By Elsa Henderson
Contributing Writer
The Bible says that we are saved by faith, not by works, yet we are saved to do good works. “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).
The following story is told, not to boast about one man’s good works, but to see how God prepared the way for him to do them.
Gordon Elhard’s parents immigrated to Canada from Eastern Europe in 1910 and settled on a homestead northwest of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. It was backbreaking work. Gordon’s father literally left his health in the soil of that homestead. Broke and six children later, in 1926, the family relocated to Alberta where Gordon was born.
God set the stage for Gordon to do good works by giving him godly parents. They were people of prayer. The family said grace at mealtime, and Gordon’s mother prayed with him at bedtime, but it was his father who had the greatest impact on young Gordon. He remembers his father, crippled with arthritis, walking with a cane and talking out loud even when no one was around. At first Gordon thought his father was talking to himself. Then he realized that he was praying. At times Gordon was embarrassed for his father, thinking that others would think he was talking to himself.
As a boy, Gordon accepted prayer times as part of life’s routine. In 1940, when he was nine years old, something happened to change that.
“My father struggled with severe arthritic pain,” Gordon said, “and in 1940 his physicians considered his condition to be terminal. My father grew up as an orphan in the old country. His parents died when he and his sister were seven and six years of age respectively. That day in 1940, when Dad was taken to the hospital, possibly for the last time, he asked my mother and me to come to his little bedroom off the kitchen where he was resting. Dad took me by the hand and asked God, very simply and in German, that he be permitted to live until I was twenty-one. That was it – a very simple and humble prayer. Dad was taken to the hospital, and a couple of weeks later his pain left him for good. He was released from hospital, his body gnarled and crippled, but pain free.
“Twelve years later, in 1952, I turned twenty-one in February. A short time later, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died a few months after. Needless to say, my mind went back to that little bedroom off the kitchen and to that simple little German prayer in 1940. Skeptics may call it coincidence, but I call it God’s answer to the desperate prayer of a father for his young son. My father did not want me to be orphaned as he had been.
“As a young man I made my father’s deep faith my very own. That faith has served me well and has enriched my life more than I will ever know.”
God enlarged the stage for Gordon to do good works by making sure he received a good education. The only thing his family knew was farming, and in those day farming didn’t require education, only hard work.
In 1950, Gordon was working for the City of Calgary. One hot July day while on a walk during his lunch hour, Gordon came to Mount Royal College, which was then located in downtown Calgary. Gordon stepped inside the front door simply to breathe some college air.
Gordon tells his story: “The place was quiet, so I examined the grad pictures on the walls, perchance I might spot someone I knew. To my surprise, someone stepped up beside me and asked whether I needed help. I remember saying, ‘No, no one can help me.’
“That someone was Dr Jack Collett, the academic dean of Mount Royal College and my encounter with him changed the trajectory of my life. Dr Collett invited me into his office and we talked. He asked me two questions that changed me forever. The first question was, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ I hadn’t a clue. The second question was, ‘Have you ever thought about going to university?’ No, I hadn’t. I was the first in my family to graduate from high school, let alone from university.
“Before I left his office, Dr Collett had me enrolled at Mount Royal College for the fall. From that, I went on to over six years of university and to a career in education that, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have missed for anything.”
Gordon’s faith led him to search for a clear sense of purpose. “Life without purpose is meaningless,” Gordon said. “I struggled to find a clear sense of mission long before mission statements were fashionable. When I began my teaching career in September 1957, I sensed a need for a higher purpose than simply transmitting information from my mind to my students’ minds, from my lesson plan to their notebooks, or from their minds to my examination paper. It was not enough for me simply to give my students my knowledge, my skills and my time. I needed to find a way to give them my very self.”
Gordon’s encounter with Dr Collett gave him the answer. He decided to do for others what Jack Collett had done for him. Gordon came up with an acronym for HOPE: Helping Other People Excel. And he did that – first as a teacher helping his pupils excel, as a principal helping his teachers excel and then as a superintendant helping his principals excel.
“Investing myself in others as so many others have invested themselves in me has become my mission in life,” Gordon said. “It’s what keeps me alive.”
When the Elhard family moved to Calgary in 1940, they attended Salem Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) Church in Bridgeland. Being the Canadian-born son of German immigrants gave Gordon a thorough understanding of the problems Salem Church was facing, and prepared the way for the start of Centre Street Church. The original members of Salem were mostly Germans from Russia. After World War II they were joined by Germans from Germany. These two German groups “mixed like water and oil,” said Gordon. As the children of the immigrants grew up and as English-speaking people joined the church, it became bilingual. The pastor preached one sentence in German, then repeated it is English. And so it went, sentence by sentence, through the whole sermon. When hymns were sung, the Germans sang in German while the others sang in English.
From 1950 to 1958, under the ministry of Rev. Fred Snyder, the little church building was enlarged. In time, the cultural differences between German speakers and English speakers became pronounced. Not all members were bilingual.
By the late 1950s, the church had a thriving youth group, which was mostly English-speaking. This group wanted a service in English only. The church elders agreed, and the young people organized their own service, held early Sunday morning. Soon “young people” of all ages – from 6 to 70 – attended the English-only service!
During an informal discussion of the situation, Gordon expressed his frustration. “There’s got to be a better way! Why don’t the English-speaking people start another church somewhere else?”
That was in January 1958. Calvin Gravelle, a young person who believed in the “crazy” idea, put a $500 cheque into an envelope, marked it “for the North Hill,” and slipped it under the pastor’s door. The idea snowballed and gained credibility. The elders of the church came to believe that the idea was of God. In June 1958, the EUB Missions Board voted to lend $20,000 toward a new church on the North Hill.
The group chosen to plant the church did not want to start a new church unless Salem’s pastor, Rev. Fred Snyder, went with them. The EUB superintendant thought they were dreaming in technicolor to make such a request. The bishop in St. Paul, Minnesota, thought it was a great idea!
Sixty-one members were sent to the new location. Both Pastor Snyder and the English choir left for the North Hill with Salem’s blessing. Gordon was 27 years old when Centre Street Church was launched, and he has been a pillar of the church ever since.
The fledgling church rented Highland Park Community Hall for Sunday morning services while waiting for their church to be built on Centre Street at 40 Avenue North. The new church building was completed in May of 1959, and within a few years they were debt free.
When a Daily Vacation Bible School was held in the summer of 1959, Martha was pregnant and Gordon was in charge of DVBS. When Martha went into labour early one morning, Gordon took her to the hospital, then went to church to run the DVBS. Later that day he got the news. “It’s a boy!”
Following the death of Rev. Snyder in 1969, Centre Street Church went through four pastors in three years. Gordon, who was Director of Christian Education, believed that the church needed a library as an aid to Christian discipleship. People donated books and Martha organized them into a library. Martha then upgraded her natural skills by taking a library course at SAIT. (She “crammed a two-year course into three years,” said Gordon, in order to juggle the demands on a wife and mother with the demands of the church library.) The library, which started as a few shelves of books in the balcony of the church, was later moved into the basement Fireside Room where there was more space.
During Pastor Art Hein’s tenure (1972 – 80), the church experienced eight years of stability, then in 1986, again, the senior pastor left. By that time Henry Schorr had been youth pastor for five years.
“What about Henry?” Gordon asked, as the church was once again looking for a senior pastor.
“He’s too young,” some objected. “He has no experience.”
“We’ve tried experience without success,” countered Gordon. “Let’s try talent!”
So the church gave Henry Schorr the opportunity to prove himself, and the rest is history.
On April 13, 1992, Gordon was diagnosed with a severe case of colon cancer; he needed surgery immediately. He was 61 years old. God used that to force Gordon to re-evaluate his life.
He went home that day and went to the Word of God, his source of strength. Reading the story of King Hezekiah, he prayed as King Hezekiah did for another 15 years. Twenty-two years later Gordon is still going strong!
Gordon has used those years to pursue his life purpose of investing in and mentoring others. He is still doing the good works that God prepared in advance for him to do.
“When I retired,” Gordon said, “I realized that while you may retire from going to the workplace, you must never retire from your purpose in life.”
Praying? Let us know.