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By Lloyd Mackey
 FOR THE second week in a row, we are shifting attention from Ottawa to British Columbia.
Last week, readers will recall, we talked about an interesting entrant into the Kelowna City Council election race.
Today, our attention turns to Bernice Gerard, who, among many other accomplishments, served on the Vancouver City Council in the late 1970.
She passed away last Saturday morning, November 1, at age 84.
Gerard was a well-recognized Vancouver public figure, as a Pentecostal minister, university chaplain, city council member, and radio/television host.
Adopted as a baby by an aboriginal family, she heard some people preaching the gospel in a country school house in rural Abbotsford, when she was 12.
In a 2000 BC Christian News interview with Meg Johnstone, she noted that the women "told me there was one whose name was Jesus who took little children up in his arms and blessed them. He was totally loving and kind."
She gave her life to that Jesus. As she grew to adulthood, her commitment stuck.
After teaching in Rossland, she joined up with two sisters, Velma (later Chapman) and Jean McCall, in evangelistic efforts in both eastern and western Canada. In the process, she was ordained to the Pentecostal ministry and, in due course, founded Fraserview Assembly (now Harvest City Church).
Her decision to run for city council, in 1977, was rooted in her pastoral activities and her chaplaincies at University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. She is probably mostly remembered for her protests against nudity on Wreck Beach, something she believed would have a detrimental moral effect on students at nearby UBC.
Gerard was a well-rounded person, practical as well as devout. She had a good liberal arts education and used it well. She was what one might, today, call a social conservative. She spoke out against porn and abortion. And she was a staunch supporter of the nation of Israel. All of that grew out of her understanding of scripture and her belief that God had a keen interest in the lives of ordinary people.
Even as she moved into middle age, she was able to influence many young people to centre their lives on Jesus. I recall her telling a little story about one of her young converts. Its setting was some of the early conflict over the use of contemporary music, overheads, guitars and drums in worship.
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She said the young woman in question, having discussed these musical trends with some of her more tradition-bound old-hymn-loving elders, came to her completely mystified.
Her question: "Pastor Bernice, what is a hymnbook?"
From the early '70s until 2000, when Parkinson's Disease was starting to take its toll, she held the attention of a wide audience with a radio and television ministry, known for much of that time as Sunday Line.
I got to know Bernice in the early '80s, during the founding years of BC Christian News and it parent organization, Christian Info Society. She served on the CIS board for most of two decades, and often had me on Sunday Line to talk about some of the current news in BCCN.
One of those appearances was in 1995, shortly after I had written These Evangelical Churches of Ours (Wood Lake Books).
During his United States presidency, I had come to appreciate many of the skills and values that Jimmy Carter had brought to public life. In These Evangelical Churches... I had talked about his strong interest in encouraging older people to take care and live cleanly, so they could live 10 or 15 years more.
I referred to Carter as taking a "real pro-life" stance.
When Bernice had me on to talk about the book, she congenially nailed me on that point. She suggested that I was implying that people who opposed or worked to reduce the number of abortions were not "real" pro-lifers. I appreciated the point and she, in turn, let it be known that she understood from whence I was coming.
The last time I saw her was at MissionsFest Vancouver, in about 2003, I believe. Some friends of Sunday Line had set up an exhibit which would permit people who had known her to meet and chat with her. She sat in a tall producer's chair and engaged hundreds of people in the course of the festival. Her trademark gravel-shaped voice was much thinner than it had been, but the Christ-generated gleam in her eye was still bright.
One of the disadvantages that Ottawa has had, compared to Vancouver, was that the nation's capital had no Bernice Gerard. We will miss her.
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We have a very interesting line-up for the new federal cabinet, about whose comment I am setting aside for a week or two, until the naming of the new parliamentary secretaries and Liberal shadow cabinet.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). Lloyd can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
November 6/2008
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