Peter Anderson McKnight

The boardwalk

Peter was born in Montreal, the youngest of Thomas McKnight and Mary Anderson’s six children, and grew up in Verdun, a small city hard by Montreal on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The family rented a second-storey flat at about sixty-five dollars a month. The height of relaxation, he wrote later, was to sit out on the balcony with your feet up on the railing in the hot humid days of summer.

Between the flats and the water ran a ribbon of asphalt everyone called the boardwalk, though it was not made of boards at all. For a boy, he wrote in a memoir he left after a few pages, the railing along it was “the barrier between a life of supervision and order on the city side, and adventure, mischief and ‘wilderness’ on the river side.”

Saturday, January 18, 1964 was sunny and bitterly cold, a typical Canadian day to go skating. They lived close enough to the river to lace up in the house. He and his father crossed Wellington Street, hoisted themselves over the railing and glided out onto the ice, heading for Nun’s Island. Peter put a foot through a soft patch and went in to the thigh; his father pulled him out, laughed him back into courage, and they went home to hot chocolate. “At eleven years old, a boy needs a father for times like that.”

The next morning Thomas McKnight died of a heart attack in the cloakroom of Onward Gospel Church, the little church in Verdun the family attended. He was fifty-six, a stockbroker with an eighth-grade education who was often asked to preach. More than five hundred people came to the funeral, and the ones who could not get in stood out in the street in the January cold.

What came to Peter was his father’s Bible, the one his father had in his hand that morning. The schedule of daily readings in the flyleaf stops nineteen days into 1964, and the portion set for January 19 is the triumphal entry. The notes in the margins are in a precise printing Peter thought he had inherited, along with the habit of alliterating his points. He carried it into the pulpit and preached from it thirty-seven years later.

The shopping trip

He knew Carolyn Crate from the youth group in Montreal they had both belonged to as teenagers. On the last weekend of August 1971, before he left for Bible college in Toronto, he asked her to come shopping with him downtown. Thirty years later he was still preaching about that weekend. “If I hadn’t asked Carolyn out then, we may never have developed the friendship that led us to become husband and wife, and there never would have been five McKnight boys in the world today.”

Ontario Bible College — now Tyndale University — kept him in Toronto; she stayed in Montreal, three hundred and fifty miles east. He kept Friday afternoons free and hitch-hiked to see her every weekend. They were married on September 11, 1976, and she said Ruth’s words to him at the altar — “where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.”

He went into the ministry that year: assistant pastor in Sarnia, Ontario, then associate in Buffalo, New York, where the first of the boys was born on the Canadian side of the river because their new American insurance would not cover a pregnancy that had begun before the move. He retold that one at Christmas years later, in the cadences of Luke 2.

In 1982, six years into the work, the family moved to Denver so that he could take a graduate degree. He sold hardware at Sears, cut grass and painted houses for a realtor, and taught an adult class at the small church up the street while Carolyn taught the children. He remembered driving home dead tired from a paint job with the boys in the back seat — just Jonathan and Peter in those days — seeing a McDonald’s and having enough left over to stop. “I enjoyed that Big Mac more than any I’ve ever had before or since.”

There would be five sons in the end — Jonathan, Peter, Philip, Thomas and Michael — and a grandson in his last year. He liked nature and art, music and astronomy, and learning about new things. He loved, in his own phrase, “order and precision.”

The pulpit

He came to Lynbrook in 1986. The manuscripts start three years after that and run from there to the end, and those years are mostly Sundays. He worked through books a passage at a time — Genesis, 1 John, Exodus — and gave fifty-seven mornings between 1991 and 1995 to the Sermon on the Mount alone. He married people and buried them, and kept what he wrote.

• Assistant pastorPeoples ChurchSarnia, Ontario
• Associate pastorCazenovia Park Baptist ChurchBuffalo, New York
• PastorLynbrook Baptist ChurchLynbrook, New York1986 – 1993
• PastorFirst Baptist ChurchAllentown, Pennsylvania1993 – 1998
• PastorErindale Bible ChapelMississauga, Ontario1999 – 2003

The last months

They were clearing the table on the evening of August 15, 2002 when the phone rang. Their doctor had the test results, and came over to say it in person: a tumour on the pancreas, inoperable, already spread. Peter was forty-nine. Two days later the family left on the holiday they had been looking forward to all year, and he lay on the raft with Carolyn watching the clouds sail along, something he wrote they never did. “Perhaps death has a way of making life more alive.”

He kept preaching at Erindale through the chemotherapy, and said the work had never been better: “I am finding such sheer joy… It is what I was created to do.” Late that year, giving his testimony at a seminar, he called the months since August “by far the scariest days of my life, but in another way… the best days of my life.”

He spent December in hospital. He returned to the Erindale pulpit on January 16, 2003 and began a short series he called Lessons from a Hospital Bed, opening it with a list of five things he believed God had been teaching him. He preached two of them before he died at home on February 5, 2003, at the age of fifty.

Ever since I learned that I had cancer, I have been convinced that this new turn in the road wasn’t meant just for me — God intended it to be a learning experience for all of us as a church… even though some might think that I have been climbing this mountain alone, the truth is that you have been climbing it with me.