The United Church’s first female moderator Lois Miriam Wilson was committed to confronting society’s ills

Very Rev. Lois Miriam Wilson was a tiny person – barely five feet tall – feisty, fearless, brassy, adventurous. She personified one of the great mythic stories of what shaped Western Canada from the late 19th century into the first half of the 20th century: the story of the Social Gospel. This progressive movement within Protestantism applied Christian ethics to societal problems such as economic inequality, poverty and child labour, seeking to put into practice the biblical New Testament injunction of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Social Gospel is passing into history, but the memory of Ms. Wilson?

“There are some people you can never forget nor imagine saying goodbye to. Lois Wilson … was one such person,” Canada’s former foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, wrote on his Facebook page a day or so after her death in Fredericton on Sept. 13, at the age of 97.

“My fondest recollection is sitting on the living room floor in the modest church manse on Arlington Avenue in Winnipeg’s North End. On Sunday evenings, Lois and her husband, Roy [like Lois, a United Church minister, who died Dec. 26, 2005], would lead a group of teens in discussion on the tenets of the Social Gospel which taught that one’s faith is tested by what you do on Earth to make it a better place. It wasn’t just talk, it was a call to action, as she and Roy brought us face to face with the realities of poverty, discrimination, war and violence.

“She encouraged us to ask the question: How could we, in our lifetime put these beliefs to use for greater peace and justice. Lois was a teacher, a pastor and a friend.

“The poet Mary Oliver spoke of life and death this way: ‘I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.’ Lois Wilson did more than visit this world,” Mr. Axworthy said. “You lived your faith by doing something about the evils going on in the world.”

Before leaving public office, Mr. Axworthy helped give shape to the United Nations doctrine of Responsibility to Protect by outlawing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

The footprints Lois Wilson left behind were monumental.

Born Lois Freeman in Winnipeg on April 8, 1927, she was the daughter and youngest child of Protestant theologian E.G.D. (Gard) and Ada Freeman. She became an ordained minister in 1965 with the United Church, Canada’s largest Protestant Christian denomination, and was subsequently elected the church’s first female moderator (senior official), the first female president of the Canadian Council of Churches and the first Canadian woman to serve as a president of the World Council of Churches.

As a student, she joined the radical, activist Student Christian Movement where she became a lifelong friend and colleague of fellow SCM member Edward Scott, later primate archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada.

She was for years a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Primarily at the invitation of the Canadian government, she went to Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Guatemala, Taiwan and South Sudan as an election and human rights observer.

She visited South Korea in 1981 and illegally met with Christian church leaders who were in hiding from being hunted by the military during what became known as the Gwangju Massacre.

From 1990 to 2000, she was chancellor of Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University.

Appointed to the Senate of Canada in 1998 by Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, she led Canada’s first parliamentary delegation to North Korea in 2000 to begin the process of establishing formal diplomatic relations between the two countries. She retired in 2002 after establishing the Senate’s first standing committee on human rights. She received 14 honorary degrees and authored 10 books on topics ranging from ethics to feminism and interpretations of biblical stories. For her work in human rights, ecumenism and social justice, she was named a companion – the highest honour – of the Order of Canada.

Asked why he engaged Ms. Wilson in global work such as leading Canada’s delegation to North Korea, Mr. Axworthy replied simply: “Because I trusted her judgment.”

When Namibia was liberated from South Africa’s enforced apartheid occupation in 1990, Ms. Wilson attended the first swearing in of the new country’s independence cabinet, most of whose members she knew because she had worked with them as an executive of the World Council of Churches on the dismantling of apartheid.

Confronting society’s ills was a lifelong commitment for her. When she was mugged by teenagers a few years ago on a pedestrian bridge in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood, she took the experience to every school in the area to tell the kids about the louts who tried to rob and terrify an old lady. She used the experience as an educational tool. She was indomitable.

She was, however, not a born feminist. When she was ordained as a minister in 1965, she was still signing her name as “Mrs. R.F. Wilson” (her husband’s name was Roy Fyfe Wilson). But after reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – and other experiences – she became a convert.

The World Council of Churches launched its Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women in 1988 with Ms. Wilson as one of the organizers. When the idea of the Decade was proposed to the WCC’s central committee, one male delegate stood up to declare “I have had no trouble with my wife” and another said: “You’re asking for a decade. You don’t need that long. So we will give you a year.”

Ms. Wilson wrote: “I was so furious that apparently I rose and said, ‘We are not asking you for anything, we are announcing a decade of churches in solidarity with women. Judging by comments, it will take at least a decade before some of you catch on with what we are doing,’ and I sat down.”

In Uruguay, she met a Bible study group of impoverished women who saw themselves in gospel stories, including this passage (Luke 13: 10-17): “She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability.’ And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God.”

The group read about women accused of adultery and asked why no man was accused. They also read about Vashti, introduced in a biblical midrash as a wicked queen who refused an order from her husband, the king, to appear naked in front of him and his drinking companions and was punished by being made to grow a tail (or male genitalia).

Ms. Wilson later declared that these women were among her favourite characters of the Bible.

For her, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not a model of pious passivity but hard-wired to the strong women of scripture. This idea was reinforced for her when she saw the message scratched on the walls of Poland’s Lenin shipyard: “Madonna is on strike.”

She met illegally during Argentina’s “Dirty War” with the Mothers of May Square whose children had disappeared or been murdered by the death squads of the ruling military junta.

When she arrived in a new country or new city she first often asked to visit an art galley so she could see a visual or mystical representation of the country’s past “because art was an early warning of what was going on in that country” and she met with theologians whose theology emerged out of the life struggles of the vulnerable, not just out of a textbook. This gave her the theological rationale for opposing violence for the countries she visited.

She wrote of women’s struggles to give birth: “Labour pains are not pointless. They are preparing for a new creation. The important thing is knowing when to push!! Because that is when we flex our muscles with all our strength and cooperate with creation in bringing about new life. So with movements for social and economic transformation … having been pregnant four times, I strongly relate to this.

In her 90s, she wrote: “Feminism is about envisioning the world through new eyes. That of women. Collaboration rather than strong individual effort … [r]elates readily to Indigenous sharing circles model. An ongoing process. My discovery of feminism was a long process over many years, with various stagnant periods.”

Miriam, Lois Wilson’s middle name, honours another strong woman of the Bible. It denotes obstinacy, contrariness and revolt. She was the sister of Moses and Aaron who, alongside them, led the Israelite women out of slavery in Egypt and taught them the Torah.

Ms. Wilson leaves her highly accomplished children: Ruth Wilson, a member of the Order of Canada, a family doctor and former president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada; Jean Wilson, comparative literature professor and former director of McMaster University’s interdisciplinary arts and science program; Neil Wilson, a retired lawyer and former chief executive officer of NAV Canada; Bruce Wilson, a retired professor of civil engineering and former department chair at University of New Brunswick in Fredericton; as well as 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren

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