraction. His morning Bible readings provided a model for Biblical exposition. I remember vividly Urbana 70 and his exposition of John 14-17. He began in 1964 with II Corinthians chapters 4 through6 and ended in 1979 with Romans 1 through 5. The inspiration for those attending from Canada was energizing and ultimately incalculable.
At the first Lausanne congress John Stott arranged to meet me in an assembly room to discuss an invitation that I, on behalf of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada of which I was president at the time, had extended to him to speak at a Christian Leadership Seminar to be held at York University the following June. His choice of a room to meet elicited his comment that “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” a proverb that I have found very useful subsequently. Over 1500 people crowded York University on that occasion, as Stott was teamed with Donald McGavran and Stephen Olford.
 L to R, Centre row: Mel Donald, Marj Long, JRWS, John White, ADM,Gordon Stewart The final invitation to John Stott to come to Canada I extended, this time as General Director of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, was on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. He came to address a four day national staff conference at Geneva Park in Orillia in January 1979. The staff had not been altogether in one place for over a decade and John Stott made the meetings very memorable.
John Stott played a pivotal role in the creation of Regent College in Vancouver and spoke at four summer schools. He was also, as Timothy Dudley Smith says in his biography, invited to be the Principal. Regent became the inspiration in 1979 for the London Institute and it was during those years that the Langham Trust was brought into being here in Canada, as a part of his vision for graduate theological education in Majority World countries, and the encouragement of expository preaching. In Canada the Trust was started as a Vancouver organization with John Cochrane one of its initiators. Gradually the center of gravity moved to Toronto where an active Langham Trust board today strengthens Stott’s earlier initiatives.
Stott’s goodbye visit to Canada was in April 1998 when a series of farewell meetings here in Knox Church, Avenue Rd. congregation and at Tyndale Seminary were thought to be his final appearances in Toronto. At seventy-eight it was not anticipated we would see him again but he returned on at least three more occasions, the last in 2004.
At least three things John Stott taught Canadians: (1) The value of expository preaching ministry which he modeled and encouraged and was in sharp contrast to the usual Canadian pulpit fare. (2) The discipline of a focused life in contrast to our more relaxed and casual approach. His razor-sharp intellect challenged easy complacencies and compromises. (3) His strategic thinking, constantly strategizing, using limited resources to the best advantage, and always with a global vision, in contrast to our too often narrow focus and the pursuit of short-term goals.
 The death on Thursday, 1 March, of Malcolm Caldwell draws to an end a remarkable career in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. I had the privilege of attending the funeral service at St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Ottawa when about 150 of us joined in celebrating his life and witness in worship led by the Clerk of Presbytery, James Hurd, who was a successor of Malcolm’s in Woodstock, New Brunswick. The message was delivered by Rev Clarence H. Witten, minister of the Dixon’s Corners Christian Reformed Church. The Caldwells, when they retired from ministry, had moved to Lantz, Nova Scotia and worshipped at the church Clarence Witten had pastored at the time, Faith Community, in Milford. Their minister at St Paul’s, Jack Archibald, was out of town conducting chaplaincy retreats at Lake Louise, Alberta.
On 30 August 2008 as Convener of the Committee on History, PCC, I interviewed Malcolm for its Oral History project. He and Lois had recently moved into Ottawa from their second retirement home in Merrickville. With Lois’ help, he struggled to recall events in his twenty-three year ministry in the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
That ministry had been nurtured in his home congregation of St Andrew’s Sydney Mines. Malcolm was born a year after church union when the church, by a vote of 265-59, remained in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The minister at the time was F Scott MacKenzie, from 1927 to 1945 Principal and subsequently (to 1958) Professor at Presbyterian College, Montreal. As I say in my biography of Stanford Reid (pages 103-6), MacKenzie very much identified with the old liberalism. It was the induction of Quincy McDowell in 1930, an American, a graduate (with my father) of the Princeton Seminary class of 1927 , that shaped both St Andrew’s and the Caldwell family. Malcolm’s younger brother was named Quincy so profound was their pastor’s impact. McDowell, who remained for a decade, was followed (from 1940-1952) by another American, Clarke Evans, a 1935 graduate of Westminster Seminary.
It was during the ministry of Doug Wilson in St Andrew’s (1954-1962) that Malcolm felt the stirrings of a call to ministry. He was at the time an employee of Dominion Steel and Coal in Sydney where he had worked since high school. His brother Quincy had taken theological studies at Westminster Seminary graduating in 1959. Now, three years later Malcolm, with his wife Lois (née MacQueen), and two children set off for Boston and studies at Gordon College and Divinity School. In this move he was encouraged by H Stewart Gray, a 42 year Trustee of Gordon Divinity School and an elder of the United Presbyterian Church of Newton, MA, with a cottage on the Mira where he and his wife, Leta (née Shaw), would summer. A successful businessman, Stewart had set up a Trust Fund for fellow Canadians at Gordon.
As Lois, a remarkable woman with great gifts of empathy and efficiency, worked to put Malcolm through school he worked summers at a golf club. He graduated with a BA and subsequently a MDiv, applied for an appointment as an ordained missionary of the PCC and was sent to the Newcastle, New Brunswick, pastoral charge. Joining Miramichi Presbytery in 1968 placed Malcolm at the centre of denominational agitation – and eventual schism – of a group of radical separatists. Unlike brother Quincy. Malcolm was a denominational loyalist, a cool head with mature wisdom and discernment. He moved on to Ottawa, serving in the Gloucester and Vernon charge. Paul Mills had been there before.By now there were three children: Donald, who moved in 1977 to Boston to work with Stewart Gray as an apprentice to his partner Stewart MacDonald, Mary and Malcolm (who later followed his brother to to work for MacGray Co.)
The family returned to the Maritimes as Malcolm accepted a call to St Paul’s Woodstock. His time at Woodstock was very fruitful: he gathered around him a Session that had been previously nurtured by Bob Ross: a remarkable group of laymen deeply committed and with leadership gifts. I had the privilege of living in the Woodstock Manse the summer of 1981 and can attest to the quality of its life and witness under Malcolm’s leadership. One of the elders, Archie McLean, later President of Maple Leaf Foods, gave me some good advice. The service at St Paul’s was broadcast and, having heard me preach my first Sunday service as he was driving back from conducting a service at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Houlton, Maine, he was outspoken: “If you preach here in Woodstock as though you were at Knox Church Toronto you won’t have a congregation very long.” I took that comment as a commendation of Malcolm’s ministry. Warmly pastoral, with an ability to immediately recall individual names, Malcolm was a man of the people: passionate about his Christian faith and contagious in sharing it.
On 28 June 1984 Malcolm was inducted as Senior Minister of Bethel Church, Sydney. His predecessor, Everett Bean, had been an icon in the PCC and served as Clerk of Synod (and General Assembly) with great distinction. Malcolm was a native son, knew the area well, and was quickly integrated back into the community, enjoying support from Everett Bean who remained in the congregation as minister emeritus until his tragic death on 7 January 1991. Bethel was a post-Union amalgamation of several minorities among Sydney Presbyterian churches and has always represented a challenge to its clergy through its sheer size and diversity. Shortly after Dr Bean’s death Malcolm announced his retirement, as of June 1991. He was 65 years of age.
Many tributes were paid Malcolm but none was appreciated more than the honour granted him by Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1990. At the instigation of Stewart Gray, the school conferred on Malcolm the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa. Stewart beamed with pride as Malcolm came up to receive his diploma. With two of his boys working for MacGray, ninety-one year old Stewart was the proud honourary parent. Four years later Stewart Gray was gone, with much of his estate going to Gordon-Conwell Seminary.
Malcolm and Lois were together in ministry for fifty-eight years. Twenty-one of those years were spent in retirement. Malcolm was a man of prayer, as his three children bore witness at the funeral. Their passionate profession of personal faith in Christ, given at that service, was a moving witness to the impact of his life. There is a whole generation of pastors of Malcolm’s ilk that are passing on: as we honour them we pay tribute to the leadership they provided in a church that is vastly different today. Malcolm’s faithfulness is an example to all of us. His faithful daily devotional life is a reminder that it is in the little things, the disciplines of the rhythm of our lives, that we will be judged.
This past Wednesday, 19 January, the day of his death, I paused to remember a man who had a dramatic impact on my life: Frank Ely Gaebelein (1899-1983). Dr Gaebelein, Headmaster of Stony Brook School for forty-one years, died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on that date in 1983. When I was deposited in September 1953 at “the Brook” straight from the mission field by my father (who had taught there 1923-1924), FEG was on sabbatical and Pierson Curtis was in charge. The legendary “PC” and I simply did not click: probably the only one in the School of whom that can be said. When FEG returned in 1954 he took an immediate interest in me and made me. for my final year, his aide-de-camp, sitting in the Office guarding his door at nights. His Romans class was the intellectual highlight of my two years at Stony Brook: careful exposition of Scripture and brilliantly applied. My senior assignment was a paper on the inspiration of Scripture and the recommended text was Francis Lindley Patton’s classic. Patton had spoken at the opening of the School in 1922 and was at that time President of Princeton Seminary. I came to FEG with my valedictory speech. He went over with me the outline, four words starting with “S,” and told me to strike out one, “Sex.”
 FEG, Graduation 1959 My first year at McGill University – FEG had battled my father who made me turn down a full scholarship to Harvard so I would be sure to keep the faith under the watchful eye of Stanford Reid at McGill – was a disaster. I describe my trauma in C Stacey Woods and the Evangelical Rediscovery of the University (154-5). In my despair I traveled back to Stony Brook, and spent time with him. He wrote my uncle Wesley Ingles, a former teacher, “I am concerned about Don MacLeod … Don has been in to talk with me … It is too bad to see [him] … at such a loose end.” (FEG to JWI, 13 Sept 1956 SBS Archives) Others may have found FEG aloof but to me he was a warmhearted pastor. Three years later, graduating from McGill, I made my way back for graduation to show him that I had navigated the shoals of adolescence successfully.
 FEG, MacLeods 13 April 1971 I have a full file of Gaebelein letters over the next decade that I cherish. What a correspondent he was: always encouraging me to stay the course, to remain strongly Biblical in the early days of ministry, to keep the faith. I started a church in suburban Toronto in 1967 and invited him to lead a weekend with my fledgling congregation over Easter 1971. How he managed to be away from home over that holiday escapes me and his utter humility in coming. We kept him busy with various events climaxing with a memorable message Resurrection Morning, “The Imperative of Christian Education.” The brochure speaks of his “continuous contact with youth [which] has given Dr.  Gaebelein a unique combination of the wisdom and perspective of age with the freshness and dynamism of the innovator.” He left me one of his books inscribed to “my former student, in whose faithful ministry of Christ and the Word I greatly rejoice.”
In March 1980, returning from a school break in Florida, we dropped in at his home in Arlington, Virginia, as I wanted my boys to meet him. We spoke briefly, left a plant, and expressed concern. Dorothy Gaebelein was upstairs in the final stage of her illness. It was a difficult time for him and, after prayer together, we continued on our journey home with a heavy heart. My final memory of FEG was at the Evangelical Theological Society when it met in Toronto at Ontario Bible College and Theological Seminary, as Tyndale was then known, in November 1981. I drove him out to the Airport to catch a plane back to Washington. He only lived another fourteen months but I see him still, going out through Departures, alone.
FEG was a cultured man of strong convictions, stalwart faith, and iron discipline. Stony Brook was his monument. He prepared me for life. I see in my notes from his Romans class ,which I still use, he said “The fellowship among believers is one of the benefits of a place like Stony Brook … That is something that we who are going to secular colleges will miss.” I have one of his mountain photographs framed in a prominent place in my home, a constant reminder of FEG. The obituary of a Swiss mountain climber comes to mind when I think lovingly of Frank Ely Gaebelein: “He died climbing.”
Christmas has a way of reconnecting you with many friends whom you only hear from once a year. News has just come to me from her husband Ian, of the death of Jill Morgan Marshall of White Hill, Pictou Co., Nova Scotia, on 10 November 2011.
Jill, like myself, was the child of members of the American Presbyterian Mission to China. We were both Third Culture Kids (a.k.a. MK’s, mish kids, missionary kids). Our earliest memories were of that tumultuous period in the history of the Middle Kingdom when wars, revolutions, and “liberation” was the story of our childhood. Jill had a further challenge: she had been adopted by her parents shortly before they left for China in 1945. Her parents, the Rev Fred Bruce Morgan, Jr., and her mother, Ruth McNamee Morgan, were assigned to Qingdao, Shandong, where the presence of the United States Navy provided some short-term safety as Mao Tse-tung’s legions were busy conquering North China.
The summer of 1949 we were all evacuated to Hong Kong and for the next two years the Morgans and the MacLeods shared rooms across the hall from each other in the Presbyterian Mission Home, 11A Carnarvon Road, Kowloon. Though the families were poles apart theologically, my mother would (perhaps wistfully) remark on the fact that she could hear Bruce and Ruth talking late into the night. Two years later the building was sold, the Morgans returned to America, and we relocated to Kowloon Tong. The American Presbyterian Mission, one of the largest in China, which had continued for well over a hundred years, was no more.
The years went by. Bruce Morgan became Executive Presbyter for the Presbytery of Albany. The family bought a deserted farmhouse in Gairloch, Pictou Co., Nova Scotia, where they would summer. Our paths crossed again: in 1963 I had been appointed as ordained missionary to a five-point pastoral charge which grew to include St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Gairloch. Jill Morgan, barely out of her teens, caught the eye of a local farmer, Ian Marshall. I was asked, as Ian’s minister, to perform the nuptials.
 The baptism of their first child: Mary and Fraser Marshall on R; Ruth Morgan to my L It was an extraordinary love match. The Marshall family was active in the neighboring Middle River Church, where Ian’s mother was organist and his father clerk of session. Fraser Marshall – the mentor and friend every pastor needs in his first congregation – also became very much a father figure to Jill, providing the love and security she had never known. We missionary kids often have difficulty in later life with relationships, solid marriages can be daunting, and the dislocations of our past can come back to haunt us. But for forty-seven years Ian and Jill maintained a strong, if unusual, relationship: she found in rural Nova Scotia the security that had evaded her as a child. Two hundred people crowded the Eagles Funeral Home Westville for her final obsequies. It was reassuring to me that she had requested a Salvation Army officer to do the service: a sign perhaps that hers was not only a resilient faith but an abiding confidence in the resurrection of our Lord that hope-fully lasted to the end. And a challenging final chapter it proved to be, with Ian as always faithful and loving to the end.
As I look back over the group of TCK’s, 1949 evacuees from Communist China that I lived with for those two years in the PMH in Kowloon, there is a savage irony as we reflect on where we find ourselves today. For many of us the faith our parents professed is not ours. But in China, the land where we were called on (without being asked) to share our parents’ sacrificial self-giving, there is a strong, suffering, growing and dynamic Christian community. God’s providence is beyond our understanding: and a troubled teenage daughter of missionaries received the warm embrace of a family and their faith, far from her early years in China. And Jill Morgan Marshall found, I trust, peace at the end.
As an expression of thanks to Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, Long Island, NY, I delivered a paper at ETS San Francisco on the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the institution by the Gaebeleins: Frank, headmaster (1922 1963) and his father Arno, the well known Bible teacher, writer and editor. To celebrate the School’s ninetieth anniversary ninety graduates, of whom I was privileged to be one, were honoured at a special evening 29 October. Both my father, Alexander, and my uncle, J Wesley Ingles, taught at the School and I graduated in 1955.
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As I state in my biography of C Stacey Woods, John Stott arrived in Canada for the first time on 10 November 1957. He and Wilber Sutherland, who had met him when his boat, the SS United States, docked at New York, had taken the overnight sleeper from New York. Wilber Sutherland as General Secretary of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada had invited John Stott to come to Canada to conduct evangelistic meetings in several universities, an invitation which was subsequently broadened to include the United States.
InterVarsity missionary conference grew from five thousand to nineteen thousand (including several thousand Canadians), he was the featured attraction. His morning Bible readings provided a model for Biblical exposition. I remember vividly Urbana 70 and his exposition of John 14-17. He began in 1964 with II Corinthians chapters 4 through6 and ended in 1979 with Romans 1 through 5. The inspiration for those attending from Canada was energizing and ultimately incalculable.
