Pentecostal Preacher Woman

Gerard quit teaching to join the sisters on the road as part of the McColl-Gerard Trio. Ordained as Pentecostal ministers in the United States, they worked as a team from 1945 until 1958, filling tents and church halls across North America and Europe.

The trio split up when the McColls settled down to marry. Gerard stayed single, but in an unusual domestic arrangement, she lived with Velma and her husband, Dick Chapman, in their Vancouver home. The two women continued living together after Chapman died and were, in fact, inseparable.

Gerard became a campus chaplain at both the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s. With her gravelly voice, she was a natural for radio, and she hosted a late-night callinshow with CJOR in Vancouver. Her media exposure helped get her elected to Vancouver City Hall, where she served from 1977 to 1981.

The world of politics was not kind to Gerard. The media mocked her as severe, frumpy and humourless for her unwavering efforts to impose public morality by fighting the spread of nudity on public beaches.

By contrast, Ambrose’s portrayal of Gerard is sympathetic. The author, a professor of history at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., describes Gerard’s conservative thinking as nuanced and more open than it at first appears. Gerard’s views, while never liberal, broadened over time. When debate opened up in the 1970s about ordaining women as ministers in Canada, Gerard found herself fighting against her own church, which had accepted women in ministry for its first 50 years but was hardening its rules in a backlash against a perceived threat of feminism.

Still, she remained hugely popular in the evangelical movement, and in 2000, eight years before her death, Gerard was rated first on a list of influential B.C. spiritual leaders compiled by the Vancouver Sun in consultation with academics.

In writing the biography of one particular woman, Ambrose reveals much about the backdrop of social history that unfolded during Gerard’s lifetime. And as the jacket blurb says, Gerard’s “complicated blend of social conservatism and social compassion has lessons for our polarized times.”