Major milestone

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This article was published 04/06/2022 (1248 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Well accustomed to pioneering in areas such as sex education, counselling and chaplaincy training, Rev. Gordon Toombs quietly achieved another milestone recently.

At the age of 101, the longtime Winnipegger marks 75 years as an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada, a distinction few, if any others have achieved.

“I have my historical background as a pastor, but I also have my identity as a sexologist at the University of Manitoba, and I never lost my loyalty to Jesus Christ,” says the Saskatchewan-born Toombs, ordained to the ministry in 1947 after graduating with a master’s degree in divinity from Emmanuel College in Toronto.

Currently, he is the only living minister within the United Church of Canada ordained for 75 years, an official at the denomination’s head office confirmed.

Toombs will be recognized for his years of service at the Sunday, June 5 worship service at Westworth United Church, where he and two others with ordination anniversaries will share reflections on a series of questions posed by Rev. Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd.

Still active in weekly book studies at Westworth, Toombs remains interested in the life of the congregation, says Shepherd, who characterizes much of his career as “small-M ministry.”

“His counselling was the big thing,” she says.

At one of his early posts in rural Saskatchewan, Toombs recognized the importance of counselling for the health of the congregation. While serving a church in Carrot River, he invited a Regina psychiatrist to the small town for three days to offer counselling to anyone who wanted it, something unprecedented in the 1950s, he recalls.

That pioneering spirit stayed with him throughout his career, which included moving his family to Edinburgh, Scotland, for three years while he undertook doctoral studies in ethics. While there, Toombs and his wife Mary, already a registered nurse, each took advantage of affordable psychotherapy which set them back “the price of a pound of butter an hour,” he recalls.

“It was very forward. It meant my wife and I could speak the same language.”

After a move to Winnipeg in the early 1960s, Toombs served as half-time minister at Young United Church and later was instrumental in the formation of the Interfaith Pastoral Institute — now Aurora Family Therapy Centre — as well as setting up Winnipeg’s first accredited clinical pastoral education program at Health Sciences Centre. He went on to become among the first in Manitoba to qualify as a sex educator and therapist, and then went on to study sexuality at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Ind., and pastoral counselling at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan.

“As soon as a new opportunity opened up, I got training in it,” says Toombs, a widower since 2015 who lives alone in a book-filled Charleswood apartment.

Not only did he get training in new opportunities, he also encouraged those around him to do the same, says a friend and fellow United Church of Canada minister.

“He put lots of us on the path to spirituality when it was considered hokum and almost superstitious stuff,” recalls Rev. Karen Toole, former spiritual care co-ordinator for the province.

After his appointment as a professor in counselling services at the University of Manitoba, Toombs and Mary were recruited to teach human sexuality courses to education and medical students.

“I started public sessions on sexuality for students,” he recalls.

“I ended up being ‘Mr. Sexuality’ on campus.”

His retirement from the university in 1986 freed him to team up again with his wife to offer workshops and short courses in couples communication, centering prayer and aging.

“We had discovered in our life together we had quite a few common interests,” he says of their shared work, which included co-leading a dream appreciation group for more than two decades.

“We had a very enriching time offering these courses until (the year) 2000.”

Well into his ninth decade, Toombs wrote a memoir about his experience as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, one of a group of eight men from the United Church of Canada who opposed bearing arms in the international conflict. Relying on his prodigious memory and the boxes of letters the men sent to each other, Toombs details the reasons for and consequences of their decision in the 310-page self-published L74298: Recollections of a Conscientious Object in WWII, released in 2019.

“To question my whole country’s dedication to war, I kind of admire my gall,” he says of the decision he made while a 21-year-old theological student.

Now nearing his 102 birthday and in decent health, Toombs remains engaged in the life of the church as much as he is able, both fearful for its future and ready with some advice for his denomination. He encourages the expansion of lay leadership within the United Church and worries about declining attendance and the watering down of core beliefs.

“We have to be careful not to deteriorate to be a nice group to belong to and doing good things in the community,” he says of his concerns.

“My solution is less head, more heart.”

brenda@suderman.com

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