Peter Wiley Philpott


Peter Wiley Philpott, a Canadian Christian fundamentalist and evangelist, founded the United Christian Workers, a working-class religious movement later known as the Associated Gospel Churches of Canada.

Biography

Early life

Philpott was born in 1865 on a farm in Elgin County, Ontario. He attended grammar school till the age of 13, and was then apprenticed to a blacksmith in Chatham for a few years.

Salvation Army

He joined the Salvation Army in 1884 after experiencing a religious conversion at an Army rally in Dresden, Ontario, where he was mainly raised. The Army had recently formed a congregation there.
Philpott rose to the high rank of brigadier, and was appointed a member of the Canadian Commissioner's advisory committee. He married Jessie Menzies, a fellow Army officer, in 1887; they went on to have 13 children.

United Christian Workers

In 1892, after a prolonged and public dispute focused on congregational autonomy, Philpott resigned from the Army, precipitating a significant secession of officers and soldiers. The secessionists created a new religious organization, the United Christian Workers, with Philpott its elected president.
Later that same year, Philpott was ordained by the Christian & Missionary Alliance, and went on to establish congregations of Christian Workers in Hamilton and Toronto. The Hamilton church was known as the Gospel Mission; migrant Scottish steelworkers were a significant part of its congregation.
In 1896, Philpott became minister of the Hamilton church, a position he held till 1922. He changed its name to the Gospel Tabernacle, and organised the construction of a large new church that opened in 1906. A 1903 Hamilton newspaper referred to the Christian Workers as:
While ministering in Hamilton, he remained affiliated with the Christian & Missionary Alliance, serving successively as its superintendent for Western Canada and associate superintendent for Eastern Canada.

Moody Church and Church of the Open Door

From 1922 to 1929, Philpott was pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, overseeing the construction of a massive new church building as a memorial to Dwight Moody.
In October 1929, he became the third pastor of the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles, resigning, due to ill-health, in October 1931. On many occasions thereafter, he spoke during services at the church, including in 1956, when he was ninety.

Later life

After retiring in 1932, Philpott settled in Toronto, where he sometimes filled in for Thomas Shields at Jarvis Street Baptist Church. In 1943, he was appointed associate minister at Oswald Smith's Peoples Church. He made extensive speaking tours throughout North America until a few years before he died in 1957.

Views and beliefs

Labour

In 1916, when minister of the Gospel Tabernacle in Hamilton, Philpott was one of several clergymen, together with the mayor and other officials, in a mediation committee trying
to avert a strike by unionised machinists. Along with other ministers, he expressed sympathy for the machinists, commenting that while they, as employees, had made many concessions in negotiations, their employers had made none.
Draper, drawing on Philpott's sermons and articles, observes that Philpott made many references to the importance of "honest toil and labouring" and saw "all of life as a 'service' to God". Draper adds that the vocabulary of the Christian Workers made considerable reference to waged employment in its metaphors and imagery.
Draper also states that Philpott's self-identification as a "blacksmith preacher" persistently framed his discourse as a pastor, quoting, as an example, this anecdote from a sermon he delivered in 1921:

Immigrants

In early 1920, Philpott appeared before Hamilton's board of education to appeal for "support in the work of educating the many foreigners in the city". He referred to ongoing, volunteer-run classes where "the aliens were being taught the principles of Canadian citizenship", of whose "morals and standards", he stated, they were "densely ignorant."
His intervention came amidst debates in Hamilton about how best to "Canadianize" its many immigrants. Failing to win over the board of education, he turned to the city's newly established chamber of commerce, which secured funding for English-language evening classes.

Fundamentalism

Philpott was a speaker at the 1919 World Conference on Christian Fundamentals. In his presentation, he said that critics of the Bible should be ignored, and asserted the importance of conversion and a Keswickian approach to living a more holy life.
He belonged to the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, which advocated premillennialism and creationism. At its seventh annual convention in 1923, along with the American politician William J. Bryan, the Canadian fundamentalist leader Thomas Shields, and others, he signed a statement of fundamentalist principles that concluded:
Pietsch labels Philpott a "dispensational modernist"someone who did not view the Bible as literally true, but saw it as a text requiring methodical, systematic analysis and interpretation in order to reveal its meaning. He notes that Philpott, addressing a conference on biblical prophecy in 1918, insisted that the dates of the end times and the Second Advent could not be accurately known, and that this necessitated the scanning of current events for signs to help gauge the closeness of the end:

Works

  • An account of the circumstances leading up to Philpott's resignation from the Salvation Army.
  • Describes political, spiritual, and other signs of the Second Advent. A second address, , pp. 233241, analyses the concept of the Last Judgment.
  • A short homily on relationships between Jesus and his followers and apostles.
  • Asserts that personal experience of conversion cannot be reasoned against or argued away.
  • Is Healing in the Atonement of Christ? Chicago: Bible Institute Colportage Association. c. 1920. Discusses the connection between physical healing and the Christian concept of atonement.
  • A collection of sermons.
  • In this short booklet, Philpott describes his own religious conversion and how he converted others.