Pioneering missionary was a bright light on the BC coast

When missionaries are mentioned these days, the comments are often critical, even hostile.

A hundred years ago, the general tone throughout society was much more positive – though that was often not the case up and down the coast of British Columbia, where Rev. George C.F. Pringle ventured into remote logging camps, homesteads and tiny communities.

Books such as Religion at the Edge (UBC Press, 2022) and Ross Lockhart’s West Coast Mission (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) make the point that BC, and the Pacific Northwest (or Cascadia), have always been ‘rocky soil’ for institutional religion, with more than our share of ‘religious nones.’

But successive generations of faithful Christians have nonetheless reached out with the gospel (as described in books such as Bob Burkinshaw’s Pilgrims in Lotus Land (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1995).

Inlet Publishing deserves thanks for retrieving a book which introduces us to a colourful and inspiring example of that pioneering spirit – with a winning combination of adventure yarns, history and convincing spirituality.

Rev. George C.F. Pringle’s Adventures in Service – first published in 1929 by McClelland & Stewart – is part of their three book BC Coast Series. 

Appreciation, pushing back

Diana Davidson (co-owner of Inlet Publishing) wrote about Rev. Pringle and his mission in the Introduction:

Frequently, he was, initially, not welcomed. Many of the loggers, quite legitimately, reacted in the spirit of “Can’t I, even here, off deep in the bush, be free from ministers trying to shove Christianity down my throat?”

I like what Davidson, a lapsed Anglican, told me in an email:

There are many reasons why I decided to reprint his book and to do the research to find his family. [George Pringle] was an amazing person. His is an example to those who think of themselves either as Christians or as decent people.  Nowhere is he contemptuous of anyone, no matter who and always sensitive to each person’s abilities and their thoughtfulness and competencies.

I think he (and as I discovered, his son George Robert Pringle) are worthy mentors and models for all of us. Also, I appreciate his scaled down version of Christianity, barren of nonsense and layering as basically forgive and help all others no matter you don’t know them or like them.

Also, after a while I realized that I wanted to push back a little at the general assumption that all missionaries and ministers were as those we now know of who abused the children of the coast and throughout Canada. Two other attitudes I wanted to give a little push back to were and are the attitude towards loggers – ie, the actual men and now women who work in the dangerous job of felling trees, working in sawmills, etc – and also wanted to say not all men are potentially dangerous.

Though she practiced family law in Vancouver for many years, Davidson grew up on the coast, in Powell River and Prince Rupert, and even had a short stint as a ‘gypo logger’ on the coast.

Adventurous spirit

Pringle was a steady man, but his life included a considerable dose of adventure. The youngest of 10 children in a Scottish family from Galt, Ontario, he clearly had a gift for the academic world. He was president of the philosophical society at the University of Toronto, before going on to become a Presbyterian minister.

He spent about nine years in the Yukon, arriving by steamboat and dog sleigh. He worked labour jobs at first, but was then ordained as a missionary.

He wrote that he was supposed to have returned to Ontario in 1903, “but the ‘lure of the north’ gripped me and held me until 1910”:

In those days there were 50,000 men in that area. It was the day of the ‘individual miner,’ when all a man needed to work his claim was a grub-stake, a pick and a shovel, and a gold pan. . . . Never have I had such an exciting, wonderful and happy experience. . . . If the old conditions still existed the Klondike would still be my home.

But he went out to the West coast and for a time was pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Vancouver (at Joyce, just south of Kingsway), which joined with a Methodist Church to became Collingwood United in 1926. The building is now home to Bethel Chinese Christian MB Church.

During the First World War he served as a chaplain. Among other things, he was with the Cameron Highlanders and a tank battalion, accompanied wounded soldiers home across the Atlantic, was gassed at Passchendaele and spent months in a military hospital.

After the war, he took charge of the Loggers Mission (later the Marine Mission of the United Church) for several years during the 1920s. There is more, but the Adventures in Service stories are based mainly on the BC coast, along with some from the Yukon and his experiences during the war.

Coastal mission on Sky Pilot

Pringle’s experiences in the Klondike and during the war served him well as he plied his way up and down the west coast. The workers identified with tough times, and he was able to convince them fairly readily that he was not just a pie in the sky preacher.

The life of a coastal missionary was never predictable, and he had considerable leeway in how he went about his task. The home mission committee told him, “Your field commences about 40 miles out from Vancouver . . . and you can go from there visiting people and camps on the mainland, its islands and inlets, as far as you think it wise to go.”

Pringle tells quite a number of good yarns along the way. For example:

• While walking through the tall timber to hold a service at a frame house in the Lang Bay settlement in the midst of the “worst gale in the history of the coast . . . there was no shelter from the broken-off limbs and branches that hurtled past us in the dark . . . then the big trees themselves commenced to fall.” He had just announced the hymn when the window blew in, the lamp blew out and the table fell over: “We closed our strenuous meeting with the first and last verses of ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea.'”
• He was used to mixing it up with Christians – and ministers – of all stripes. Once he was asked by a Catholic mother to bury her son. He felt it was best to get a priest, and managed to do that. But when the priest discovered that the church building was Protestant, he felt he couldn’t officiate there. They agreed that the priest could “repeat the necessary formula, with sprinkling of holy water and other rites” to transform the church, for a day, from Protestant to Catholic. “I was the priest’s bell-ringer, usher and altar boy,” and appreciated “one of the most comforting funeral sermons I have ever listened to. The burial ended, the Protestant mission boat took him home again. Next Sunday I held my simple service with much the same congregation present,” including the bereaved Catholic family.
• Taking shelter from a storm in Lasqueti Island’s Squitty Bay, he spent a couple of hours with two local ranchers, one of whom was well versed in literature. He expatiated comfortably on Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Kant, Robert Burns Spencer, Dickens and and more. But “he would dare to place George Borrow and his Lavengro first in prose.” Borrow roamed Spain as a Bible Society agent in the !830s, but also wrote several novels.
• He spent a week or more joining in the fight against a raging fire surrounding Gillies Bay on Texada Island. “‘Not regular mission work,’ someone possibly might say. No, but the hand the missionary took in fighting that bush fire was as true a part of his ministry as the best sermon he has ever preached.”

Empathetic nature

Pringle clearly admired the people he visited. In a chapter about Lasqueti Island – so near and yet so far from Vancouver – he wrote:

The inhabitants are among the best people I have ever met. They are neither ignorant, nor benighted, nor ‘lost souls,’ not unregenerate heathen, but just ‘folks’ like you or me, influenced, of course, in character and outlook by the conditions in which they live. . . .

Poor in money, they are in no sense to be classed as paupers. Trail-blazers they are; pioneers, trying, with independent spirit and patient effort, to work out the problem of making homes for themselves and their families in these forests, clearing a little of the jungle away from around their shacks part of the year, and going away from home, to be absent for months, working in logging camps to get some needed cash.

He was particularly impressed with the women:

The women have to stay around the home-shack [usually with children] doing the same monotonous round of humble tasks year after year. . . . Indeed, in some instances I am amazed that the woman is able to keep sane, patient and cheerful. Let us honour the men who have done and are doing the pioneering along the frontiers of settlement in Canada. But if we are just we shall give greater honour to the women for they have carried the heavier burden.

His own wife, Grace, remained behind at Vananda on Texada Island while he travelled the coast in his boat, Sky Pilot. She kept a kerosene lamp alight, all day every day, as a service to seamen moving through Malaspina Strait.

Critiquing the church

Pringle was not always impressed with the church’s effort to reach out to those lonely communities. Writing about the first time he anchored in Tucker Bay on Lasqueti Island, he wrote:

They gave me the astonishing information that I was the first clergyman of any sort, Catholic or Protestant, that had ever come to them. . . . As a Canadian and a minister I felt ashamed that such conditions existed in a settlement almost within sight of one of our large cities.

In a particularly appealing portion of the book, he describes the conversations he had during a February snow storm at a group of camps 18 miles from the sea. One evening he joined a group of men who were talking ‘about religion’:

“We were discussing the Bible, churches and Christianity just before you came in, Mr. Pringle,” said Sorenson, one of the fallers, “and we would like you to hear our opinions and then we’ll listen to yours. Nearly all of us have drifted away through force of circumstance, bad habits or careless living.

Many of us, too, through reading, debate and experience have found ourselves unable honestly to believe in the commonly accepted church creeds. . . . Perhaps you can contribute some ideas that will help us to a common-sense, fair-minded, free-minded verdict on this question of religion.

For three hours the men laid out their questions and critiques (and sometimes defence) of the faith. For example:

• the stories and miracles are hard to believe;
• there is disagreement about what really constitutes the Bible;
• the churches killed heretics during the Middle Ages;
• wealthy churches oppose  progress;
• there are lots of good men who are not Christians;
• and much more

Rev. Pringle responded as best he could, writing:

Let me assure you that I had to speak straight. No sophistry would go. . . .

Jokes were thrown back and forth, and I am sure if you had been there you would have voted the evening one of the most stirring, instructive and interesting you ever had.

Pringle held a high view of the people he met out in the woods.

Defending the church

He was by no means shy about defending the church in general though. For example, he wrote:

When you get the detail as to the work the churches are doing for the help of mankind it should shut the mouth of bitter criticism. . . .

In foreign lands it has brought the only message, in its missionary doctors, nurses, hospitals, schools and evangelists, that has nothing to do with moneymaking, territorial aggrandisement, exploitation or vice. , , , ,

Heart and intellect I am for Christ and organized Christianity. The Church upholds Christ to all the world in word and work. His likeness is beclouded and distorted at times by earth-born fogs of hypocrisy, bigotry, formalism and ignorance. But you can find Him even then shining through the fog if you will but seek. Very, very often, however, He is presented with clarity, beauty and convincing power.

Social gospel

His concerns weren’t limited to the spiritual realm. Clearly influenced by the social gospel – and anticipating the work of fellow religionists Tommy Douglas and J.S. Woodsworth in the political realm – he wrote:

When are we going to lift the medical services of our land from the deplorable and odious necessity, so humiliating to the patient, of the personal money-test in times of sickness. . . .

The present system, or lack of system, has become too expensive except for the rich. The ordinary married working man cannot afford to be very long sick and yet cannot afford to die. It is high time we had some form of Government Health Insurance by a compulsory tax while a man is well and working, a tax that secures to him, and his family, good standardized treatment when sick, a decent burial at death and protection for dependents. It must come, and soon.

Pringle knew well, and often referred to, his flock’s dangerous working conditions.

Need for salvation

But Pringle cared for eternal health as well. His reception varied from logging camp to logging camp. Sometimes he was well received, but often the men weren’t keen to see him: “They didn’t know what I might make them do, might “save their souls before they could stop me,” as one of them said.

He wrote that he would never regret following Christ:

What more can a man ask than Christ offers us, a Way that we know is right, a Destination that the heart of man craves and a guarantee, through God’s love evidenced supremely in the Atonement, that we shall ultimately arrive. . . .

Christ is continually capturing thousands of new hearts. He stimulates His disciples, old and new, to noble, sacrificial lives on earth. Nor does he fail them in the hour of death. In that mysterious experience they are sustained by the glorious promise of immortal life through their Saviour, the Lord of Life and Death.

A rewarding read

Adventures in Service will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in BC history and especially early life on the coast. Rev. Pringle was a good man and he is a good storyteller.

I should point out that there are numerous glitches with the editing – I gather it was a real challenge to copy from the original manuscript – but I doubt that would prevent many from appreciating the impressive content.

And do take note of the fact that Adventures in Service is the third in the Inlet Publishing Coast Stories series, following Narrow Escapes and Quiet Excursions for the Geologically Inclined and Is that a Grizzly I Hear? Princess Louisa and Jervis Inlets with Related History. Both are by Diana Davidson.