They placed firm blame for the pull out by Campus Crusade at the actions by Pastor Wallace who was grandstanding. Graceously they did add that the Calgary Franklin Graham Festival in 1998 might never have happened had the Campus Crusade Mission project gone ahead.

Quite why Pastor Wallace used this example that morning is unkown other than to say it was a typical approach to deflect personal responsibility by putting the fault on a remote 'enemy'. Certainly others in the general Christian community felt that Wallace had used his position as president of CEMA to force his views on others.

A verbal complaint was made to the elders but they refused to look into the complaint.

We hope others might comment on this issue and other times where power and postion has been used to hurt the Christian mission in Calgary.

Jim Wallace Sermon Illustration –Sunday, April 18, 2004 (taken from a recording)

 
In 1994 I was in a meeting with two other pastors at the Petroleum Club. We were called there to meet with some very influential “Christian” business men in the city who wanted to bankroll an effort to take the Jesus video - you know the Campus Crusade Jesus movie – and to purchase copies of that and to put a copy of the Jesus video into every home in Calgary. And we were invited to this meeting and these business men who had lots of money and were used to engineering great projects and accomplishing great things sat down and said to us pastors, “This is what our meeting is for: we will bankroll it; we will make it happen; we just need your help in connecting us with the churches” And they were all excited and the conversation went on and I just sat there and I looked at them and I said, “Do you guys have any idea what is going to happen when you announce that this is what you are going to do? Do you believe that Satan is going to stand by and let you – let the churches of this city - take the gospel of Jesus and put it in every home in the this city and not pull out all the stops and do everything possible to stop and destroy and end what you are trying to do?” I said, “Some of you men should be afraid for your very lives because he will throw everything he’s got at you.” Now these were men who were at the tops of corporations who were used to doing great projects for God but this was a direct frontal attack on the gates of hell and there will be a battle. They were sure that they knew their Bible, they understood the enemy, they were prepared. They said they were prayed up, confessed up, everything up and they were ready to go for it. And the three pastors said, “Ok we’ll work with you and we’ll do what we can to bring this together for you.” We spent several months putting that together. The money was in place, Campus Crusade was in place and we had had conversations with leaders. We had one final meeting to pull together the loose ends and I remember what happened. To this day I don’t know what happened. But the conversation that went on at that meeting I was there, I heard it, and I thought that every thing was clear. But after that meeting the chairman of the committee, who was a businessman from another church, went out of the meeting, called up the head of Campus Crusade of Canada and said that the churches of Calgary could not support what they were doing and therefore he was pulling the plug. Three days later as we were making some final preparations I got a phone call from someone who was calling to cancel the project and I said, “What happened?” and nobody could explain it and we spent three weeks reading the record unraveling things, trying to figure out how did this project that was so close to happening get blown apart and it happened in one phone conversation. Finally, Marvin Kehler, the president of Campus Crusade of Canada, flew intoCalgary with one of his associates and met with myself and two other pastors at the airport to go over what happened and to unravel this thing and get briefed. And what he heard is that there was confusion and deception behind it. And I realized that the enemy had undermined this whole thing that we had spent months of work doing.