Minister’s Complaint

After finishing a week in attendance late this spring at a conference of the United Church of Canada, minister J. A. Davidson wrote a column in the Toronto Globe and Mail complaining about “all those pious resolutions.” He noted from discussions with Anglican, Baptist and Presbyterian friends “that in assemblies of their churches the multiplicity of pious resolutions have a similar mind-and-heart-numbing force.” He recommended that “a day or two could be profitably spent in meditation on the dictum of Bishop Stephen Neill: ‘If I were not already a Christian and a churchman, I think that what more than anything else would keep me back from accepting the responsibilities of church membership would be the apparently irredeemable triviality of the churches.’”