UNION OF CHURCHES

Otago Witness, Issue 4038, 4 August 1931, Page 23

UNION OF CHURCHES

SUCCESSFUL CANADIAN MOVEMENT DR P. BRUCE THORNTON’S VIEWS. A visitor to Dunedin is Dr P. Bruce riiornton, minister of St. Paul’s Church, Winnipeg, Canada, who, under the auspices of the United Church of Canada, is at present engaged on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, India, China. Korea and Japan to gain first-hand knowledge of the foreign mission work being carried out by the church in those countries. To our representative on Friday Dr 1 hornton explained that the United Church of Canada was a union, consummated six years ago, of the Congregational. Presbyterian and Methodist Churches of that Dominion, each of which had brought into the union its own traditions and rich heritages. Each Church —the Congregational with its passion for liberty, the Methodist with its evangelical fervour, and the Presbyterian with its devotion to truth and principal—had supplemented and augmented the others, so that the United Church was not only a united but a uniting Church, and the process of union with other bodies was still going on. There was now no Congregational nor Methodist Church in Canada, but there was a continuing Presbvterian Church. The United Church now had a membership of between 600,000 and 700,000, and in the first six years of the union it had received 153.501 members on profession of faith. He considered, said Dr Thornton, that the union of the three churches was one of the greatest things that had happened in Christendom since the Protestant Reformation.

Prior to coming to New Zealand, Dr Thornton visited India, and during his stay there he was fortunate enough to have an interview with Mr Gandhi. The famous Nationalist leader he found to be a congenial and companionable man who conversed freely on the nationalist movement and on international polities generally, and although Dr Thornton “had, before meeting him, imagined him as a mystic and an idealist, he was somewhat surprised to discover that he was in reality a particularly astute politician with a very practical turn of mind. He told Dr Thornton that he was trying to save India from going the wa_- of Russia, and emphasised the fact that whereas Russia s revolution was one of force, that of India was one of non-resistance. From what he had seen and heard during his visit to that country, said Dr Thornton, he was convinced that a change must come to India; the demand for some fuller form of self-government was very great, but any radical change must be very gradual. He had, however, complete confidence in Mr Gandhi, whose sincerity could not be challenged. He did not want to break with Britain, but he wanted at least partial Indianisation of the civil service and the army.

During his travels through New Zealand, said Dr Thornton, he had been particularly impressed with the young people he had met. They were, perhaps, the most heartening and encouraging feature of his visit, and it was obvious that, realising the challenging times through which the Dominion was passing, many of them were facing facts and doing more serious thinking. He had, in fact, been told by a leading bookseller in a town he had visited that the reading of the young people was noticeably changing its character, and that they were gradually turning from the lighter type of fiction to more serious reading. He had also been impressed by the number of young people he had seen in the churches in which he had p eached, and in this respect he felt that the Bible Class Movement was doing great work among the rising generation. In conclusion, Dr Thornton expressed the opinion that despite tariff controversies and political questions, a deeply friendly feeling existed among the people of Canada for those of their sister Dominion. New Zealanders and Cc adians belonged to the same big family, and the national problems of both countries were very similar, so that the peoples should he of real help to one another, but newspapers and politicians would never interpret their views satisfactorily. What was wanted was a closer personal touch, and he was hopeful that exchanges of teachers and ministers between the two countries would help to establish this, for throughout the world there was a great need for a better spirit of sympathetic understanding between class and class, nation and nation, and individual and individual.