Ottawa prepares for
Billy
Graham visit
Spiritual
climate warmer than 30 years ago
when evangelist first invited
By Lloyd Mackey Special to ChristianWeek
OTTAWA–It has taken three decades for the nation’s capital to prepare for a Billy Graham mission. On June 25-28, at the Corel Centre, where the Ottawa Senators play NHL hockey, the evangelist is expected to speak to crowds of 20,000 or more.
Back in 1967, Ernest Manning, completing 25 years as Alberta’s premier and himself a radio preacher, wanted his evangelist friend to do a cross-Canada crusade, culminating in a series of meetings in the capital.
The Ottawa churches were not united, so the capital event did not work out, although Graham preached in several other Canadian centres that year.
In 1998, however, the spiritual climate is seemingly warmer. Allen Churchill, mission chair and senior minister at downtown Dominion-Chalmers United Church, has hoped and prayed for a spiritual melting in the capital for close to two decades, ever since he came to the flagship church located just a few blocks from Parliament Hill.
Ten years ago, there were tentative plans for Leighton Ford to hold a mission in Ottawa. Churchill was involved in those plans and recalls that there simply was not enough church support then to make it feasible.
The Ottawa Valley is home to almost a million people. The French-English ratio is close to 50-50, if suburban Hull, across the river in Quebec, is included. And the church-going population, too, is fairly balanced between Protestant and Catholic.
Spiritual thaw
And therein lies one of the clues to the spiritual thaw.
Some 300 churches from 30 denominations–including Catholic–are participating in the mission event. The level of Catholic participation emanates in part from the strong support for Graham offered by Ottawa Archbishop Marcel Gervais and Bishop Fred Colli, who is responsible for the diocese’s English-speaking parishes.
But Graham senior staffer Rick Marshall notes that the attendance of Catholics at pre-mission leadership sessions has been very strong.
Sunday homilies in several parishes have strongly authenticated the mission’s Operation Andrew. Priests have spoken strongly of the need for Catholics, as disciples of Jesus, to bring others to him. Those supporting the mission see it as a way for 1990s Christians to emulate the example set by Andrew, the little known disciple who brought his brother, Simon Peter, to Jesus.
For Churchill, the exhilaration of the event is that even the preparation has gotten both Christians and non-Christians thinking and talking about Jesus. Much of that talk resulted from some comments made last October in the boardroom of the Ottawa Citizen by the moderator of Churchill’s own denomination, Bill Phipps.
In a moment of candor, Phipps suggested that he doubted whether Jesus was God. His comments and the resulting ecclesiastical damage control brought national headlines.
In retrospect, Churchill believes that God himself used the controversy to draw the attention of the nation’s capital to Jesus.
