Last week[note:the article is dated 2021] brought the news that Don Lewis has died—Dr. Donald Munro Lewis, professor of church history at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is remembered there with great affection not only as a skilled teacher of church history, but as a spiritual companion to many, a faithful mentor, and a man who was committed to prayer. And though I met Don only a handful of times, and though we were only infrequent correspondents, I owe him pretty much everything. Long before Don was a professor at Regent, or even a student there, he attended Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, very close to his hometown of Sherbrooke. Don was raised in a Christian home and became a believer at a young age. His father led a church in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and it was as a Pentecostal that Don enrolled at Bishop’s University, a school associated with Anglicanism. Bishop’s is set in the beautiful Eastern Townships of Quebec, quite near to Montreal where my father was raised and closer still to the small towns where my mother grew up. It was on the campus of Bishop’s that these three lives would intersect. Dad had grown up in a privileged home, the son of a Superior Court Justice. But his family life had been turbulent, often dominated and disrupted by a sister who suffered from severe mental illness and who committed suicide when dad was in his teens. (Nancy’s story, as I have explained elsewhere, became the subject of … Continue reading Why I Owe Everything To Don Lewis