Stuart Macdonald, a recently retired Presbyterian professor at Knox College, Toronto, begins this book by sharing his “frustration that so little has been written” by historians about his church (xviii). He then proceeds to help fill the gap with an engaging and masterful survey of the four decades that he calls “the tipping-point” (238) for the Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC), the country’s fourth-largest denomination. He begins in 1945, when Canada started its transformation from a rural to a suburban nation, and the PCC, confident in its future, responded with ambitious projects of church extension. He ends in 1985, when Presbyterians were facing declines in church membership and deepening divisions on various issues, and, he suggests, lost a common vision.

Before Macdonald arrives at 1945, however, he devotes most of his first chapter to the year 1925, when the creation of the United Church of Canada crucially reshaped the PCC. The United Church swallowed up about two-thirds of the PCC’s pastoral charges, but the other one-third excluded themselves and claimed to be the continuation of the PCC in doctrine, structure, and actual organizational identity. The United Church, for its part, claimed to be the rightful successor of the PCC and denied the Presbyterian remnant the right to call itself by the old name or to keep its property. After many propaganda battles, court cases, legislative acts, and negotiations, the PCC by 1939 had won the right to its old name and some of its property. Nevertheless, it could not forget “what had happened in 1925” and was given to “replaying past conflicts” for many years (154). It redoubled its loyalty to the Reformed tradition, the main reason for its resolve to survive, and it became “more closely tied to the Westminster Standards … after 1925 than had been the case prior to the disruption” (117). It was suspicious of change in general and ecumenism in particular.

When Macdonald’s book arrives at 1945, the reader begins to realize that he is constructing his history in mostly silent dialogue with one of his own mentors, the late John Moir of the University of Toronto. Moir’s The Enduring Witness (Bryant Press, 1975) contended that the PCC came into 1945 disheartened and crippled. Macdonald corrects some of Moir’s numbers, checks some of his premises, and concludes that, despite the Depression and the War, the PCC remnant successfully rebuilt itself and regained its confidence and sense of purpose by 1945, notwithstanding that it was dramatically smaller, especially outside Ontario and Quebec.

What gives Macdonald the edge in this disagreement is the PCC’s remarkable success in church extension after the War, especially in the suburbs, led by the local presbyteries. The membership of the remnant in 1925 had been about 150,000, but it exceeded 200,000 in 1963. Their success “assured Canadian Presbyterians they had been correct in their decision to remain out of church union in 1925” (87).

The 1960s, which launched Canada’s exit from Christendom, forced the PCC into a new context. Macdonald identifies the 4 years from 1967 to 1971 as “a time of critical self-examination for Canadian Presbyterians” (138). What had worked for the Church in the past was working no longer. His thesis is that Presbyterians knew that change was necessary, but they began to disagree bitterly on how much change was necessary, and on the direction that the change should take. Before this turning-point, the different theological constituencies sparred respectfully. Discussions were animated and well-informed among the Reformed evangelicals (like Stanford Reid of the University of Guelph), the modernizers (like Joseph McClelland of McGill University), the Barthians (like Walter Bryden of Knox College), and the high-church Scoto-Catholics (like David Hay, also of Knox College). Frictions were lubricated by common loyalties and a common sense of purpose. But afterwards, the many issues that pitted tradition against modernity generated opposing positions that were doctrinaire and non-negotiable. These issues included the authority of the Westminster Standards, financial priorities, bureaucratic procedures, liturgy, music, doctrinal statements, social and political advocacy, ecumenical cooperation, and overseas missions.

Criticisms became personal. For example, in church extension, national church administrators continued the post-War policy of “if you build it, they will come,” and Macdonald thinks (against Moir) that it still worked relatively well. But now it attracted stinging, evidence-free critiques from various Presbyterian committees and leaders.

Another example was the ordination of women, which the PCC approved as early as 1965 with relative ease, though certainly not unanimously. Macdonald suggests that many who had reservations about the idea held their peace, partly because they underestimated how many women would come forward but also perhaps because divisions had not fully hardened. But in 1979 opposition flared up, with dissenters arguing that “the church had erred” (200). Finally, in 1982, the PCC reaffirmed the ordination of women, but the dissenters created, for the first time, an organization “outside of the courts and the committees of the church which represented one theological voice (evangelicals)” (210).

Macdonald has worked from a diversity of far-flung primary sources from across Canada, chasing elusive information and gathering statistical data. In describing divisive issues, he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of opposing views, and notes lost opportunities for reflection and negotiation. How useful his insights might have been at the time!

He has written this book, he says, to encourage readers to problematize the simplified and doctrinaire versions of Presbyterian history that are in informal circulation, to review relevant evidence, and to listen to one another. Perhaps naïvely, he dares to hope that a better knowledge of their history can help Presbyterians move wisely into the future.