May 12
4
James Robertson: Apostle to the West
James Robertson: Apostle to the West
By Michael Wagner
Originally published in the October 2009 edition of Reformed Perspective magazine, pages 21-22.
Reading about how the Lord can take a single person, and change the world – how He used people like Martin Luther and John Calvin – can be a great encouragement. But when we read about these great leaders from distant lands, and the distant past, we shouldn’t overlook how God has worked wonders locally through Canadians like James Robertson.
Today, Robertson is largely forgotten because, two decades after his death, his denomination – the Presbyterian Church of Canada (PCC) – was overtaken by the false prophets of theological liberalism. The result was that in 1925 the vast majority of the Presbyterian Church folded itself into the United Church of Canada.
But during his lifetime James Robertson was used by God to spread the Gospel throughout the vast areas of Western Canada.
Scotland’s loss…
In the late 1800s most of the settlers in Canada (outside of Quebec) had come from parts of Britain. Thus, the only substantial Calvinist church in Canada was the Presbyterian Church. James Robertson (1839-1902) devoted his life to spreading Presbyterian churches throughout the prairies to ensure that the Gospel would be present in the newly forming communities.
Originally from Scotland, Robertson came to Canada as a child with his family and grew up in Ontario. Feeling the call to be a minister, he spent two years at the leading orthodox Calvinist seminary in the western hemisphere, Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, before finishing his studies at Union Seminary in New York. His pastoral abilities were clearly evident and he received offers to pastor churches in the US.
West to Winnipeg
However, Robertson believed he should serve the people in his own country, and he returned to Ontario to pastor a Presbyterian church there.
A few years later he made a trip to the new province of Manitoba to survey the growing needs of that field. What he saw convinced him that it was imperative for this new prairie region to immediately receive missionaries for the emerging settlements. The rest of his life was spent organizing churches and recruiting missionaries for western Canada. As such, he had a major influence on the spread of Christianity on the prairies. One of the missionaries he recruited, Charles W. Gordon, would later write a biography of Robertson, The Life of James Robertson, in 1908.
Robertson began his work out West as the pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg in 1874. Although a popular and successful pastor, his real heart was in extending the work of the Presbyterian Church throughout the prairies and into British Columbia. Thus in 1881 the Presbyterian Church of
Canada made him the Superintendent for Manitoba and the North-West Territories. The office of “superintendent” is not a Biblical office, so many people within the Presbyterian Church feared that the position amounted to the sort of hierarchal office a Roman Catholic or Anglican bishop holds, and opposed it accordingly. Nevertheless, Robertson remained as Superintendent until his death in 1902.
Presbyterianism was a major force in the West in these early years. In his 1886 report to the General Assembly of the Church, Robertson estimated that over 30 per cent of the population of the North-West Territories and over 40 per cent of the population of Manitoba was Presbyterian.
100 per cent growth
Robertson worked relentlessly to recruit missionaries for western Canada and to raise money for the work. Gordon writes that in the first ten years of Robertson’s tenure as Superintendent in the West, “the mission fields went up from 81 to 176, a gain of over 100 percent; the preaching stations from 335 to 652, a gain of nearly 100 per cent; the church buildings from 68 to 172, a gain of 152 per cent; the families from 3,148 to 5,926, a gain of over 88 per cent; the communicants from 3,956 to 6,773, a gain of over 71 percent.” Gordon adds that, “never in the history of Christendom was there ever such a pace set for the advancing line of Christian conquest.”
Robertson was constantly traveling. Usually he was circulating around the prairies, preaching, organizing congregations, and encouraging the local missionaries. Occasionally he would travel around eastern Canada, raising money for mission work in the West. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time with his own family and was slowly working himself to death.
When the Yukon gold rush began at the end of the nineteenth century, Robertson immediately pushed for a strong missionary presence in that territory. Speaking of the large numbers of gold-seekers heading to the Yukon he said, “We must send with them some one to tell them of the treasure more precious than gold, some one to warn them in their day of prosperity, or remind them in their day of calamity, that God reigneth, some one to stand by the dying bed and point men to Christ.” The Yukon effort was basically Robertson’s last great missionary crusade before he passed away.
As Gordon notes, Robertson had been “God’s own instrument for God’s good work for Western Canada.” In fact, Gordon went so far as to refer to western Canada as “the Robertson land.” This was because “it bears to-day the mark of James Robertson’s hand more than that of any other one man’s, and that mark is cut deep into the heart and conscience, into the very life of the Western people.”
One man, used by God, can do wonders.