20: Rethinking the Ekklesia - with Richard Topping

We first met a number of years ago when I was curating the international exhibition Anno Domini, Jesus Through the Centuries for the year 2000. I discovered, quite by happenstance, that the marvelous hand-woven tapestry Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me by the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1998) was the property of the Church of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul in Montreal. Richard Topping was the pastor of the church and was eager to see Burn-Jones’ work grace the exhibition. We met face to face some years later when he became Principle of Saint Andrews Hall and then President of the Vancouver School of Theology, at the University of British Columbia. 

Richard has a deep knowledge of the reformer John Calvin and the twentieth century’s great theologian Karl Barth. I want to know what each of them and what Richard made of the church, how they thought about her gifts and what she means in our world. I turned to Richard and our conversation ranged from the 16th century, through the Nazi period that captured so much of the church in Germany, to our own day and the gifts and missteps that mark churches and the faithful in our fragile world.    

Welcome to our conversation.