Brian Mulroney, prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993, passed away last week at age 84.
Mulroney was referred to as a frontrunner able to pushing big ideas. But he also opened doors for evangelicals in Canada to have interaction with the federal government on major issues. His encouragement was very necessary, coming at a time when Canadian evangelicals were wrestling with the best way to present a gospel witness to civil society.
One yr before Mulroney became prime minister, I used to be invited to steer the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), the Canadian affiliate of the World Evangelical Alliance. Prior to my arrival, the EFC had been relatively inactive. It was largely a group of files accompanied by an occasional public meeting.
I had grown up because the son of a Pentecostal pastor on the Saskatchewan prairies. For us, politics was considered outside the orbit of Christian concern. However, two provincial premiers, each Baptists, saw things otherwise, and their actions provided fodder for earnest conversations as to what Jesus meant when he said, Give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s and to God what’s God’s.
On one hand, Tommy Douglas, a pastor with socialist leanings who became premier of Saskatchewan, introduced the primary universal health care system in North America. Meanwhile, within the neighboring province of Alberta, E. C. Manning was a free-enterprise capitalist who also preached every Sunday on the radio.
Despite their influence, our church had no real interest in public engagement, aside from bringing people to Christ and preparing them for eternity.
However, because the EFC president, I perceived that the evangelical community couldn’t stay out of issues boiling inside our political spheres. Abortion was becoming a serious topic of debate, one which we couldn’t ignore.
Eventually, in 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that provisions within the Criminal Code requiring the involvement of a hospital in an abortion were contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This decision left Canada in a vacuum, because the only country within the West with no laws restricting abortion. The EFC could hardly be silent in such a situation.
Up up to now, the one Canadian churches that had significant contact with the federal government were Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants. Evangelicals were simply unknown. Moreover, within the Eighties, we were victims of what I called “the Jerry Falwell effect,” meaning that our status was being harmed by how the Canadian media portrayed US evangelicals as indignant “fundamentalists” and assumed that Canadian evangelicals were the identical.
Our task was obvious in Canada: to dismiss that myth, establish a public understanding of who we were and what we believed, after which work out how we would make useful contributions to our country.
Image: Courtesy of Brian C. Stiller
Brian C. Stiller of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada pictured with then-prime minister Brian Mulroney
What I didn’t know was that the brand new prime minister can be open to engaging with evangelicals. When Mulroney formed his government in 1984, quite a lot of evangelicals were included: Jake Epp became minister of national health and welfare, Len Gustafson was parliamentary secretary, and Mennonite John Reimer, together with other evangelicals, entered parliament as members of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party.
Epp, highly regarded by each his party and people in opposition, helped us understand not only how we would speak to the federal government—especially on the difficulty of abortion—but the best way to construct credibility.
For one in all my one-on-one meetings with the prime minister, I arrived with an agenda that our senior staff had worked on. While waiting for Mulroney to call me in, I mulled over my early-morning Bible reading of Daniel chapter 11: “And in the primary yr of Darius the Mede, I took my stand to support and protect him” (v. 1).
It appeared to me that I should put aside my planned agenda and as an alternative offer words of encouragement. Just a few minutes later, I used to be invited into his office, and after some pleasantries, was asked about my agenda. My response was simply, “Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t have any agenda today but to encourage you.” We spent a couple of minutes with some Bible verses and prayed, and, after the customary photograph, I left.
The next week while I used to be boarding a plane, the minister of justice, Ray Hnatyshyn, invited me to sit down with him for a minute. He promptly asked, “Brian, what happened with you and the prime minister last week?” My heart sank. Had I gone too far? I wondered. “Minister, was there something unsuitable?” I asked with trepidation.
He smiled and said, “No, by no means,” after which proceeded to inform me that the prime minister had prolonged his time with me, delaying his meeting with the Cabinet members waiting for him in the subsequent room. After joining the Cabinet meeting, Mulroney told them of my visit and our conversation and prayer.
As Hnatyshyn recalled, “The PM said, ‘If we as the federal government misunderstand or ignore the evangelical community, the country and this government will probably be the losers.’”
That easy meeting opened more doors for necessary and substantive conversations with people in any respect levels of the federal government, giving us opportunities to grasp the best way to relate in a God-honoring manner to “Caesar,” than many protests or editorials might need completed.
When I heard about Mulroney’s premature death, I used to be reminded of the teachings I had learned from him in looking for to grasp how our public witness suits throughout the agenda of Christ and his kingdom.
In my global travels, this query is commonly among the many first that Christians ask me, as they seek to grasp how our commitment to Jesus as king should shape our interaction with government.
Brian Mulroney opened the door for us to flesh out our mandate and to embody what the apostle Paul instructed: “For the one in authority is God’s servant on your good … Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor” (Rom. 13:4, 7).
Brian C. Stiller is global ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and the founder and former editor in chief of the Canadian magazine Faith Today.
