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The following is, obviously, an incomplete list of some of the many people who have shaped SCM Canada’s life and history since it began in 1921. Some went on to become church moderators and archbishops. Others went into politics. Some quietly lived out the values of justice and social gospel gained in SCM. Others are on the frontlines still today.

In any case, most were somehow changed by their experience. Read more about them below, and upload any biographies using the comment form at bottom! [Website administrators will update the table of contents periodically]

CONTENTS

People

• Christie, Harriet
• Endicott, James
• Endicott, Stephen
• Powles, Marjorie
• Scott, Frank Reginald (1899-1985)
• Scott, Ted
• Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1916-2000)
• Sword, Jack
• Ting, K.H. (1915- )
• Wilson, Lois

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Scott, Frank Reginald (1899-1985)
Poet, intellectual, constitutional expert. One poem was recorded by Leonard Cohen. Involved with SCM at Oxford.

Francis Reginald Scott CC, commonly known as Frank Scott or F.R. Scott, (August 1 1899 - January 30 1985) was a Canadian poet, intellectual and constitutional expert. Born and raised in Quebec City, Scott witnessed the riots in the city during the Conscription Crisis of 1917. Completing his undergraduate studies at Bishop’s University, in Lennoxville, Quebec, Scott went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and was influenced by the Christian Socialist ideas of R.H. Tawney and the Student Christian Movement. He was married to Marian Dale Scott, an important modern painter in Canada.

Scott returned to Canada, settled in Montreal and studied law at McGill University eventually joining the law faculty as a professor.

The Great Depression greatly disturbed Scott and he and other intellectuals formed the League for Social Reconstruction to advocate socialist solutions in a Canadian context. Through the LSR, Scott became an influential figure in the Canadian socialist movement and a founding member of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and a contributor to the Regina Manifesto. He went on to serve as national chairman of the CCF from 1942 until 1950.

During the 1950s, Scott was an active opponent of the Duplessis regime in Quebec and went to court to fight the Padlock Law. He also represented one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, one Frank Roncarrelli, in Roncarelli v. Duplessis all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada a battle that Maurice Duplessis lost.

Scott served as dean of law at McGill University from 1961 to 1964 and served on the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In 1970 he was offered a seat in the Canadian Senate by Pierre Trudeau but declined the appointment.

He won both the 1977 Governor General’s Award for non-fiction for his Essays on the Constitution and the 1981 Governor General’s Award for poetry for his Collected Poems. Scott was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal in 1962.

As a poet he wrote “A Villanelle for Our Time”, to which Leonard Cohen added music for his album Dear Heather.

From bitter searching of the heart, Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.

Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.

On his passing in 1985, Frank Scott was interred in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal.

Scott is the subject of a number of critical works, as well as a major biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott by Sandra Djwa.

[ _from Answers.com ]

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Ted Scott
Anglican Archbishop and former Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. Known as the “Red Primate”. Secretary of SCM Canada.

“Quite frankly, I probably would not be in the church if it were not for SCM. It gave me the right to ask questions and to explore.”

from the Anglican Journal
By Marites N. Sison
Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Archbishop Edward “Ted” Scott, the 10th primate of the Anglican Church of Canada who gave meaning to the words “social conscience,” died Monday afternoon in a car accident near Parry Sound, Ont., two hours north of Toronto. He was 85.

Archbishop Scott was both praised and maligned when he served as the youngest primate of the Anglican Church of Canada for 15 years, during a period of social and political turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Globe and Mail reported that Archbishop Scott died after the car driven by his companion Sonja Bird, rolled over and landed upside down a metal culvert while they were traveling on Highway 69, about 18 kilometres south of Parry Sound. Ms. Bird was taken to hospital with serious injuries. His funeral arrangements have not been finalized.

Just last week Archbishop Scott celebrated a final eucharist at the chapel of 600 Jarvis St. , the national church office in Toronto , where church staff were preparing to move to a new building.

Archbishop Scott was the controversial “Red Primate” to those who disagreed with his many social justice causes.

But he was simply a man who cared deeply about people to those who witnessed how he boldly challenged institutions, including his own church, to make a strong stand on issues such as apartheid in South Africa, native land claims in Canada’s North, Third World debt relief and development, racism, the nuclear arms race, and the ordination of women to the priesthood.

His successor as primate (senior archbishop), Archbishop Michael Peers, called his friend’s death “a great jolt.” Archbishop Peers, who retired in February, said his strongest impression of Ted Scott was of “a person as determined to see as much of the Lord’s work in 24 hours as could possibly be done.” His legacy, said Archbishop Peers, would be felt within the Canadian church and far beyond.

“I was there when he was elected (at the meeting of General Synod in 1971),” recalled Archbishop Peers. “We were looking for a person who would press the church in addressing the world in an incarnational way and that’s been the way it’s been ever since.”

Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, who was elected primate last month, said a “remarkable number of people” will feel a personal sense of loss at Archbishop Scott’s death because “his contacts with so many people were perceived as highly personal.” Archbishop Hutchison recalled that once, as a parish priest in the diocese of Toronto , he sent an invitation to Archbishop Scott to attend his parish’s anniversary - with little hope that the primate would be able to attend.

“He telephoned and said he’d like to come for three days,” said Archbishop Hutchison. Following the anniversary service and a community dinner, the primate and the then-priest toured the parish of Minden , Ont., in Archbishop Hutchison’s battered Volkswagen “visiting unsuspecting parishioners. Each one felt they made a personal connection with a human being, they did not simply meet a primate.”

Born in Edmonton on April 30, 1919, to Kathleen Frances and Rev. Thomas Scott, an Anglican priest who later became bishop of the diocese of New Westminster , Ted Scott seemed destined to lead a life of activism.

He was the son who argued the most with his intellectual father during his youth, according to Canon Elspeth Alley in her biography of Archbishop Scott entitled Call Me Ted. “Ted would not accept a statement if he felt it should be challenged, and he loved to argue, bouncing ideas of all kinds off his father, especially those of a political or religious nature.” His mother, who “showed interest and concern for the welfare of others” and “encouraged independence” was also a great influence on him, Ms. Alley wrote.

His family upbringing plus the fact that he grew up during the Depression had a lasting impact on him. “Ted became critical of the institutional church for failing to express real concern for the unemployment situation,” wrote Ms. Alley. “He had disagreements with his father. He felt that the church was an uncaring institution.”

It may have come as a surprise to his father when the young Scott decided to enrol at the Anglican Theological College , a training school for future Anglican priests at the University of British Columbia , after he finished his bachelor of arts degree in English and history in 1940. But Ted Scott saw it as a way to translate his faith into action. His association with the Student Christian Movement (SCM), where he served as general secretary, had a profound impact on the choices he made in life. “Quite frankly,” he was once quoted, “I probably would not be in the church if it were not for SCM. It gave me the right to ask questions and to explore.”

He became exposed to the plight of native people as a seminarian when he served on the Northern Cross, “the Anglican mission boat that ministered to small northern communities from Kitkatla in the south to the Alaska panhandle in the north,” wrote Ms. Alley.

On Aug. 5, 1942, a year after he was ordained deacon in Christ Church cathedral, Vancouver , Ted Scott married Isabel Florence Brannan. They would later have four children - Maureen, Douglas, Patricia and Jean. Isabel Scott died in September, 2000.

The first parish he served was St. Peter’s, in Seal Cove, Prince Rupert , B.C., from 1942 to 1945. He was later appointed general secretary of the SCM at the University of Manitoba , Winnipeg.

From 1949 to 1955 he served as rector of the church of St. John the Baptist, and later as rector of St. Jude’s, Winnipeg. Later, he became director of social services and priest-director of Indian Work for the diocese of Rupert’s Land. In 1966, he became the bishop of Kootenay in central British Columbia. The United Church Observer wrote of him in 1969, “He drove about 35,000 miles a year - spent almost 100 working days a year behind the wheel to visit his 32 ministers. ‘I never make appointments; if a man is out, I chat with his wife - they have problems too.’”

Five years later in 1971, he became the youngest bishop to be elected primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. He was 51. “When he left Kelowna for Niagara Falls (Ont., where he was elected) . he’d promise Isabel Scott he wouldn’t let his name stand. But God called,” wrote Hugh McCullum in the Observer . (Mr. McCullum would later write a biography of Archbishop Scott, Radical Compassion , which was released by ABC Publishing last month.)

A man steeped in activism seemed the right choice for the turbulent times. “It caused Canadians to wonder whether anyone could take seriously an institution that seemed out of touch with questions and relevancy being raised by youth, who were keening over society’s manifest hypocrisies, and by women, who were raising indignant questions about representation, and by impoverished Third World nations raging with racism and inequities,” wrote June Callwood, author, journalist and broadcaster. “A man less humble, less respectful, less perceptive, less good, could never have guided the church, the country, and the world through such turbulence.His legacy, for me, is that he never wavered - however daunting the adversities he faced - from the path of honour.”

Mr. McCullum echoes those sentiments: “When Ted Scott believes something he cannot waffle on it. That, and a vacuum in church leadership elsewhere, thrust him into the centre,” he wrote. “It made him the butt of criticism from many quarters, including more than a few of his brother bishops.”

In 1975 he was elected as moderator of the central committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC), a position he would serve for seven rough years. “In 1978 when the WCC granted money to the Popular Front in the Zimbabwe civil war, he was crucified by the media, attacked by business interests in all churches, severely questioned by the conservative elements of the Anglican church,” wrote Mr. McCullum.

Controversy also dogged him when he challenged the Church of England regarding its stand on the ordination of women. He said that its refusal to allow overseas women priests to officiate in England was causing a rift in the Anglican Communion. He told the Ontario Churchman newspaper in 1985: “One of the crucial issues of this age of history is whether or not we can create a church and a society where women are equal partners with men without having to become imaged by men.”

Archbishop Scott also spoke out against the support of Western governments for military dictatorships overseas, against cruise missile testing and in favor of native as well as homosexual rights. He also became part of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group, which worked towards a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa. Jesus, he observed in the Anglican Messenger newspaper in 1986, “was involved in transforming the structures of the society of his day.”

Coming from a background of “almost poverty” he declined invitations to join elite business clubs, to which former primates had belonged. “I felt I wanted to give every indication of the church’s concern for people who cannot afford to belong to a club,” he once said.

When he ended his term on June 15, 1986, people remarked that it was “the end of an era.” His biggest disappointments, he later said in interviews, were the failed union of the Anglican church with the United Church of Canada and racial segregation in South Africa.

His tenure made him “much more aware of the complexities of the kind of issues that we confront and the complexities that confront other people,” he told Toronto Star’s Michael McAteer in an interview. “I’ve acquired a much greater sensitivity to the pressures that people live under.” Asked about how he wanted people to remember him, he said, “I’d like to be remembered as somebody who helped the church develop a sense that human beings are important, that they counted and were taken seriously.”

Upon retirement he resumed his hobby of carpentry - something which he picked up when he worked as a carpenter’s helper to put himself through college.

But his retirement did not end Archbishop Scott’s activism. He continued to campaign against apartheid in South Africa and was elated when it ended in 1994. He later worked with the South African Education Trust Fund and the International Defence and Aid for South Africa. He also served as a member of the Scott-McKay-Bain health panel that looked at health conditions among native populations in the Sioux Lookout Region of northwestern Ontario. He also became an advocate for the blessing of same-sex unions in the Anglican church, performing a blessing at Toronto ‘s Church of the Holy Trinity last September for two women who were legally married.

In his keynote address to the 150th synod of the diocese of Toronto on November 2003 Archbishop Scott perhaps summed up what made him the kind of person that he was. He said, “There are two key questions which I believe we as Christian persons ought, from time to time ask ourselves: What kind of a person am I becoming?

What kind of a world am I helping to come into being?”

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Ting, K.H.
Anglican bishop. Accused communist. Missionary Secretary of SCM Canada circa 1946.

<img src=”http://www.anglicanjournal.cohttp://scmcanada.org/admin/node/edit/694m/uploads/pics/2005_October_world02.jpg

“There were Protestants in China who preached from the pulpit that the aggression was ordained of God: The Chinese had sinned and God sent Japanese troops to punish them… Quite a number of foreign and Chinese leaders were entirely without sympathy for the people’s liberation struggle [and prayed for the Chinese to be drowned in the sea]. What a cruel and inhumane prayer that was.”

The last Anglican bishop
Marites N. Sison
Anglican Journal
Oct 1, 2005

Editor’s note: An ecumenical delegation from the Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches in Canada visited Christian churches in China last April. During a stop to Nanjing, the delegation met briefly with Bishop Ding Guangxun (who in the Wale-Giles Romanization of Chinese is also referred to as Bishop K.H. Ting), the last Anglican bishop in post-denominational China. Bishop Ting is a well-known figure in international Christian circles.

At 90, still quick-witted but in frail health, Bishop K. H. Ting remains one of the most sought after Christian leaders in China. No one, it seems, who visits China wanting to know more about Christian churches there, ever leaves without seeing him. That includes his admirers and detractors alike.

Often called the last Anglican bishop in what is now post-denominational China, Bishop Ting has lived through some of the most turbulent periods in Chinese history and has been a key figure in helping Christian churches survive these difficult transitions, including the now-infamous Cultural Revolution.

Not everyone agrees about his contributions - some have labeled him a closet Marxist because of his support for socialism in China â�� but Bishop Ting and his views about Chinese society and Christianity cannot be easily discounted. He is a man with a genial smile who doesn’t hesitate to express a caustic but well-thought-out remark.

For a church to survive, he said, it must be relevant to its milieu. “For the church in any country to have a selfhood of its own, a real and not a borrowed identity is all-important,” he wrote in an essay. “First it provides evangelical effectiveness in the country it is located, and second, it gives enrichment of the church universal in its understanding and worship of Christ.” It is a sentiment that is all too important in China, given the burden of its colonial past where religion was not only imposed from outside but was in some cases, in collaboration with imperialism.

On the matter of religious liberty, which many â�� especially from the West - say is absent in China, Bishop Ting argues that the issue is “not just a legal matter or a question of human rights.”

In an essay, Religious Liberty in China: My Perspective, he argued that religious liberty must also carry the weight of social responsibility. “What are the leaders of the religion for which liberty is sought going to do with liberty once they have it? What are the social consequences of their ways of using that liberty?” He recalled that during China’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression in the 1930s “there were Protestants in China who preached from the pulpit that the aggression was ordained of God: The Chinese had sinned and God sent Japanese troops to punish them.” He also recalled that” quite a number of foreign and Chinese leaders were entirely without sympathy for the people’s liberation struggle,” asking Christians to pray that God would drown the army in the river. “What a cruel and inhumane prayer that was,” he noted.

Such statements have earned Bishop Ting the ire of some Christians. But to his supporters, labeling Bishop Ting an apologist for Beijing is simplistic. During the Cultural Revolution, he wrote, China’s constitution “mentioned the freedom to propagate atheism, but said nothing about the freedom to propagate theism or religion. As a matter of fact, not only the freedom of propagating, but also that of religious worship was denied.”

He added that religion in China “enjoys a good amount of freedom” not because the Communist party has “a high opinion of religious doctrines” but because “it seeks to foremost unite the whole people in the cause of nation-building… (it) cannot afford the luxury of communal conflicts kindled by religion.”

While he has led the branch of Protestant Christianity in China that agrees to be registered with and is not critical of government, he has nonetheless affirmed that the state should not ban religious house meetings. He is also said to have supported the pro-democracy student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

Born to a Christian family in Beijing in September 1915, Bishop Ting studied at Shanghai’s St. John’s University and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 he was pastor of the International Church in Shanghai. He left China to be missionary secretary for the Student Christian Movement (SCM) in Canada, where he formed a friendship with a religious leader who, like him, was labeled a Communist because of his involvement in social justice - Ted Scott, then the SCM’s general secretary, who later became primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. After a year, he became a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Upon his return to China in the 1950s, he became principal of Nanjing Theological Study; in 1955 he was consecrated bishop of the coastal province of Zhejiang.

During the Cultural Revolution, his home was taken over by Red Guards and he and his wife were reported to have joined millions of other intellectuals and professionals sent to work in labour camps across China. But Bishop Ting has been quick to say that there were many more who suffered worse fates. There are those who believe that he was deliberately spared hardships because of his friendship with communists.

When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, he became head of the Three Self-Patriotic Movement and later, president of the China Christian Council, which worked to re-establish relationships with Christian churches around the world, including Canada. While the reins of religious leadership have been passed on, Bishop Ting, even in his twilight years, has remained an important point of reference for Christians in China.

[ _from Anglican Journal ]

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Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1916-2000)
Post-war President of SCM Canada. Islam scholar.

from Bookrags.com

[ LINK TO ARTICLE ]

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916â��2000) was a historian of religion, a comparative theologian, and an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. In 1949 Smith founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he matched Muslim and Christian appointments. He later succeeded R. L. Slater as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (1964â��1985), quitting Harvard for Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to dissociate himself from U.S. militarism during the Vietnam War years. While at Harvard, Smith coordinated the university’s first undergraduate concentration in religious studies.

After majoring in oriental languages at the University of Toronto, Smith studied theology under H. H. Farmer and Islamics under H. A. R. Gibb in Great Britain. In 1941 he joined the faculty of Forman Christian College in Lahore (in present-day Pakistan), then a center of multireligious dialogue. An admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru more than Mohandas Gandhi, Smith deplored the 1947 partition of India because he considered nationalism to be morally bankrupt.

As president of the Student Christian movement in Canada following the Depression era, Smith embraced John Macmurray’s personalist philosophy and the Social Gospel movement. Smith’s first book (rejected for a doctorate by Cambridge University) stressed class-based socioeconomic determinants in religion and politics. Stalinism, however, cured his enthusiasm for Marxist immanentism. Concluding that self-criticism requires a transhistorical referent, Smith linked issues of justice to a prophetic sense of transcendence. Thereafter, he vehemently challenged the practice of restricting the humanities and religious studies to a social science orientation.

A Princeton University doctorate (1948) led to publications on Islamic modernism, in which Smith juxtaposed “objective” cultural history and “subjective” faith. He noted the conflict in Islam between secularly educated professionals, who are needed to run a state, and traditionalists, who define statehood according to conservative interpretations of sharÄ«Ë�ah (theocratic law).

Islamic insistence on divine transcendence and its ban on idolatry reinforced Smith’s polemic against reifying conceptions in and of religion. He gained international attention with a call to abandon the word religion as an academic category. This proposal was rejected, but his terms for construing the dataâ��cumulative tradition and personal faithâ��were widely adopted. The former can be studied by any observer; the latter requires participation in the evolution of a tradition.

Smith’s typical method was to analyze the changing meanings of key words, illustrating lost nuances by citing original senses in other languages (e.g., Arabic words for truth) and ruminating on shifts from verb to noun and singular to plural forms. To him, singular usage of religion and scripture resists reifying phenomena. From failures to adduce universally accepted definitions of such terms, Smith concluded not that linguistic essentialism is wrong but that misconstruals show insensitivity to necessarily tentative, metaphorical references to transcendence. A liberal, Smith’s fundamentalist Calvinist upbringing was apparent in his assumption that earlier meanings are truer, later meanings being distorted by rationalization.

A major trilogy on faith, comparative history of religion, and world theology (published in 1977, 1979, and 1981) linked early believing to beloving, denied that belief (in the sense of hypothetical opinion) is what religion is about, and argued that existential trust is what relates human beings to the transcendent, however named. Among Ernst Troeltsch’s categories, Smith emphasized the mystical-poetic.

Smith rejected as positivistic contemporary faith in pseudoscience and condemned the technocrats who dismissed humanizing concerns as irrelevant for decisions leading to the bombing of Hiroshima. Without sacrificing the scholarly rigor of historians of religion (often criticized for antiquarian fixation on texts), he emphasized living religion and dialogue, not just for gathering information, but as essential to becoming true to others and oneself in plural affirmations of transcendence.

Unrepentant over using Christian theological categories, Smith insisted that religious studies are about people responding to God Buddhistically, Christianly, secularly, and so on, focusing on different paradigmatic symbols. He pointed out that the Muslim homologue to Jesus is not Muḥammad but the Qurʾ�n. His final major work, written with his wife Muriel, was a study of scriptural dialogue through texts.

Dubbed an “experiential-expressivist,” Smith considered himself primarily a historian in the global tradition of Arnold Joseph Toynbee, appealing to knowable but not fully describable “facts” of human relationship. In Smith’s view, comparative, personal data are intuitively grasped and cogent if expressible in terms derived from two or more starkly contrasting traditions, such as Hinduism and Islam in India. Against academic fragmentation, he essayed a world history of religion as the cultural product of humanizing faith, of which the faithful are the final arbiters. According to Smith, true relationships are only validated by participant observers through “colloquy.” Beyond both objective and subjective approximations is the truth and goodness, which the “critical corporate self-consciousness” (Smith, 1997, p.123) of spiritual and intellectual peers discerns.

Critics among philosophers of religion (e.g., John Hick, Ninian Smart) and later deconstructionists challenged the insider-outsider dichotomy intrinsic to Smith’s conception of faith and tradition and his privileging of insiders. His hermeneutic of recovery rather than suspicion obscured how radical his insistence was that truth is dialogical. In global politics, Smith expected Muslims, Christians, humanistic atheists, and others to converge on the truth that matters. Mark Heim argues that, theologically, this was not pluralism, as Hick and Smith supposed, but ecumenical inclusivism, which wrongly assumes that religious ends are the same for all. In theology, Smith was more Muslim-Methodist than Trinitarian, foregrounding Jesus’ humanity, not claims concerning his divinity.

Bibliography

Bae, Kuk-Won. Homo Fidei: A Critical Understanding of Faith in the Writings of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Its Implications for the Study of Religion. New York, 2003.

Cracknell, Kenneth, comp. William Cantwell Smith: A Reader. Oxford, 2001.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Islam in Modern History. Princeton, 1957.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind. New York, 1963.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Religious Diversity, edited by Willard G. Oxtoby. New York, 1976.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Belief and History. Charlottesville, Va., 1977.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Faith and Belief. Princeton, 1979.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion. Philadelphia, 1981.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis, 1993.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective, edited by John W. Burbidge. Albany, N.Y., 1997.

Whaling, Frank, ed. The World’s Religious Traditions: Current Perspectives in Religious Studies, Essays in Honour of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. New York, 1984.

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Lois Wilson
former Moderator of the United Church of Canada. General Secretary of SCM Canada.