Ministry couple takes time-out
DOUG
KOOP
CW Editor
– Ottawa –
After lots of soul-searching and a rejection by Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, the founders of Peacemakers Canada are taking “a time-out from ministry.”
Since the mid-1990s Rudy and Marny Pohl have been prominent speakers and teachers in a variety of Christian reconciliation and prayer initiatives. They have also written three books, including A Matter of the Heart: Healing Canada’s Wounds (CW, Apr14/98). But now they are re-assessing their call.
In a mid-March newsletter, Rudy Pohl highlights several reasons for the change. “The most significant event that led to this decision occurred last December when the Department of Charities of CCRA rejected our application for tax status.” CCRAcaseworkers took 18 months before they determined Peacemakers Canada was “essentially ‘political’ in its nature and primary focus.”
Strangely, Pohl agrees. “Years earlier this would have greatly disturbed us,” he writes. But after studying the “key question” of “what exactly is the mission and mandate of the church” at length, Pohl discovered he was indeed preaching national unity as gospel message.
“We thought we were already totally out of ‘Christian nationalism,’ but we weren’t,” he says. “We agree with the government’s verdict ... that our focus was off.”
The newsletter also discusses Pohl’s “serious reservations about the legitimacy of the underlying theology in the burgeoning reconciliation, intercession and spiritual mapping movements,” the groups that have been most receptive to the Peacemakers Canada ministry.
In particular, Pohl disputes the way many of his “friends and colleagues” are applying 2 Chronicles 7:14 to the contemporary situation. He also takes issue with the concept of “identificational” repentance. “No one can ‘repent’ for someone else’s sins. Nor does God hold the church responsible for the welfare of the nation,” he comments.
“As well, we do not believe that God gives specific national destinies to individual nations, other than Israel. Yet so much of what is taking place in these ministries is ostensibly so that today’s nations can ‘fulfill’ their God-given destinies.”
While none of the couple’s books teach these theological elements, for several years the Pohls have struggled with the fact that their views “have placed us very much outside of the mainstream of these three ministry movements and our friends and colleagues who work in them.”
Roger Armbruster, a Manitoba pastor active in all three movements, responded graciously to the newsletter, affirming the couple’s “valuable contribution to the body of Christ,” and reminding Pohl “that the ‘stops’ as well as the ‘steps’ of a good man are ordered of the Lord.”
Now some months into “a sabbatical year of rest,” Pohl has returned to the secular workforce and is active in a variety of volunteer activities. The couple intends to withdraw from Peacemakers Canada ministry for the remainder of the year “in order to give the Lord time to work in us, renew us, to restore us and to give us clear direction.”