One of the Fellowship’s great evangelists, Olive Copp
Hang around the Fellowship long enough and you hear about Murray and Lorne Heron; Frank and Wilf Wellington; or one of our founders, Morely Hall or Professor W.S. Whitcombe, who were connected by their commitment to the North and reaching Francophone people for Christ.
One common connection between them and so many other early pioneers and architects of our Fellowship was Olive Copp. Hers is an extraordinary story that needs to be shared far and wide.
Our Fellowship Archive Coordinator, Lynda Schultz, came across Olive’s testimony while rummaging through the clerk’s records for First Baptist Church in Timmins, ON. Please ensure you keep your records safe and secure so we don’t lose these priceless stories of our past as Fellowship Baptists.
Here is an excerpt of Olive’s story, as told by Lynda Schultz:
“A young man by the name of Ian Cruickshank had sensed the call of God to take the Gospel to Timmins. Back then it was a gold mining community of about 10,000 made up of shacks without any comforts or conveniences and completely without a witness of any kind. Cruickshank regularly travelled to the town on the train from Toronto. In 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic, he contracted pneumonia and died alone.
“Moved by the young missionary’s mission and untimely death, Olive said, ‘I must take Ian Cruickshank’s place.’
“Off to Timmins she went. She lived at her own expense, and though she had the means to do otherwise she determined to live as Ian had lived. Mrs. Holman wrote: ‘…she…lived in a poor room over a shack-like store with a tiny stove not adequate to the 40 below zero winters, living as frugally as possible, though possessed of means, duplicating as it were, the life of Ian Cruickshank’s privations. And so throughout her stay in the north at Timmins, Widdifield (North Bay), New Liskeard, Cobalt, Milberta (Temiskaming Shores area), and later Noranda and Rouyn, she laboured individually at her own expense in the same frugal way to give the Gospel. Up and down to every small hamlet where a train could be flagged to stop, she went individually visiting every shack along the railroad, and seeking to build churches in the towns now well-known but then only beginning.’”
Read the rest of Olive’s story here.
I look forward to meeting Olive in Glory and thanking her for her sacrificial service to the Lord. Are there any more “Olives” out there?