When Lois Wilson submitted a request to transfer her church membership, board members of the receiving church asked the minister: “Who is Lois Wilson?” The minister, Rev. Doug Norris, answered: “She’s 90 pounds of piss and vinegar.”
This anecdote appears at the end of Janice Meighan‘s master’s thesis titled “Canada’s Ecumenist in Residence: Lois Miriam Wilson, C.C. in the Religious and Public Spheres.” Janice has just completed a master’s degree in religious studies at the University of Toronto. Her thesis began as a short survey paper for a class with Phyllis Airhart. Because Janice had not grown up in the United Church of Canada (UCC), she was only marginally acquainted with Lois Wilson’s work, and naively assumed that a short paper would be sufficient to cover the “topic”. A quick survey of online resources suggested that maybe the subject matter deserved something longer, maybe a term paper. (See Wikipedia, University of Manitoba, Govt. of Canada.) Because Wilson was serving as ecumenist-in-residence for the Toronto School of Theology, Janice had ready access to her. After an interview, she realized that a term paper would never do; she had found her thesis topic. Now, having completed a thesis (which she had to pare down to 150 pages), Janice has discovered that what Lois Wilson really deserves is a book – maybe two, and so last week she prepared a book proposal. I don’t think it’s a question of if, but when, Janice will publish a book on Lois Wilson’s work.
As the title indicates, the focus of Janice’s thesis is the ecumenical work of Lois Wilson. This is about work, about doing, about practice. Although Lois has written books and papers, hers are not theoretical works discussing why she does what she does or its meaning. That interpretive task belongs to others. In addition to the subject matter – ecumenism – Janice had to select an approach or, to be hoity-toity about it, a methodology. She opted for the “life-writing” approach developed by Marlene Kadar in Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Grounded in feminist theory, the life-writing approach brings underlying narratives to the fore rather than focusing on abstract ideas and propositions. What that means is that Janice’s thesis unfolds chronologically, uses interviews as its primary sources, and relies heavily on context to understand its subject.
There is a sense in which Lois Wilson’s life is emblematic of the church she has served. Born in Winnipeg in 1927 just two years after the UCC came into being through the union of Methodists, Congregationalists and two-thirds of Presbyterians, she too was something of an amalgam. Her father was a Presbyterian minister and her mother was an active volunteer from the Baptist tradition. She was also born just six years after the founding of the Student Christian Movement (SCM), an ecumenical student organization active on campuses and a movement in which she would become involved as a young adult. Another formative influence was the political climate of Winnipeg, a hotbed for the CCF (later the NDP). There, J.S. Woodworth, and later his protegé, Stanley Knowles, would transform ministries into political careers rooted in social gospel teachings. (Winnipeg’s UCC Minister/NDP MP combination became something of a tradition with Bill Blaikie who represented the Elmwood-Transcona riding from 1979-2008.) Thanks to the early example of these men, Wilson took for granted that a person’s spiritual commitments have a rightful place in public discourse and lead inevitably to practical action that benefits the marginalized. All of these influences – uniting churches with diverse histories and interests, ecumenism, the social gospel, political activism – are likewise integral to the life of the UCC.
Wilson spent the first seventeen years of her career in a team ministry with her husband, Roy Wilson. My impression is that she wouldn’t have made much of a pastoral minister if she had been working alone. Having met her on a number of occasions, she doesn’t strike me as the pastoral type. Her passion was, and continues to be, getting out in the community and building bridges. One of her early successes in this regard was Town Talk which she implemented in Thunder Bay in 1967. It was a public forum focusing on adult education that brought together civic organization, educational agencies, media, and religious institutions. Using both radio and television, it featured grassroots organizations, ordinary citizens and local celebrities. Its primary purpose was to ensure that ordinary people had a voice in shaping the community where they lived. Janice writes:
As progressive and active in community ministry as Wilson’s father was, “he was puzzled by my efforts with Town Talk and did not know what it had to do with the church.” So, what did Town Talk have to do with the church? Wilson, in accordance with her by then broadening theological understanding of ecumenism, responded that the arena of God’s activity is the whole inhabited world – that the church is one community within the world, not separate from it. Town Talk, therefore, asked, “what made for authentic community?” Additionally, it taught her that one denomination could not make societal changes alone and the efforts of all, religious and secular, were required; but to affect (sic) change, the church had to “be in the mix [be part of the community], … learning about negotiation and the ability to understand ‘the other’ and the issues.
This model of engagement would follow her into future endeavors.
Also influential at this time was Wilson’s discovery of Betty Friedan‘s 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, which is credited with sparking a second wave of feminism. From an ecumenical perspective, feminism was important because it reminded people that the bridge-building of ecumenism was not restricted to institutions and beliefs but also demanded that spiritual people reach across lines of gender. It was also important because it reminded women that the work of improving their social position was inherently political. Wilson took this lesson to heart, leaving pastoral ministry and accepting positions that would engage her in national and international work.
The first of these was her election as the first female president of the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) in 1976. This gave her a taste for taking social justice and human rights issues to the policy-makers in Ottawa. Wilson “believes that shaping a political agenda and responding to the political agenda of one’s community, province and country is an ecumenically responsible and deeply religious activity.” She also found herself forging a relationship with the World Council of Churches (WCC), and through that connection, partnering on social justice issues with interests beyond Canada’s borders, including work in Cuba and the sponsorship of draft dodgers from the US. Even today she remains active in Project Ploughshares, an NGO committed to peace which is an agency of the CCC.
Another first came immediately following Wilson’s term with the CCC: she became the first female moderator of the United Church of Canada (1980-1982). This was an affirmation of a general trend within the UCC to look beyond itself to social justice issues of broader concern.
When asked at a press conference following her election “… if the social activist part of the church had won, who had lost?” she replied, “People who would see faith as a privatized, individualistic affair with no involvement in society.”
That involvement meant an unprecedented amount of travel for a UCC moderator, a commitment to bilingualism, and an outspoken voice on international affairs. Her greatest detractors came from within the national church. For example, her criticism of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile prompted one member to cancel a $2,500 commitment to the Mission and Service Fund. On the other hand, some of her greatest support came from outside the UCC, not surprising given the many relationships she had developed with other religious groups and NGO’s. During her term, she traveled as representative of the WCC to South Korea where she bore witness to the stories of the Kwangju massacre of 1980. On a 1981 visit to Argentina, she presented a gift she had received from survivors of Kwangju to the Mothers of May Square, an NGO formed in 1977 by women whose grown children had been disappeared, tortured and murdered. It was an impromptu gesture but illustrates her intuitive gift for drawing together people from diverse backgrounds and her vision of global solidarity. During her term, she also met with Mother Theresa and traveled to South Africa where she met Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At the urging of South African churches at the grassroots level, Wilson encouraged the UCC to become part of a coalition of churches to lobby the federal government to impose sanctions against South Africa.
In 1983, Lois Wilson was elected as one of six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the first Canadian to hold this office. Alongside Dame Nita Barrow of Barbados and Margaret Bührig of Switzerland, this was the first time that half the presidents were women. Given that Wilson was the first woman in the world ever to hold the top spot in a major Christian denomination, it is not surprising that she found the WCC to be a patriarchal organization with deeply entrenched male chauvinism. The three women presidents held regular meetings apart from the others to address these issues and to strategize change. As with her previous work, Wilson dedicated herself to social justice issues particularly as they affected women and children. During her term, travels to the Philippines, Chile and Sri Lanka confirmed the imperative for this focus. In addition, her experience at the WCC expanded her conception of ecumenism to embrace religious pluralism. It was no longer enough to build bridges across lines defined by Christian denominations; it was vital to develop relationships with people whatever their spiritual and religious aspirations.
Like her mentors, Woodward and Knowles from Winnipeg, Wilson found that her bridge-building was taking her inevitably into the secular arena. From 1984 to 1988 she served on Canada’s Refugee Status Advisory Committee, advising the Minister of Immigration about immigration claimants seeking refugee status under the UN Convention on Refugees. In 1989, Wilson accepted an appointment from the federal government to investigate the issue of nuclear waste disposal. It had been proposed that nuclear waste could be safely buried in the north beneath the Canadian Shield, a region inhabited almost exclusively by First Nations peoples. She documents her experiences in her 2000 publication, Nuclear Waste. There she addresses the “hard” issue of waste disposal and the “soft” issue of the federal government’s broken relationship with Native communities and with Canadian citizens generally. Her work had drawn on the Town Talk model to listen to the affected interest groups and culminated in testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.
In 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Lois Wilson to Canada’s Senate. One would think she was already busy enough with her roles as Chancellor of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Chair of the Board of the Montreal-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, and vice-president of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Nevertheless, she accepted the appointment, making her acceptance conditional on serving as an independent. During her four-year term, she spearheaded the creation of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights and was appointed Canada’s Special Envoy to the Sudan. She gave NGO’s committed to social justice issues a greater voice in Ottawa, and her work in Geneva laid the foundations for the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended long-standing north/south conflict in the Sudan (although east/west conflict broke out during the same period).
Since her retirement from the Senate in 2002 at the age of seventy-five, Wilson has worked alongside Michael Blair on an intercultural project in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood, has served as ecumenist-in-residence for the Toronto School of Theology in the University of Toronto, and continues to teach at Emmanuel College.
Janice Meighan’s thesis raises up the life and work of Lois Wilson. Janice has characterized that work as bridge-building — drawing linkages between disparate peoples to create relationships of mutual support in the name of justice. One of the important roles for this kind of writing is that it helps preserve the integrity of those bridges. Stephen Harper’s government has pursued policies on the hard right that give priority to a deceptively named “liberalized” economic ideology that has little interest in marginalized and minority groups and, with its bizarre connection to the conservative REAL women’s group, threatens to turn back the clock sixty years on women’s rights. Harper’s policies are like a wrecking ball to the kinds of bridges that women like Lois Wilson have devoted their lives to build and to maintain. This kind of writing can be an act of resistance against short-sighted stupidity and deserves our support.
Thumbs up to Janice Meighan. Here’s looking forward to a fuller treatment of Lois Wilson’s work and vision.