Central Baptist Seminary (CBS) in Toronto, where I began my academic career as a church historian, experienced a deep financial crisis between 1989 and 1991. A three-man management team was put in place to lead the school instead of a president. One of the three men serving on this management team was Roy Lawson, in every way a larger-than-life figure in the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada. And to be honest, he frightened me! But not my academic colleague, Stanley K. Fowler.
In fact, once when Roy was complaining about hyper-Calvinists within our Fellowship (Calvinism was a controversial issue in the Fellowship in the 1980s), Stan asked Roy if he could define what hyper-Calvinism was exactly. Flustered, Roy found himself at a loss for words (something that was rare with him). When he failed to come up with a definition, I shall never forget Stan telling him pointedly, though winsomely, that Roy’s complaints about something he could not define was actually bearing false witness! That was Stan to a tee: never afraid to tackle tough issues and totally committed to truth-telling, and yet always winsome in his speech.
First impressions
The first conversation I remember having with Stan was around 1983 or 1984. It was after the bi-weekly chapel of Central Baptist Seminary, then located at 95 Jonesville Crescent in Toronto—so it was probably either a Tuesday or a Thursday.
We had sat beside one another during the chapel time and naturally began to chat afterwards. I soon discovered, to my joy and amazement, that here was a thinker, a man who delighted in intellectual reflection, and was interested in more than the praxis of the Christian Faith.
Conferences
In the late 1980s, our friendship was mostly centred upon our work together at Central and was deepened through faculty retreats (held in May each year) and the student retreats (in September and February). In the 1990s, we took a number of trips together. First, we travelled to a major conference at Wheaton College in April 1992 that was entitled “Evangelicalism in Transatlantic Perspective.”[1] What a privilege to hear some of the most remarkable Evangelical historians of the day—men and women like David Bebbington, Mark Noll, David Wells, and Edith Blumhofer—discuss and debate the nature of the evangelical movement. I had never been to a Christian campus like that of Wheaton—even the cafeteria blew me away! And of course, travelling down together and back by car with continuous conversation was such a delight.
We took in a number of other conferences during the 1990s—after CBS had merged with London Baptist Bible College and Seminary (LBBCS) in 1993. For a number of years, we went to the annual Spurgeon’s Pastors conference that was held on the campus of William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri and hosted by Pastor Gary Long (1940‒2021) of Springfield, Missouri, one of the most remarkable Christians I have ever known. Brother Gary made Stan and I feel most welcome to this fascinating conference where we heard men like R. Albert Mohler, Timothy George, Don Whitney, Jim Elliff, and Mark Coppenger for the first time. On one occasion, driving through Indiana a massive thunderstorm followed us for a number of hours and we experienced what one might call white-knuckle driving through the teeming rain. It was on the occasion of one of these conferences that we stayed at Stan’s parents’ home outside of Indianapolis and I learned first-hand of the solid Christian environment in which Stan had been raised.
We also took in the annual local conferences of the Evangelical Theological Society in Ontario until they ended with the formation of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association, a move spearheaded by Clark Pinnock (1937‒2010) of McMaster Divinity College. It was at one of these specific conferences, held in Kingston, that I first met David Barker and I heard about the possibility of a merger between CBS and LBBCS.
Leadership
Stan was the key figure from CBS in the discussions that led to this merger with LBBCS.[2] If it had not been for his solid leadership, CBS, which by then was located in a strip mall in the village of Gormley between 1991 and 1993, would have died entirely. Stan was the perfect person to give leadership in the discussions with LBBCS: firm on the fundamentals of the Faith and yet accommodating on other issues of the Christian life that were not as vital.
I found the years after the merger, though, difficult ones. From 1993 to 1999, I wrestled with whether or not I should remain at Heritage. Finally, the die was cast, and I stepped away from Heritage, which after being in London for two years (1993‒1995) was based in Cambridge. Stan, though, remained a key part of the school and through some difficult days in the first decade of the second millennium, his presence and leadership was critical in the preservation of Heritage.
Penultimate reflections
My teaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 2007 onwards meant that my contact with Stan decreased significantly. We had renewed fellowship in 2008 during one of the annual conferences put on by the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, when Stan spoke on “Baptist Associations in the 17th century.” We also had a fabulous time of fellowship in 2014 in California when the national three-day Evangelical Theological Society conference was held in San Diego. A memorable dinner was had on that occasion with our wives and Steve and Gretta Weaver—Steve had earned his doctorate at Southern (pictured above).
When I began teaching again in a part-time capacity at Heritage from 2012 onwards, we occasionally met one another and it was a delight to be involved in editing, along with David Barker and Barry Howson—longstanding colleagues of Stan at Heritage—a festschrift for him in 2016, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.[3] And again, just this year, what a joy it was to honour Stan with a two-volume book launch of his collected writings in the new building at Heritage.[4]
Stan gave himself unstintingly to making Heritage a success, for he rightly knew that seminaries are vital for the flourishing of local churches. This meant that until the appearance of the two volumes of his collected works, his published writings were mainly his dissertation on the sacrament of baptism and a small, popular version on the same subject.[5] Given my passion for writing, and my deep appreciation of the need for Stan’s voice of Christian reason and balance in our present day of extremes, I longed for him to write more.
As an aside, for me personally, I know of no one who will be able to fill Stan’s shoes in this regard in Ontario in our deeply divided and contentious day. There have been a number of times I have thought to myself, “O that Stan’s voice could be heard on this matter.” But in hindsight, his giving of himself to the leadership of Heritage has proven to be utterly vital for the school’s present flourishing.
Students at Heritage and the churches that have sent them to this school owe much to this faithful servant of God, this “theologian in service of the Church.”
[1] For the papers delivered at this conference, see Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States, ed. George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993) & Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond 1700‒1900, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[2] For the story of this merger and Stan’s role in it, see Michael A. G. Haykin and Jonathan N. Cleland, “A priceless heritage”: A history of Heritage College and Seminary in three essays (Cambridge, ON: Heritage Seminary Press, 2023), 93‒102.
[3] See David G. Barker, Michael A. G. Haykin, and Barry H. Howson, ed., Ecclesia semper reformanda est: the church is always reforming. A festschrift on ecclesiology in honour of Stanley K. Fowler on his seventieth birthday (Kitchener, ON: Joshua Press, 2016).
[4] Michael A. G. Haykin and Jonathan N. Cleland, ed. A Theologian in Service of the Church: The Collected Writings of Stanley K. Fowler. Volume 1: Soteriology, Moral Theology & Contemporary Issues (Cambridge, ON: Heritage Seminary Press, 2025) and idem, ed., A Theologian in Service of the Church: The Collected Writings of Stanley K. Fowler. Volume 2: Ecclesiology, Sacramentalism & Eschatology (Cambridge, ON: Heritage Seminary Press, 2025).
[5] Stanley K. Fowler, More Than A Symbol: The British Baptist Recovery of Baptismal Sacramentalism (Carlisle, Cumbria; Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster Press, 2002) and idem, Rethinking Baptism: Some Baptist Reflections (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015).
