The memoirs of an ordinary pastor

Quebec: a singular movement of God - Don Carson recounts what happened in the 1970s as part of his dad's story

A quiet revolution had passed through Quebec in the early 1960s. In its wake, its younger citizens were much less tightly tied to the Roman Catholic Church.

Before Vatican II, it would have been difficult to find a single vehicle driven by a French-Canadian that did not have a St. Christopher medal hanging from the rear-view mirror. Vatican II ‘de-sainted’ Christopher. At the popular level the shock could be felt across the Province. Perhaps the Catholic Church was not trustworthy after all.

God raised up a handful of remarkable leaders. The most remarkable was Jacques Alexanian. As a lad, his father Pascal had barely escaped the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks. After knocking around the Middle East, Pascal eventually settled in France and was married there in 1928. His firstborn was Jacques.

Jacques and his American wife Loretta moved to Quebec in June 1963, several months before my dad, Tom Carson, left Drummondville for Hull. Jacques determined that in due course he would plant a work in nearby Victoriaville, which, despite the name, was virtually 100% French-speaking. Before making the move to Victoriaville, however, he and Loretta decided that, for her sake, it would be wiser to spend a year in Sherbrooke where she could work on her French at Institut Biblique Bethel.

Hammering away

That one year stretched to 11. Jacques was, and is, a Type-A personality. From the beginning he was hammering away to open up new evangelistic opportunities. By the end of the first year, he and a team of five others from his little church were visiting door-to-door every Monday night. Then he distributed 1,500 pieces of literature inviting people to enrol in a Bible correspondence course. He started a small Christian bookstore; he invited students from Bible colleges to spend part of the summer in Sherbrooke, even if they did not know the language, distributing free literature. By this means he blanketed half the city. During this period he still kept his eye on Victoriaville, a city of 50,000 with no evangelical congregation of any kind. But still he stayed in Sherbrooke, by his own admission somewhat discouraged by the slow growth despite the aggressive effort.

Explosion of faith

In the decade of the 70s, evangelical work in French Canada exploded. From about 40 evangelical churches, the work grew to just under 500 churches and preaching points before settling down to just over 400. The turning points were slow but significant. A popular French-Canadian musician, Armand Desrochers, was soundly converted under Jacques’s ministry and began to write gospel songs. Armand’s wife Carmen trusted Christ in 1971. Her baptism was attended by 159 people. At the Sherbrooke Fair in 1972, Jacques secured the films from the ‘Sermons de la Science’ (‘Sermons from Science’) pavilion at the 1967 World Fair in Montreal. 8,000 saw them before the Sherbrooke Fair was over.

Perhaps more significant yet was the conversion of Claude Laverdiere and his wife Suzanne in the summer of 1970. Laverdiere was promptly fired from his teaching job. Jacques kept encouraging him with the truth that God had a plan for his life. One of Jacques’s efforts in outreach had begun to see a handful of conversions among the 6,000 students in Sherbrooke. In due course, Claude Laverdiere became the first full-time campus worker for the French churches of the Fellowship. And, in the providence of God, similar outreach onto other CEGEP campuses was bearing fruit in many places around the Province.

Training?

One of the challenges emerging was how to train these young men — and the overwhelming majority of converts on the campuses were men — quickly enough to meet the needs of the expanding churches. Sending them outside the Province was expensive. By January 1974 the decision had been made by Quebec French-speaking pastors to begin a training college with no campus, a modified church-based system. Regional churches would be designated, and all courses would be modular. The handful of French-speaking evangelical scholars in North America were invited to fly in for a week to teach modular courses (Roger Nicole was one of the first of these); where no French-speaker was available, English-language professors were brought in and interpreters were assigned. Within eight months, 60 students had signed up for the programme. When they were not actually taking courses, they were expected to serve in local churches where they were passing on what they had learned.

By 1974, Jacques had been in Sherbrooke for 11 years. The region had grown to 200,000, but the church was well established and could be led by one of the emerging French-Canadian pastors. It was at that juncture that the Montclair church was without a pastor, and my dad Tom was again serving as interim while holding down his Civil Service job. The leaders asked Tom whom they should consider inviting as the next pastor. Tom’s reply was simple: ‘Go after the best man you can find’. It was already clear to most observers that that man was Jacques Alexanian.

Remarkably, Jacques came in 1974. By the middle of the year, he and his wife and family of six had settled in Hull. He came with the articulated strategy of focusing his own energy entirely on the French side of the work. By August he was already gently insisting that two separate sets of financial books be kept, one of the obvious first steps toward disentangling the congregations. The Fellowship office was asked to look into the possibility of sending someone entirely for the English side. Jacques said such a person would be welcomed with open arms, but that the congregations must be separated or the French side would never grow. Tom was asked to preach pretty regularly on the English side until someone could be appointed.

Built in 48 hours

Within a little over a year of Jacques’s coming, the now entirely French-speaking Montclair church was financially independent. Before Jacques left in 1984, four more churches had been planted in the area. The largest was in Gatineau, perhaps a dozen miles away. When the time came to put up a building, Jacques organised the laying of the foundations and then brought in 70 volunteers from Ontario and close to that number again from around Quebec, and within 48 hours the basic structure of a church building that would seat 400 was standing. The Gatineau church had drawn off many of the most promising of the Montclair members, but both churches were viable and growing. The Sunday after services first began in Gatineau, there were still 91 in the Montclair congregation. While Jacques maintained genial supervision of all five of these churches, increasingly he devoted his own energies to the Gatineau work. Tom, now retired from the Civil Service, provided the leadership and preaching needed at the Montclair church, all in French. In this he was assisted by a young man called Andre Constant, one of those initial ‘servants-in-training’.

The pace of growth was staggering, and Tom’s reactions to these changes initially were complex. I want to bear my own witness to those remarkable years.

First, I have focused on Jacques not only because he was one of the most fruitful leaders during that remarkable period, but also because he was the next pastor of the Montclair church where Tom and Marg were still serving. But many around Quebec were seeing far more growth than anyone had seen in half a century. After the fact, we can poke around and try to understand some of the social dynamics that God used to usher in these changes, but the fact of the matter is that this was a singular movement of God. I finished my PhD in the autumn of 1975 and took up a post in Vancouver on Canada’s west coast. Because of my facility in French, it was not long before I was flying back and forth across the country to make minor contributions in ‘la belle province’ (‘the beautiful province’, as Quebec was known). In the summer of 1976, 1 spent a week or ten days teaching a modular course in Sherbrooke. On Wednesday night I was asked to speak at the prayer meeting and Bible study of the church that Jacques had left two years earlier. I asked the pastor how long I had to speak. He replied: ‘These people are hungry for the Word. I never take less than an hour; as a visitor, you should take more, of course’.

Prayer meeting

I arrived at 7.30. About 85 people were present. There was half an hour of reverent singing, some of it freshly written hymns and songs. Shortly after 8.00 1 began to preach. I finished just before 9.30. The pastor said this was a wonderful opportunity to ask any question they wanted about what the Bible said. I answered questions until 10.00 pm. Then prayer requests were solicited, and almost all of them had to do with the conversion of people or the spiritual growth of people to whom these believers were bearing witness. We got down on our knees to pray at about 10.30 pm. I was the first to leave, sometime between 12.30 and 1.00 am, as I still had some preparation to do for my class at 8.00 am the next morning. The pastor assured me that this was a fairly normal Wednesday evening.

This degree of intensity was not replicated everywhere around the Province, but in some measure or other it was not rare in the years leading up to about 1980.

This article is an edited extract from The Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor by D.A. Carson (160 pages), copyright 2008. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, USA (http://www.crossway.org).

The memoirs of an ordinary pastor

An extract from Don Carson's book on his father

Hammering away

Explosion of faith

Training?

Built in 48 hours

Prayer meeting

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