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Samuel Dwight Chown (11 April 1853 – 30 January 1933) was a Methodist minister who led the Methodist Church of Canada into the United Church of Canada in 1925. ==Early years== Samuel Dwight Chown was born on 11 April 1853 in Kingston, then in Canada West. At the age of four he took the pledge to abstain from alcohol. As a youth Chown resisted attending Methodist classes, but he promised he would do so to his dying father, and was converted at the Sydenham Street Church in Kingston in 1868 soon after his father had died. He graduated from the Kingston Military School, and for a short period served in the Prince of Wales Own Rifles. He then worked in his father's hardwood and sheet metal company. He was accepted on probation by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1874, attended Victoria College in 1876-77 and was ordained a minister in 1879. Chown served in a number of churches. In 1875 he helped Richard Hammond in his revival meetings. Later he led services himself. He said that guiding people to decide to lead a Christian life was the "supreme joy". Chown copied the example of the Salvation Army in using bands to attract people to his meetings. When he was pastor in Sydenham, a small community, he was helped by a band led by the minister David Savage. More than 200 people came to the inquiry room of the Methodist church there, and he thought 150 were "soundly converted." One of the issues Chown had to deal with was the excesses of revival meetings, which established members of the church considered to be a form of paganism. He wrote later of talking at these meetings that "there spread a contagion of hysteria manifesting itself in prostrations, shocks of glory, while some professed to be able to 'speak with tongues' ... I had much to do in controlling and in some instances suppressing these hysterical outbreaks in camp meetings and elsewhere. In their inception there was probably something of a religious element but the contagion was largely due to mob psychology." Chown held pastorates in Toronto from 1894 to 1902, and during this period became involved in Methodist administration. In 1902 he was appointed secretary of the Department of Temperance and Moral Reform, which had just been created. In March 1902 the Ontario provincial parliament passed a bill prohibiting alcohol, subject to ratification by a referendum. Chown objected to the need for a referendum, and organized the Union Prohibition Committee, which later became the Temperance Legislation League, to field candidates in the May 1902 provincial election. The attempt fizzled out, and the referendum failed to gather enough votes for prohibition. Chown was the first head of the Department of Evangelism and Social Service which succeeded the Department of Temperance and Moral Reform. Later Chown noted that the decline in revival was due to a change in emphasis from the need to forsake sin to the nobility of enlisting in Christian service, a change for which he was partly responsible by blurring the lines between evangelism and social service. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Samuel Dwight Chown」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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