"[3] 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' ...

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.

[11] Chown's election to work with the aging, dictatorial and abrasive Carman was due to an alliance between wealthy lay members of the church and theologically liberal ministers.

In November 1915 it created the Army and Navy Board to oversee military chaplains and coordinate work in Canada related to the war.

[18] Chown supported the change in emphasis in sermons from stern teachings about sin and repentance to a more optimistic message with greater stress on the redeeming love of Christ.

He thought this would create a revival of religious belief, and wrote, "The preaching that shall produce it may not be nearly as dramatic as that of the past, and therefore the results may not be so sensationally and superficially striking.

[22] He wrote that modern social science would, show the young men of our country that the theological student is not a recluse, and that, in its essence, Christianity is ethical, altruistic and aggressive.

The Church, to attract virile young men, must blazon forth the possibility of a career, which will justify their consecration to the ministry; and the outstanding fact is that their full equipment is impossible unless they know the world in which they live.

[25] Chown attacked the way students at the church colleges were taught, saying the curriculum was irrelevant in its focus on ancient systems of theology.

Future ministers had to be taught to "enter into dynamic relation" with the modern world, rather than being made "miniature theological professors.

"[24] He wrote sarcastically of theological studies, Then we took a balloon, for flying machines were not yet invented, and we sailed sublimely upward, landing on the mountain of eschatology, or the science of the last things - the end of the world, heaven, hell, the judgment and hereafter.

These subjects were illuminated by all the lamps which shone in the great field of speculation, and impressed upon us by a formidable body of descriptured philosophy.

They rest upon our moral constitution, upon conscience, upon history, upon the corporate religious consciousness of the church and upon the experience of each individual Christian.

He preached, "Regeneration consciously experienced and testified to by the spirit of God was the outstanding doctrine of Methodism, and it is still our paramount mission to proclaim it.