His sermons were like
complex symphonies,
rich with historical and
intellectual detail that
made the listener work.
Although he enjoyed
contemporary culture,
he seemed to struggle
with the popular
references that
preachers increasingly
relied on.B16 OBITUARIES OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | TUESDAY,JULY30,2019
Vancouver actor Gabe Khouth,
best known for his role as Sneezy
in the TV showOnce Upon a Time,
has died after a motorcycle crash
in British Columbia.
Natasha Trisko, Mr. Khouth’s
talent agent, says Mr. Khouth
died on the afternoon of July 23
in Port Moody, about 40
kilometres east of Vancouver.
She says he may have gone in-
to cardiac arrest while riding his
motorcycle.
He was 46.
Many actors are paying tribute
to Mr. Khouth on Twitter, describ-
ing him as someone who always
put a smile on people’s faces.
The actor’s brother, Sam Vin-
cent, also confirmed the death
on social media, saying Mr.Khouth went out doing what he
loved.
Adam Horowitz, co-creator of
Once Upon a Time, says Mr.
Khouth was a lovely man, a great
talent and an indelible part of the
show.
“But more importantly, he was
our friend,” Mr. Horowitz tweet-
ed. “He will be missed.”THE CANADIANPRESSGABEKHOUTH
ACTOR,46VancouverstarofOnceUponaTime
alwaysputasmileonpeople’sfaces
PORTMOODY
ActorGabeKhouth,seeninanundatedphoto,dieddoingwhat
heloved,accordingtohisbrother.THECANADIANPRESS/TRISKOTALENTI
n the early 1950s, when a de-
mographic boom and surging
economy began to transform
every corner of North American
society, the United Church of Can-
ada turned to a young preacher to
do the same for the pulpit.
Canadian church leaders had
watched how Billy Graham’s
energy electrified congregations
across the United States and felt a
new style of Canadian preacher –
perhaps less fiery, perhaps more
reflective – could fill their pews,
too, as a postwar generation
struggled to balance a new secu-
larism with an angst brought on
by the bomb, the pill and the Age
of Me.
Rev. Leonard Griffith would be
their star.
Already a rising figure from his
perch in Ottawa’s Chalmers Unit-
ed, where the great and good of
Canadian politics worshipped,
Mr. Griffith was recruited in his
early 30s and sent out nationally
to spark a new kind of Canadian
theology. The young preacher
was soon a headliner for the
church’s first “evangelistic meet-
ing” in Windsor, Ont., drawing
close to 30,000 people at a local
arena on the gathering’s first
night. He continued every night
for a week, sending a signal that a
new voice had arrived.
As a United and later Anglican
minister, Mr. Griffith was one of
Canada’s most influential Protes-
tant voices through the second
half of the 20th century. He was
also, perhaps, the last of a kind.
With a command of ideas and
oratory, he had an ability to con-
nect the Bible to postmodern
anxieties. He filled pews, of
course, but he also built a follow-
ing that included political lead-
ers, business tycoons, academics
and swaths of ordinary Cana-
dians. From Chalmers, Mr. Grif-
fith went on to be the voice of the
great City Temple in central Lon-
don in the 1960s, and finally St.
Paul’s Bloor Street in Toronto,
where he often drew 2,500 con-
gregants. At one point, in the
1980s, he preached to nearly a
million worshippers, over the
course of a week, in South India.
I watched Mr. Griffith at the
height of his craft, in the late
1970s at St. Paul’s, where, as a
server, I sat beside him on Sun-
days as he prepared to mount the
pulpit. It was like sitting in the
bullpen with an ace pitcher pre-
paring to take to the mound.
Every week, as another minis-
ter, usually Rev. Bob Dann, led the
church in prayers and readings,
Mr. Griffith sat quietly behind the
pulpit, muttering key phrases to
himself and reviewing his notes
one last time before rising to
speak for 20 to 30 minutes. In
those days, a half-hour sermon
was still a high point of the week-
end for many worshippers.
His sermons were like complex
symphonies, rich with historical
and intellectual detail that made
the listener work. Although he
enjoyed contemporary culture,
he seemed to struggle with the
popular references that preach-
ers increasingly relied on. He
equally eschewed the pop psy-
chology that those in the modern
pulpit often tried to deliver, pre-
ferring to take his listeners
through the majesty and nuances
of the theology he had learned
from perhaps the century’s great-
est thinker in the field, the Swiss
theologian Karl Barth.
Mr. Griffith treated every ser-
mon like a marathon to train for,
noting in his memoirs,From Sun-
day to Sunday: Fifty Years In the
Pulpit, that he liked to spend an
hour at his desk for every minute
he would address the congrega-
tion. He also came about his craft
naturally. He was born in Preston,
England, on March 19, 1920, to
two Welsh opera performers. He
spent his early childhood travell-
ing around England with his par-
ents’ various troupes. (His father
began his working life in a Welsh
colliery, and had a bass baritone
that Leonard often adopted, aid-
ed by 40 years of smoking that he
later observed, guiltily, didn’t
diminish his lifespan.)
His parents’ stage careers were
undone by the Great Depression
and the rise of cinema, which
forced them to seek a new life in
Canada. They settled in Brock-
ville, Ont., holding a series of
menial jobs that allowed young
Leonard to excel at school and
volunteer for the local church. He
earned a scholarship to McGill
University, where he studied the-
ology and advanced his com-
mand of the stage through cam-
pus theatre and some early CBC
Radio plays.He then studied at Montreal’s
United Theological College, grad-
uating in 1945, the same year he
was ordained.
Mr. Griffith later confided,
again with some guilt, that he
never had a religious experience
or revelatory moment that drew
him to the church. He was instead
drawn by the intellectual chal-
lenge of dissecting scripture (he
wrote 21 books) and using his
rhetoric to compel people to
change.
One of his preferred sources
was the Book of Isaiah, with its
mix of poetry and prose, and its
sweeping landscape on reflec-
tion.
Mr. Griffith excelled as a small-
town preacher in Southern Onta-
rio before being called to Chal-
mers, then the citadel of the Unit-
ed Church, which he took over at
the age of 29.
He regularly drew more than
1,000 people to his Sunday morn-
ing service, and another 200 on
Sunday evenings. But as the 1950s
progressed, he noticed the eve-
ning numbers shrink, as did other
ministers in Ottawa. He realized it
was the same media disruption
that had been the undoing of his
parents’ travelling opera. For him,
it wasThe Ed Sullivan Show, the
biggest force in TV in the 1950s.
Exhausted from the pulpit, he
returned to academia to com-
plete a doctorate at Oxford Uni-
versity in England, where he fo-cused on the theology of Barth,
who was so influential a theolo-
gian he appeared on the cover of
Time magazine in 1962. From
there, Mr. Griffith moved to City
Temple in London, which at the
time was one of the world’s most
influential churches, patronized
by those among Britain’s elite
who didn’t attend the Church of
England or Roman Catholic
Church. The congregation includ-
ed Garfield Weston, the grocery-
store magnate, who was so
pleased to have a Canadian in the
pulpit that he bought the church
a house for the new minister and
his young family.
While on high occasions Mr.
Griffith could fill the church to its
1,500-person capacity, he
watched the crowds slowly dissi-
pate as church attendance de-
clined across the West amid a
growing view that “God is dead,”
and the sexual and secular revo-
lutions that swept the 1960s.
In his memoirs, Mr. Griffith
recollects using his time in Eu-
rope to visit Switzerland to inter-
view Mr. Barth for his Oxford the-
sis. He was struck by a Grunewald
painting behind the great theolo-
gian’s desk, depicting Christ as a
figure who transcended the world
and indeed religion. It was that
image of infinite mystery, and
transcendence, that helped him
see his own messages as more
than words spoken to an immedi-
ate audience, even as it dwindled.
They were an expression of faith
that he hoped lived beyond the
moment of their delivery.
It was a faith he would need
when he returned to Canada,
moving to Toronto with his wife,
the former Anne Merelie Cayford,
and two young daughters. The
city of the 1970s was in the early
stages of a de-churching that
would shake many church lead-
ers and push them to try almost
any gimmick to draw and retain
parishioners, a bit like Isaiah de-
spairing the rebellious nation of
Israel. As Mr. Griffith later wrote,
in his new pulpit, at the presti-
gious Deer Park United in North
Toronto, he saw “membership
shrank; the congregation shrank;
its financial intake shrank; and I
guess my popularity also began to
shrink.”
His confidence was shaken,
like that of an all-star pitcher on a
new team and losing more games
than he had won. Parishioners,
when they bothered to come at
all, seemed to want entertain-
ment more than edification.
He regained his confidence at
St. Paul’s, and continued in retire-
ment, preaching into his 90s and
turning to new media – CDs at
first, then YouTube – to record
and share his work, still turning
to Isaiah as much as any other
source, taking stock in its equa-
nimity and promise of a day
when righteousness overcomes
folly, and “the eyes of those who
see will no longer be closed and
the ears of those who hear will lis-
ten.”
Mr. Griffith died on April 7 in
Toronto at the age of 99. He leaves
his wife, Merelie; two daughters,
Anne Rutherford and Mary Grif-
fith; four grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren (one of
whom was born after his death).Special to TheGlobe and MailLEONARDGRIFFITH
MINISTER,99CLERGYMANCONNECTED
THEBIBLETOPOSTMODERNANXIETIES
Hewasanewkindofpreacherforthepostwargeneration,fillingpewswithinfluentialcongregants
anddeliveringcomplexandinsightfulsermonsJOHNSTACKHOUSE
Rev.LeonardGriffithisseenduringcelebrationsmarkingthe100thanniversaryofFounders’ChapelatWycliffe
CollegeinTorontoin2011.Mr.Griffithconfidedatonetimethathewasneverinitiallydrawntothechurchby
wayofareligiousorrevelatoryexperience.Rather,theintellectualchallengesinherenttoclericallifearewhat
attractedhim,asherelishedtheopportunitytousehisrhetorictocompelpeopletochange.WYCLIFFECOLLEGE