Ecumenical Movement — A.W. Tozer

The Unity of Believers After Pentecost

There is a verse in the 2nd chapter of Acts, verse 44, which says,. And all that believed were together, and had all things come. Now that's the little story of the unity of believers immediately after Pentecost.

One of the dearest doctrines in the scriptures, and one of the dearest to me personally, is the doctrine of the unity of the members of the Church of Christ. Not only one with each other, but one with Christ.

I sometimes tell people that I think in our family that we have quite a demonstration of at least interdenominationalism. My wife grew up a Presbyterian, and I met her in the Methodist Church, and we entered immediately after an Alliance Church.

Her eldest son and his family go to a Quaker church in California. The next son attends with his family a Presbyterian church, and the next son teaches Sunday school in a Baptist church, and his people go there.

Another son is affiliated with a Presbyterian church. The youngest son is a Presbyterian preacher. My daughter is taking her training and expects to go to the field as a missionary under the Christian Missionary Alliance.

And I don't know what I am. That's the ecumenical movement in practice. Now, I really want to preach to you to warm your hearts a bit out of this 2nd chapter of Acts. But since we are hearing a lot about it, I thought that I would talk a little bit about the ecumenical movement which is abroad.

It won't be anything like a scholarly discourse, nor will it be a history of the movement. But it will only be an effort to show that there is a movement of which I believe is not of God, and then there is a unity, a universal oneness which is of God.

The Meaning and Pronunciation of “Ecumenical”

In the first place, the ecumenical is a word which, if you are subject to the influence of British-speaking people or are yourself English, you would call it ecumenical. But ecumenical doesn't sound right to me, so I call it ecumenical, and I think that most people on the continent do.

I know they do in the States, and as you know, I'm an old Yankee go-home. And I will call it, therefore, ecumenical, giving it the soft E instead of the hard one. Some of you are so busy with your housework and your work generally that you pay little attention to it.

The Ecumenical Movement and Institutional Unity

But there is a movement on, and has been on for some time, to bring all the Church into one organization. This ecumenical idea, of course all the word ecumenical means is universal all over the earth.

That's all it means. But it has been adapted to mean that all over the earth, wherever there are Christians, they are in one organization. It doesn't mean that the whole Church, if there is a council, there will be next Thursday, beginning in Rome.

If there is an ecumenical council, it doesn't mean that all the Church is there, but it means that the representatives of the whole Church are there. This ecumenical council is to be held in Rome starting next Thursday.

It will take a long time to complete its work. There will be over 2800 delegates, and they will deal with 70 different items on their agenda. The most important one, unless I miss my guess, will be the one they call the unity of all Christians.

I have noticed that they are now getting very broad and Protestant in their views, and they are calling it, they say that they are willing to put more emphasis on scripture. That, to my mind, is bait to catch suckers, to put more emphasis on scripture, because our friends over on the papal side of the road, if scripture has it one way and the Catholic tradition has it another, the Catholic tradition will win out all the time.

But if they can say that they are willing to give more emphasis to the scripture in the Church in order to woo the Protestants who love the scriptures, of course they will do that. The Protestants also, of course the ecumenical councils have been all down the centuries.

That is, the councils held by the Roman Church, in which there were delegates from all over the world, and they settled all kinds of questions, and sometimes they didn't say the right thing. But then we have a movement among the Protestants, and that movement among the Protestants has some aims.

Christ’s Prayer for Unity and Pentecost

One of the aims I don't believe in at all, because I think it's already been fulfilled. Our Lord, you know, when he prayed his prayer, our brother quoted it tonight, it said that they all may be one. Jesus wanted his Church to be one, and he prayed that way.

And now they are coming to me, and they are saying, you ought to join our organization for the unification of believers so that the prayer of Jesus would be fulfilled, that all may be one. Now, I'd like to tell you this, that if it takes Jesus Christ 1900 years to get his prayer answered for the unity of his Church, and if the Church all down the centuries hasn't been answered and they have not yet become unified, then my faith in the Lord would suffer a staggering blow.

The simple fact is that the prayer of Jesus, that they might all be one, was answered dramatically in the fiery outpouring at Pentecost, when all that were believers were baptized by the Holy Ghost into one body.

But then there are those who, while they wouldn't say that this is their reason, they just want everybody to get together, all like-minded Christians, and that's a fine idea. And there have been some mergers, you know.

There have been quite a number of mergers in recent times, and some of them have been all right. That is, they are all believers and they all get together instead of having two heads and two headquarters and two official magazines and why they only have one.

That's always to be desired. For 25 years I have worked on this thing of trying to get the Christian Missionary Alliance to unite with the Missionary Church Association. It looks now as if they will. But then you could put the Missionary Church people and the Alliance people in a sack and shake them up and you wouldn't know one from the other, because we do believe the same thing.

We are simply Christians, and so when we would unite or merge, there would be no sacrifice of any vital theology at all. Then there are others who believe that Christians ought to get together and thus fulfill the prayer of Christ, even if they had to sacrifice truth.

The World Council of Churches and Roman Catholic Influence

There started in Amsterdam in 1948 a great world movement called the World Council of Churches. You've never heard me say anything against it. I don't make it a practice to preach sermons against things.

As I've said, I'm 99 percent for things and 1 percent against. But this happens to be one of the things that I'm against. The Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestants and the old Catholics got together.

Then after that, into the World Council there have come denominations, or at least whole parts of denominations, until it's a vast, falling octopus all over the world. Now the pressure is on from many directions, especially from Rome.

That smiling, rather overweight gentleman in the Vatican is a kindly old fellow. You know, it wouldn't be bad to talk to him. I'd like to talk to him, pointing to Jesus. But he said, you know, that here I am at the end of the road and on the top of the heap.

He said that after he got elected Pope. Now, that was a human thing to say. There hadn't been anything human come out of the Vatican for at least during the time that the previous Pope was in. He couldn't.

He had big eyeglasses and big eyes and a sober look. But this fellow, he's a nice old fellow. But he wants us all to get together, and he's saying that he thinks the union of all Christians is one thing that he wants to try to promote.

And he'd love to bring it about and go down in history as the Pope that brought the Protestants back into the fold. Now, one thing that we ought to remember, my dear friends, is that the unity of the Christian Church in the Spirit is one thing, but the union of all Christian groups is quite another thing altogether.

Apostasy and the Difference Between Christendom and the Church

We ought to remember the doctrine of the apostasy found in the scriptures. There is a doctrine there that says that the time will come, perhaps I could read just a few verses of it. It says that the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine.

Preach the word, be it in season or out of season, reprove and rebuke and exhort with all suffering and doctrine, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But after their own, alas, they shall eat to themselves, teachers having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables.

Now, that's what the man of God said. And there's much else there also, where it said that the time would come when men would be lovers of their own selves and having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.

And he said, from such turn away. You see, there is a difference between Christendom and the Church. What the present ecumenical push is trying to do is to solidify Christendom, to bring us all who are on the Christian side of things at all, that is, the Western world and all Christians of any sort, to bring them together in one vast body.

That's Christendom. But there is in the scriptures a great difference between Christendom and the Church, and the Church teaches that Christendom shall be apostate and shall give up her faith and shall wallow in her own self-righteousness and shall deny the power and shall be totally unprepared for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When the Son of Man cometh, will he find faith in the earth? That's Christendom. But the Church is another thing. The beautiful Church of Christ that we read about in Ephesians, the 4th chapter, where there is one body and one spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, the Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all.

But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ, and says then that we must go on until, for the work of the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Now, the perfecting of this unity which took place and takes place when anybody is baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ, then the perfecting of that until the whole beautiful Church is brought into the presence of Christ, this is the business of the Holy Ghost through the scriptures, through the pastors and teachers and prayer warriors on the earth.

But in the meantime, there is a great large body called Christendom made up of Christians of every stripe and color and kindering, straight and speckled and spotted throughout the whole world, and this is not included here, and the Holy Spirit never intended it to be here.

Testing Churches by the Truth of Scripture

What then should we do about it briefly? Well, join nothing that questions the truth of the Bible. Now, let me tell you that. Join nothing that questions the truth of the Bible. I preached down in Newark the other night, as I mentioned, and I said that Jesus Christ took nothing from science and nothing from philosophy and nothing from civilization and nothing from man's wisdom, that he stood alone, unique and supreme above all.

And I went over them one at a time, and I showed how little science really knew in the end. After the meeting, a fine-looking lady, middle-aged, and a very distinguished-looking husband, walked down the aisle and spoke to me.

The lady said, Mr. Tozer, we're just fresh out of liberalism. She said, We have just been delivered from the modernistic church and we've been born again and oh, we're so glad to hear you. And the distinguished-looking gentleman said, I am a scientist.

And he said, After hearing men like you, I know how little we scientists really know after all. Well, that dear couple, even though he was evidently a brilliant scientist, he looked like one. And after submitting he was one, I know I was one.

The question now is, were they to stay in a church that taught that the Bible is a book of myths, that there are several Jehovah's, there are several gods in the Old Testament, that Jehovah is a tribal god, that he is not the truly one God, but a tribal god, and that Daniel was written after the event, and that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, and that Jonah couldn't possibly have been swallowed by a whale, and that Joshua couldn't make the sun stand still, and that the story of creation is now outdated and out-and-loaded and proved to be wrong.

I have had them come to me right in this city, at least on two occasions, and question, after the event, whether they believed the Bible at all or not. They said, Do you believe it? Obviously, there are those in this city preaching in churches that do not believe the Bible, and these young people, for all instances they were young people, they are being taught that the Bible is a book of myths, and that there are some good things in it if you can find them.

So they either don't want you to read the Bible, or they want you to scratch through it as a rooster scratches through a pile of straw, looking for that lone grain that he might find. Now, I say, any movement or any church or any group anywhere that questions the truth of the Bible, you as a believer cannot afford to fool around with them.

And if this group accepts any place for all the superstition that goes along with holy bones and holy water and the Mother of God and all mankind, as I heard her called today, the thing for you to do is to quietly walk out.

Separating from Apostasy While Loving Fellow Believers

I have not come outside of the church I mentioned where I came out and joined the Alliance. I've never come out of anything since that I can recall. I've come out of churches, but they've always gone back the next week.

But I have never left anything, and I've never split anything. So I am not a lint-picker nor a witch-hunter, and I am not compelling every man to say, shibboleth in the same tone of voice that I do.

If he has an Irish accent and says shibboleth some other way, let him say it. If he loves the Lord, he's my brother. But if he's a smooth talker and tells me that it's ridiculous for me to believe that God ever inspired the scriptures, why then, of course, I can't have fellowship with him.

Remember that 17th chapter of Revelation. I'm not going to take time to read it, but that 17th chapter of Revelation tells about that great mystery of the Babylon, the great mother of harlots, the abomination of the earth.

But I want you to know that this harlot has children. She not only is a harlot, but she is the mother of other harlots. And these harlots are nothing else than the churches that are apostate and claim the name of the Lord, but do not live the truth of the Lord.

Now, remember that 17th chapter of Revelation, and remember the teaching of the apostles about the apostasy that shall be in the end time. And remember the teaching of Jesus. And do not be taken in by any soft talk about more emphasis on the scriptures.

A fellow told me, the President of the Collegiate Institute where I spoke, told me on the way that he used to speak, and some of his messages were so beautiful that I said, I wish I could have him preaching my church.

Then he said the very next time he would get up and upset the whole business and kick the foundations out from under the New Testament and out from under Christianity and out from under things of God.

And he said, I knew better. Therefore, I'd like to tell you this. I don't know. I'm not good enough, Prophet, to know what direction things are going to take. I do know that I hear strange things in evangelical circles these days.

I hear people rethinking things. We're rethinking inspiration, we're rethinking the deity of Christ, we're rethinking sin, we're rethinking morals, and we're trying to equate it with what they call mores, or the habits and customs of certain cultures.

We've gone to anthropology and have learned that what's a sin in one country won't be in another, and therefore we Christians have got to accept whatever is there. We're rethinking things. We're even rethinking whether God really created the heaven and the earth and man after his own image.

The evangelicals are now rethinking things that a generation ago evangelicals took for granted and never gave a thought to. So I don't know what direction we're going to go from here. They asked me at the newspaper in Miami, Florida, whether I thought that there would be more unity in the Church in days to come, and whether I thought there ought to be.

And I said, No, I thought there ought to be more division. Because I thought that there ought to be a group of godly people who wouldn't be taken in by apostate churches and preachers, and that they ought to stand out and stand up and be counted.

And they printed it. I don't know whether anybody liked it or not, but I wasn't particularly careful whether they did or not. I still believe it. I believe that we ought to obey the word of God and withdraw from all that which says that it is not of Christ.

Christian Freedom and Refusal to Surrender Truth

I tell you this, that while I live there will be one free Protestant. I don't know about the others. I know not what others may do, said the old politician, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

And as for me, I know not what others may do. While I live there will be one free Protestant. I may be in jail, but I will be free. And a man who believes in God through Jesus Christ the Lord, knows where he is, and hasn't been taken in by a red herring, and hasn't been brainwashed by soft talk, and who loves God and Christ and mankind for Christ's sake, that's a free Protestant, even if he's in chains.

So I say to surrender to the movement that would unite us all together and make a great, vast, sprawling, super-church out of all Christians. Some drink, some dance, some live wickedly, some are mad about money, some never go to church except once a year, one of the holidays, and some doubt the word of God and some deny it and some laugh at it, and some gamble and some play the horses, and some are dirty-minded and some tell dirty jokes, and yet they belong to the different churches, and they want me to join that mess.

To join it, my dear brother and sister, would be for me to surrender, and to surrender would be to perish. Now, I can't have much influence on the Evangelical Church, but I should like to say to the Evangelical Church that there is a little limerick which they ought to remember about the young lady from Niagara.

There was a young lady from Niagara who went for a ride on a tiger, and they came back from the ride with the lady inside and a smile on the face of the tiger. And if you and I who love God go for a ride with the Pope, we will come back from the ride with the Evangelicals inside and a smile on the face of the tiger.

True Christian Unity Versus a Super-Church

So my brothers and sisters, you know now, and whether this makes me popular or unpopular in Toronto, I care absolutely not at all. But I want you to know this, that while I have preached for Lutherans, and almost all of them, let me see, what denominations haven't I preached for?

I can't think of any. And I love them all, and as I've said, we're a sample of interdenominationalism in our home, and any Alliance Church has in it, just practically everybody will know. I preached on Lutheran Church here the 5th of August, and this last week I got an anonymous letter, a nice approving letter that cracked in it, from somebody who said, A Lutheran here who heard you August the 5th at Lutheran Church.

So there was a Lutheran. I preached for them all in their denominations as well as scattered ones in there. So I don't think the Alliance has everything, and that you have to be in the Alliance to have to be saved by any means.

I just think we're a missionary society, and up to now we're clean of any liberalism, so I'm staying along with the Alliance. But there is a difference between the ecumenical movement which would unify in one great super-organization all people who say they are Christians, and the true Church which is a living organism and which is born of the Spirit and washed in the blood and joined to the Body of Christ by the mysterious operation of the Holy Ghost in what we call regeneration.

When this happened in their book of Acts, the 2nd chapter, I'll watch that talk, and when it's time to quit, I'll break my sermon off and quit, whether I'm finished or not. Gypsy Smith said his sermons were like a fish's backbone.

He said, you can unjoin them anywhere. And I'll just unjoin this thing when the time is up. And I want you in the meantime to know that I'm for the Church, but I'm not for the great world super-Church, but for the Church which he purchased with his blood.

And all that believed were together. Now, why were they together, this beautiful crowd of believers? They were together because there were reasons for it. You see, they were pressed together by antagonisms from the outside, and they were drawn together by magnetism from the inside.

The Church as a Spirit-Formed Community

And a body of Christians that are living so clean and right and that dare to take their stand and stand up and be counted on the issues that matter, they are very likely to get pushed together and pressed together by external antagonisms.

But that's not enough. They must be drawn together by internal magnetism. That is, we must be drawn together by the Holy Spirit. I love the people of God, I really do. I'm a very nervous man, and sometimes I can't spend a lot of time with people.

The pressure of hard work keeps me rather jumpy. So I don't say that I always like to sit down and talk 5 hours with everybody, but I love the Lord's people. I love the old, weary ladies, and I love the bright-eyed young fellows just converted.

I just love God's people. If they are in Christ, I love them. And that magnetism would bring me to the Church of Christ. I don't imagine that I haven't down the years said, Well, I'm going to quit preaching.

But as Jeremiah said, While I was musing, the fire burned, and I went back to preaching again. Well, this explains the constitution of the sheep figure. Sheep are not solitary creatures, you know. They work together and live together and feed together and lie down together in the green pastures beside the soft waters.

The only time a sheep goes off by himself is when he's lost or sick. A sick sheep doesn't go with the flock. And when I find a Christian who is such an individualist that he never goes to church, if he's a Christian, he's a sick Christian.

So if you're a found sheep and a healthy sheep, you will go where the flock is. And any of you who wonder where the shepherd is, I'd like to tell you where. He's where the flock is. And if any of you wonder where the flock is, I'd like to tell you it's where the shepherd is.

So the shepherd and the flock always stay together. And I, for my part, don't have the courage nor the disposition to go off by myself and try to live my Christian life all alone. I need others. I need the other sheep which are of the fold, and the other sheep which are not of this fold, but which are coming into the fold.

A Christian doesn't dwell alone, I say. And the Christians should stay together. For the mutual help they can be to each other. And if you think you don't need the church, that's just the proof that you do need the church.

Because if you didn't need the church, you probably would think you did. It is the same as when a man says he isn't sick. And it's obvious that he is, he's worse off than the man who knows he's sick, for the man who is sick and doesn't know he is and won't admit he is, is not going to go anywhere for help.

The Communion of Saints and Eternal Fellowship

For such a thing as the communion of Saints and the cultivation of eternal friendships, you know something that in this church right here, you can cultivate friendships that will be yours in the eternal tabernacles.

You can say goodbye to people here at their graveside and meet them again with a warm immortal handshake at the right hand of God, and know them and recognize them and know them for who they are and were.

So we need each other. The communion of Saints. I don't want to make so much of it, I don't want to make too much of anything unless it's not possible to make too much of Christ. But apart from preaching every time I preach about Christ, I don't want to preach every time I preach about the communion of Saints.

But I believe in the communion of Saints nevertheless. The communion of the Saints of God on the earth and the communion of the Saints of God who have gone from the earth. Well, you say, then, you believe in spirit tapping, can you communicate with somebody that's gone?

I didn't say communicate, I said commune. There's a difference. I don't believe it's possible to communicate with the Saints in heaven, but I think it's possible to have communion with them. I used a little illustration one time in a book and have never used it since, I think, but I think it's a pretty good one, so I'll use it now.

Looking to Jesus Across Distance

I said, suppose that a man and a girl were, as they say, in love, and the man had to leave her and go away and have to go to another province somewhere, another state. And he said, Now, listen, we'll be a long, long way apart, but I'll tell you what you do.

And he looked at his counter, and he said, At a certain night, at a certain hour, the moon will be full, and it will be in a certain position at a certain time in the evening of a certain night. Now, I can't come to you, but you go out on the lawn and you look at the moon, and I'll go out on the lawn and I'll look at the moon, and I'll be looking at what you're looking at, and we'll be seeing the same thing, and we'll be thinking about each other.

Now, that may be a little romantic and sticky, but isn't there something to that, brothers and sisters? Isn't there something to that, that we look at Jesus and they look at Jesus, and though they're over yonder and we're here, we're the Church militant and they're the Church triumphant, but we meet in the same person.

We don't communicate with each other, just as the young men and young women don't hoo-hoo across the meadow to each other too far apart. But they do say she sees it, and she said he sees it, and so we're together.

I believe it entirely possible to have the communion of saints, which is a unity of appreciation, a unity of love, a unity of worship, a unity of devotion, and more than that, a union in the Holy Ghost, which makes all the people of God one around the world.

I don't know whether I'll take my sense of humor to Heaven or not. I don't do much for these articles and books that are being written proving that God has a sense of humor. But I think that I may keep mine in the world to come, and I think, brothers and sisters, that I am going to laugh at least with a certain amount of celestial dignity when I see the astonished look on the face of some people who didn't think we were going to get there.

They didn't belong to our denomination at all. No, I didn't belong to your denomination, but I got there. And their look of astonishment is going to please me. I think I'm going to laugh, because I believe that all the people of God are going to make it through without any effort at all, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, and there is the communion.

Loving Believers Across Denominational Lines

Therefore, I want to commune with the people of God. I started to say Chicago, of course I mean Toronto. We lost a lovely soul here from our midst the other day. He didn't die, he went back to England.

Our friend Jerry Gregson was an Episcopalian, and he always had his call around the other way. We had one of them here, and he wasn't an Episcopalian, but he was sitting here beside me during the Keswick meetings, the spiritual life convention.

I sat there alongside him and felt small because I had my suit on, and he had on his with the call around. So the next night I saw him back there ushering, and I said, Is this the man that sat beside me on the platform last night with a dog collar on?

He said, I'm sure it's a man. He said, A man has to get a clean shirt on occasionally. So he took it good naturedly. I don't care, let him wear. I have preached in robes. I never preached with a collar on backwards.

I always managed to be sober at the time and put it on right. But if this brother just feels he looks better looking out over his collar, I see him and put it on wherever. It means nothing to me. One fellow said, The reason I wear them, I visit the hospital.

It's an entree to the hospital. Well, if that's worth your trouble, Reverend, go ahead and wear it. I love you, and we're one in Christ. We'll have communion of the Saints. There's always safety near the shepherd, too, you know.

Christ-Consciousness and the Manifestation of Christ’s Presence

It can be suicide for a sheep to stray from the shepherd. So if you stay close by the shepherd and all the rest of the sheep stay close by the shepherd, you'll not only be near the shepherd, but you'll be near to each other.

Isn't that reasonable? As you crowd in, you get nearer to each other. And then, of course, there's the manifestation of the shepherd's presence. I repeat again that I grieve that we have so little manifestation of the shepherd's presence.

We talk about his being here, but we don't sense that he's here. You know what I mean? We don't have the feeling that he's here. Don't talk down feeling. It's part of our human constitution. When he walks into the presence of his people consciously, they can't help but feel it.

And I think the most wonderful thing that we could have here at Avenue Road would be that we should become so Christ-conscious and so Church-loving that we would clean up our lives and purify our hearts and wash our hands and forgive our enemies and love them too.

And then we would focus our eyes on him and learn to live and pray and preach and give and worship in the very conscious presence of the Son of God's love. I think this would be the most beautiful thing in all the wide world.

And dear friends, I don't mind telling you at all, if I knew there was any place on the earth, a company of believers, that enjoyed this as intensely and wonderfully as they should, I think I would try to find them, and if they would have me, spend the rest of my days with them.

But as I've said, I have been among almost all the denominations, from Pentecostals to the Lutherans, and preached for them, and I just don't find it much. Maybe, maybe God would have it that this Avenue Road Church should be the one to give back to the evangelicals again in this dispensation, this period, what it means, what Christian unity means, what Christian love means, what the real unity of the believer is.

Being let go, they went to their own company. And it's a sweet company when the Lord is in the midst of it. Now, there's where I break off my sermon. I have another page of notes, but it's going to end right there.

Prayer for the Church, Redemption, and Perseverance

And I want to pray. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we are not worthy to be members, but we are not going to be tricked by the devil into letting our unworthiness make us morbidly unbelieving, even though we're not worthy to be.

We're accepted in thee, and thou hast made us members of thy body, and we accept it, and we leave the matter of our worth with thee. And if angels or archangels question our right to be there, we look to thee as a sheep looks to his shepherd and say, Answer for me, Lord, answer for me.

I admit I'm not worthy, but answer for me, dear Lord, and thou wilt answer for us. For thou didst come from high heaven to low earth, from the immortal and eternal liberty of the Godhead to the confines of the virgin's womb, that we might be redeemed.

And thou didst die on the cross of shame and suffering, and rise that we might be justified and forgiven, and be reunited again with the Father from which we fell in the fall. Lord, all this is true, and we leave it with thee.

Now wilt thou bless and help us to see how wonderful it is to be a member of however small a group that believes in thee. We leave the great, top-heavy Christendom to find its own way. We shall pray, O God, for all the Church, all who call themselves Christians.

We shall be tolerant and kind and charitable and loving and friendly to them all. But we will only go with those that love thy name, that trust the precious work of Christ on the cross, and that are ready to leave all and follow him.

We pray, O God, for every Christian in Toronto. We pray for all the ministers of the truth, and we thank thee there are many who preach the truth. Bless them all, Father. Grant that over these weeks that lie before us we may see a constant rising tide that shall eventuate and flow, that it shall be like the river that flows out from the throne of God.

All this we ask in Christ's name. Amen.