Opposition To United Church Merger
He had opposed the first attempt to merge the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches of Canada in 1904 saying "I cannot recall one moment when I ever doubted that it was our duty to maintain the Presbyterian Church in Canada in the interests of truth, sound church government, spiritual freedom and national righteousness."
He favoured a federation over a total church union. This was highlighted in his 1911 "Alberta Plan", that critiqued the "Union Churches" then being created primarily in Saskatchewan. In 1923, he went on a six-week speaking tour of Eastern Canada for the anti-church union Presbyterian Church Association and became known as "Brown of Red Deer". When the final vote on union was held during late 1924 and early 1925, Brown's Red Deer Presbytery was the sole presbytery in the PCC with a majority vote against Church Union.
Nationally, some 30% of Presbyterians opposed this union and reorganized themselves as the "Continuing Presbyterians", until they were legally permitted to resume using the name Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1939. With regard to the namecontinuing Presbyterians, Brown was quoted during his fight for the preservation of the Presbyterian Church by reciting a Scots challenge:
They may rob us of name, they may hunt us with beagles,
Give our roofs to the flame and our flesh to the eagles...
While there are leaves on the forest or foam on the river,
MacGregor despite them shall flourish forever!
(Neil G. Smith, A Short History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, pp 85)
At the 1925 General Assembly, Brown was one of 79 Commissioners who refused to join the United Church, and met in a corner of Toronto's College Street United Church at the conclusion on June 9 in order to resume business later that night at nearby Knox Presbyterian Church and legally claim their continuity.
Read more about this topic: Walter George Brown
Famous quotes containing the words opposition to, opposition, united and/or church:
“Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)