Source: Link

Brown, Walter George, Presbyterian minister and politician; b. 6 Sept. 1875 in Athelstan, Que., third son of Charles Brown and Christina White; m. there 22 Nov. 1904 Martha Ann Rowat (1881–1981), and they had one son and three daughters who survived infancy; d. 1 April 1940 in Ottawa and was buried three days later in Athelstan.

Youth and education

Walter G. Brown’s Irish grandparents on his father’s side homesteaded in Huntingdon County, Lower Canada; his maternal grandparents were from Scotland. By the time of his son’s birth, Charles Brown was an established agriculturalist. Walter contracted rheumatic heart disease as a child but nevertheless developed a powerful physique because of hard work on the family farm. He received a first-rate education. At Huntingdon Academy he graduated at the top of his class and won a four-year scholarship to McGill University in Montreal, where he earned a ba in 1899. He then entered the city’s Presbyterian College to study for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC), and he would graduate in 1902 with a bd and the silver medal, serving as class valedictorian.

The college’s faculty was moderately conservative, with only Principal Donald Harvey MacVicar* being a strict Calvinist. Its stance apparently suited Brown well, and he remained a middle-of-the-road conservative for his entire ministry. His writings at this time reveal an earnest student who strongly supported Christian missions. He showed a sincere desire to work with other Protestants, and he was involved in cooperative exercises with the local Anglican, Methodist, and Congregationalist theological colleges. A vigorous participant in intercollegiate sports (his specialty was the shot put), Brown was an exponent, and exemplar, of muscular Christianity. He evinced an early interest in politics, and his youthful ideas foreshadowed the prairie radicalism that would mark his life later. He decried the mounting cost of a university education that excluded “the poor man’s son”: “Anything that discriminates between rich and poor, that does not deal with man as man, is bad in itself and sadly needs reform.”

Early career

On 30 Sept. 1902 Brown was ordained to do mission work in northern Ontario lumber camps. He was well suited to the task, having an affinity with the marginalized, the physique of an athlete, and fluent French. One of his daughters would recall that he routinely walked 15 to 30 miles a day to preach at night. After completing his term in April 1903, he obtained an appointment as a missionary to mining camps in British Columbia, mainly at New Denver. In a report of March 1904 he remarked that “the average hard-fisted working-man … will go to a church, where he receives an honest welcome, where the service is simple, the sermon good, and the minister a manly man.” As a result of his labours, the mission station in New Denver, which had only a church building, acquired a residence as well. This more stable situation allowed Brown to marry Martha Rowat, a daughter of the manse in Athelstan. In 1906 he was elected moderator of the Presbytery of Kootenay. That same year he successfully completed an ma thesis, “Socialism in British Columbia,” for McGill’s department of economics and political science.

New Denver was to be Brown’s shortest pastorate. In 1907 he was allowed to resign to attend the United Free Church College in Glasgow. After a term, he returned to Athelstan. Armed with three degrees, and the prestige of postgraduate studies in Scotland, he was courted by notable pulpits across Canada. He instead headed for the rugged hinterland of Alberta, to Knox Church in Red Deer. The Presbytery of Red Deer had been created only in 1904 and at its inception had no self-sustaining pastoral charges. When Brown arrived in April 1908, Knox was its most important church, with 143 communicants, and paid the largest stipend. Brown was in his element in the young, raw presbytery, and he would stay for 17 years.

First and foremost, Brown was an indefatigable pastor. He was also, as convener of home missions for the presbytery, tireless in establishing outposts in central Alberta. The credit for opening up the Canadian west to Presbyterianism is usually given to the Reverend James Robertson*, the PCC’s first mission superintendent for the region. Of unquestionable ability, Robertson nevertheless could not have achieved what he did without a phalanx of tough-minded and tough-bodied men who had the idealism and evangelical zeal to put up with primitive conditions on the frontier. Of the same stamp, Brown helped to expand Robertson’s early efforts. He also became thoroughly involved in his community, both locally and provincially. Not only did he serve his church and its educational institutions in various executive positions, but he also joined a number of municipal-improvement and social-reform organizations, such as the Red Deer Board of Trade and the Social Service Council of Alberta. He was also active in Red Deer’s sporting and other clubs.

Opposition to church union

By 1909 Brown was becoming well known in the PCC as an adversary of church union. With the dawn of the new century, there had arisen an increasingly powerful movement to form one Protestant church in Canada. A substantial minority of Presbyterians were against the idea [see Clarence Dunlop Mackinnon; Ephraim Scott]. Brown and many others were proud of the church’s Scottish heritage and in no hurry to see it diluted. They were further repelled by the high-handed tactics of the pro-union forces. As an alternative to organic church union, Brown offered a form of federalism that envisaged planned cooperation between the denominations, and he organized and promoted a working model for collaboration in northern Alberta mission fields. His labours were to no avail: more than half the country’s Presbyterian congregations and ministers joined the new United Church of Canada in 1925. The dissenting Presbyterians then proceeded to reconstruct their church. If “Brown of Red Deer,” as he was known, was a big name in the pre-union PCC, he would be a giant in the church that endured. He had been one of the commissioners to the fateful General Assembly that saw Canadian Presbyterianism fracture. In the continuing assembly, he was chosen as a member of the General Board of Missions.

During his fight against church union, Brown had been particularly offended by the way in which Presbyterians, notably those in Saskatchewan, were, through procedural manoeuvres, made to support the scheme. In Saskatoon only one of four Presbyterian churches stayed out of the United Church. The dissenters from the other three joined together to form a new congregation, St Andrew’s, and boldly issued a call to the west’s leading anti-union cleric. Always up to a challenge, Brown accepted.

Apart from his regular pastoral rounds, and his customary community involvement, Brown became a driving force in the reconstruction of Presbyterianism in Saskatchewan. His efforts were impeded by the state of the larger church. The continuing PCC was a somewhat unstable amalgam of the rather more deep-dyed elements of the pre-1925 PCC, encompassing modernist liberalism on the one hand and narrow confessionalism and fundamentalist millenarianism on the other. The leader of theological renewal within it was Walter Williamson Bryden* of Knox College in Toronto, who embraced the ideas of the genial Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Bryden could have had no influence, however, had there not been other influential Presbyterians, Brown among them, trying to strike a balance between liberalism and conservatism in the church.

Church administrator

In 1931 Brown was elected moderator of the PCC, a one-year appointment. After chairing the annual meeting of the General Assembly, this official normally tours Canada and often makes a trip abroad to see first-hand the church’s overseas work. In January 1932 Brown, never one to take the easy route, sailed, in spite of increasingly painful arthritis, to Formosa (Taiwan), Japan, Korea, and Manchuria (People’s Republic of China). In north Formosa he celebrated the diamond jubilee of the mission founded there by George Leslie Mackay*. Japan had recently invaded Manchuria, and Brown’s visit to this disputed Chinese territory coincided with the meetings of a League of Nations commission on the crisis. He criticized vigorously the timidity of a body that did not forthrightly recommend measures to stop Japanese aggression.

Brown was the first serving moderator of the PCC to visit the thriving mission field in north Formosa, which had been made over to the continuing Presbyterians in 1926. A number of Canadian missionaries and co-workers there harboured pro-church-union sentiments, and Brown was highly disturbed by the way in which they were, as he saw it, introducing theological liberalism and disrupting the Presbyterians’ efforts. He gave blistering testimony against them on 11 Sept. 1933 before the General Assembly’s committee examining the work on the island. In this speech Brown described himself as being “100 per cent an evangelical.” He did not mean that he took all scripture to be historically accurate or that he was a millenarian, but rather that he believed “the one outstanding reason for and justification of Foreign Missions is the uniqueness of the way of salvation for sinners through Jesus Christ.”

Basic locomotion was now becoming increasingly painful for Brown. His condition forced him to get his message across without necessarily being physically present, and he began to have his Sunday morning or evening message broadcast on CFQC radio, Saskatoon, which gave him a greater public presence. He took to print as well, publishing in 1937 a series of 15 tracts, each of which consisted of one of his sermons that had a wider appeal than usual. These tracts provide a window into Brown’s soul and a fair representation of the rather weighty content of his sermons on theological and other questions. It is evident that he deemed the pulpit a proper forum for more than purely spiritual concerns.

Well educated at two universities – he refused the honorary degree of dd offered by both the Presbyterian College and Knox College – Brown continued to read current theological literature. He also explored the relationship between science and faith. His critique of Darwinism, while not penetrating, shows an acquaintance with contemporary intellectual discussions. He made no attempt to interpret the first 11 chapters of Genesis in a strictly historical way but sought a middle course between belief in a six-day creation, which he does not mention, and a philosophical acceptance of blind chance as the motor in the development of life on earth.

Social activist

The renewal of the PCC in Saskatchewan had initially had considerable success: the number of “preaching places,” including mission stations, rose from 15 at the time of the union to 94 by 1929. Progress was stalled, however, by the climate of severe insecurity resulting from the Great Depression and from a persistent drought on the prairies. In addition to dealing with the consequences for the church, Brown was at the forefront of those trying to mitigate the harsh lot of unemployed workers, many of whom were perforce itinerants. “Deep in his heart,” an obituary would note, “he felt the hardships … of those who had suffered losses in the general economic debacle.” He was outraged by the inhumane reaction of government institutions at all levels: “Why don’t we, as a people,” he asked, “rise and demand of the Government, which is our servant, immediate assistance for these transient men?” He was equally troubled by appeals to laissez-faire capitalism. Having had an early interest in socialism, he now advocated the via media of cooperation. Rejecting nationalization, the cooperative movement envisaged capital being raised for agriculture and industry by the workers themselves and the workers having a share in management. Thus Brown was part of the agrarian-labour movement that was then coalescing into such entities as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) [see James Shaver Woodsworth*]. His social activism received only limited support within the PCC, however.

Brown was an idealist. At the close of a sermon that was essentially a polemic against capitalism, he made what he called a “prophecy,” predicting “within twenty years” the arrival of a golden era of personal religious renewal and national and international cooperation. It is difficult to know how to interpret his remarks. He rightly foresaw the horrors of the Second World War (“we are rushing into the devils’ inferno that will turn this world into a human slaughterhouse”), and perhaps he really did believe that humanity would learn its lesson and found a new world on better principles. On the question of participation in war, he sought a middle position, warning against “jingoists, who want war for its own sake,” and “pacifists, who will not fight under any circumstances.” Brown wanted his flock to be “militant people, who believe in and demand peace and are ready to put themselves into a fight to secure the conditions upon which peace is possible.” By this “fight,” he meant that leaders and ordinary members of the Christian churches should work aggressively for disarmament, international cooperation, and mutual understanding. In his approach to war, as in doctrinal and economic matters, Brown sought to navigate between extremes.

Politician

Captivated by politics, Brown finally succumbed to immense pressure from his admirers and ran for parliament, under the banner of the independent United Reform Movement, an ad hoc labour-farmer coalition of members of the CCF, Social Credit, and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada. He handily won the by-election of 18 Dec. 1939 in Saskatoon, but he had entered politics at an inauspicious moment. Hostilities had broken out in Europe on 3 Sept. 1939, and Canada had joined in on 10 September. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King* summoned parliament in order to dissolve it; he wanted new elections to get, he claimed, a mandate to lead Canada through the war. Thus parliament sat for only one day: 25 Jan. 1940. Among the new members introduced was Brown (by Agnes Campbell Macphail*). At this point he was so ill that he was obliged to remain in Ottawa with his married daughter. His followers got him re-elected in the general election of 26 March 1940, with an even larger margin of victory, but he died on 1 April 1940, his rheumatic heart condition finally getting the best of him. His wife, Martha, would survive him by more than 40 years.

Eulogies at Brown’s death described him as fearless, articulate, and straightforward. “He was a hard fighter for any cause he held to be right,” one commentator said, “and all his life he was a doughty champion of the underdog.” Brown had this to say about himself: “I classify myself as an orthodox-radical. By that I mean that I am orthodox in religion, that is I accept and believe the great fundamental doctrines of our Christian faith as ordinarily understood. In social, economic and political reform, I am a radical.” Brown was a peculiar mixture of supreme self-confidence and humility. “I get most of my philosophy of life from my own experience or reflecting on my observations of the experience of other people.” That emphasis on personal judgement and personal experience has an oddly contemporary ring. It demonstrates both the strength of his teaching, as being born out of personal conviction, and its weakness, as being essentially eclectic. If he could make his own judgements, then so could his hearers.

Brown lived a full life, as a scholar, missionary, pastor, social agitator, and mp. His obituary notice in the 1940 minutes of the General Assembly of the PCC well sums him up: “As he was perhaps the best known minister in our whole church we do not need to mention his outstanding qualities, suffice to say that he quit himself like a man, was a good soldier … of Jesus Christ, was eloquent and mighty in the scriptures, was of help to the Timothys and Tituses, and cared for the poor and needy.”

Dan Shute