What do you do when a high-quality magazine stops being published? How do you ensure that the contents of its 66 issues continue to be available? These were questions facing the leadership of The Renewal Fellowship Within the Presbyterian Church in Canada (RF) last year, nearly twenty years after Channels ceased publication in 2006.
First, some background. The Renewal Fellowship was founded in May 1982, and during the next year, plans were made to begin a magazine to reassure isolated and sometimes discouraged Presbyterians in Canada who wanted renewal that they were not alone. Word associations with media, communication, and television channels resonated with the old hymn, “Channels only, blessed Master”, and suggested the name Channels. And so, Channels – intended to be an instrument of blessing for The Presbyterian Church in Canada – debuted in the fall of 1983.
Over the next 23 years, some 66 issues were published. Channels succeeded in placing the Renewal Fellowship within a broader national and international context. Publishing articles written by internationally known authors like Eugene Peterson, James I. Packer, Michael Green, Darrell Johnson, and John G. Stackhouse Jr. helped members of RF to realize that they were a part of a much wider movement.
The high quality of this magazine has long been recognized, but only recently did it prompt a desire on the part of current RF Executive Director, Rev. Andy Cornell, to make a digital archive of all 66 issues: the contents were too valuable to be simply lost to the world. So, beginning in February 2025 with some experimental processing, and then bearing down with more effort from September to mid-February 2026, I managed to scan over 600 articles to PDF. Then I converted them to text and posted them on channelsmagazine.ca. Each article is presented in text format, and at the bottom, a searchable, downloadable PDF copy of the issue opens at the page where the article originally appeared. The challenge of the job came from the magazine’s two-column format, interspersed with pictures and pull-quote blocks: the converted text was often quite jumbled, and needed to be reassembled in order. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and each article was strangely rewarding to complete. For me, it was a labour of love. On six recent days in April, over 100 articles were accessed online each day, as a testimony to their enduring value.
During this lengthy process, I was amazed at the variety of articles that presented vignettes of the issues that Presbyterians were dealing with during those years. The editor for the first 16 years was J.H. (Hans) Kouwenberg, minister at Prince George BC and later at Abbotsford BC, and the managing editor was Dal Schindell, an elder at Fairview Church, Vancouver BC. During the digitization process, and knowing that Dal worked at Regent College, Vancouver, I observed that all of the internationally known authors that I listed above were identified as professors or visiting lecturers there. And so I figured that Dal undoubtedly took advantage of his position in Regent College to just walk down the hall to their offices and ask if he could publish an article from their upcoming book, or an article that they had written for another publication. Many such articles found their way into Channels.
I became keen to learn more about Dal’s contribution to Channels publication history, but unfortunately, he passed away in August 2019. So, in January this year I arranged to interview his wife Kit. This turned out to be both informative and interesting! I learned, for example, that Dal was Regent College’s Instructor in Christianity and Art for 30 years. He was also their Director of Publications, and as the Managing Editor and Art Director of Crux, Regent College’s publication, he was eminently skilled to design and publish Channels. After RF was founded in 1982, Dal phoned Rev. A. Donald MacLeod, the founder of RF and then Associate Minister at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto, offering to produce a magazine for the fledgling organization. Channels was his idea, and he was the driving force behind it. All 66 issues were designed and produced by Dal – the true “hero” of Channels. Kit remembers how Dal would stretch out on the floor in their living room, pasting the typeset text onto pages, getting it ready for offset printing. Dal knew a lot of people, and he was good at asking them to write for Channels. Especially after the RF Annual Meetings and Renewal Days, he would track down the speakers and get them to write articles for Channels. Dal also served for thirteen years on the RF Board, including four years as Chair. Kit says that she and Dal had deep love and respect for Donald and Judy MacLeod. They were unendingly generous, hospitable, and committed.
I learned a great deal about the story of RF thanks to historical articles by Donald MacLeod. If you are unfamiliar with Channels, I would recommend that you read an article that Donald MacLeod wrote on the 20th anniversary of the first issue, “Looking Back Over Twenty Years of Channels”, which serves as an introduction to the scope of topics that had been covered over the course of its publication to that point. Another article is ‘’’Good-bye’ is Never Easy”, a retrospective on the events that led up to the birth of RF. A fuller description of the pivotal meeting at the Skyline Hotel near Malton Airport is to be found in “A Twenty-fifth Anniversary: the Silver Jubilee of October 17, 1966”. Although many of the articles are dated material, like stories on RF Annual Meetings, the pictures and information have historical significance. The website offers 30 category searches, such as sexuality, health, and youth, as well as author searches, such as Eugene Peterson, James I. Packer, W. Stanford Reid, as John Vissers.
One consistent feature of the magazine was the book reviews, of which two or three appeared in each magazine, for a total of 123. A surprising and pleasant feature that I enjoyed was the inclusion of 34 cartoons, entitled “Beyond Belief”, by Roger Judd, which poked fun at the foibles of clergy and laity alike.
It is to be hoped that the digitization of the Channels magazines will extend their influence into a new generation.
