Veteran CBC TV journalist Brian Stewart has covered many international crises as a foreign correspondent, and has won numerous awards. Last May, he gave the following address at the 160th Convocation of Knox College, in Toronto.

I'M NO THEOLOGIAN, forgive any blunders on that ground; but what has truly surprised me over many years is not the triumph of trends, which flicker and fade like shadows at summer twilight, but rather the survival of spiritual hunger. This spiritual hunger, and a religious 'force-field' that springs from it, is the human drive to serve, and to help others.

It's so very much greater than I had imagined, and I've seen it blaze forth in places far darker, more threatening, than I could have imagined.

The surprise, I suppose, was my surprise. For this 'force' has been there, after all, from the very beginning of Christianity ­ and mysteriously, seems never to weaken nor grow weary. But I do wish to tell you something of what I have observed as a reporter, and [have] finally come to believe very deeply.

For many years I've been struck by the rather blithe notion ­ spread in many circles including the media, and taken up by a rather large section of our younger population ­ that organized, mainstream Christianity has been reduced to a musty, dimly lit backwater of contemporary life, a fading force. Well, I'm here to tell you, from what I've seen from my 'ring-side seat' at events over decades, that there is nothing that is further from the truth . . .

Christianity in action

I've found there is no movement, or force, closer to the raw truth of war, famines, crises and the vast human predicament, than organized Christianity in action. And there is no alliance more determined and dogged in action than church workers, ordained and lay members, when mobilized for a common good. It is these Christians who are right 'on the front lines' of committed humanity today ­ and when I want to find that front, I follow their trail.

It is a vast front, stretching from the most impoverished reaches of the developing world to the hectic struggle to preserve caring values in our own towns and cities. I have never been able to reach these front lines without finding Christian volunteers already in the thick of it, mobilizing congregations that care, and being a faithful witness to truth ­ the primary light in the darkness, and so often the only light.

Now this is something the media and government officials rarely acknowledge, for religion confuses many ­ and anyway, we all like to blow our own horns. So front line efforts of Christianity do not usually produce headlines, and unfortunately this feeds the myth that the church just follows along, to do its modest bit.

Let me repeat, I've never reached a war zone, or famine group or crisis anywhere where some church organization was not there long before me ­ sturdy, remarkable souls, usually too kind to ask "What took you so long?"

I don't slight any of the hard work done by other religions or those wonderful secular NGOs I've dealt with so much over the years. They work closely with church efforts, they are noble allies. But no, so often in desperate areas it is Christian groups there first, that labour heroically during the crisis and continue on long after all the media ­ and the visiting celebrities ­ have left.

Now I came to this admiring view slowly and reluctantly. At the start of my career, I'd largely abandoned religion ­ for I, too, regarded the church as a rather tiresome irrelevance. What ultimately persuaded me otherwise ­ and I took a lot of persuading ­ was the reality of Christianity's mission, physically and in spirit, before my very eyes. It wasn't the attraction of great moments of grandeur ­ although I admit covering this Pope on six of his early trips abroad, including his first one to Mexico and then epic returns to Poland, certainly shook any assumptions I had of Christianity as a fading force.

No, the millions upon millions gathered was impressive; but I was more moved by quiet individual moments of character, and courage that seems to anchored to some deep core within Christianity.

Communism cracks

I remember a dim stairwell in Gdansk, Poland. As many of you remember, the first unbelievable crack in the mighty Communist empire, which had so often proclaimed triumph over religion, occurred in Poland in the early 1980s ­ when the Solidarity Movement, supported by the church, rose to challenge tyranny under the leadership of a most unlikely little shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa.

Later he'd win the Nobel Prize and become president of Poland; but when I met Walesa he was isolated, had been jailed, and his life was so often threatened I thought he was a dead man walking. We all assumed security forces were arranging one of those convenient 'accidents,' that really did happen in that frightening climate of oppression ­ just like the movies.

A few of us met him alone on this stairwell, as he slipped out to Mass. "Are you frightened?" one of us asked. He stopped, looked surprised at the thought, then answered in a voice of steel: "No, I am afraid of no one, and nothing ­ only God." And he walked out alone into the night.

It was a transcendent moment. Here in this dingy stairwell was the purest courage and conscience ­ backed by Christian faith that I suddenly realized no force of empire or terror could ever extinguish.

Years later, in Poland again, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, I watched that empire crumble away before civil rights movements that [had] often begun in equally dingy little church halls and basements ­ early gatherings the outside world never even knew about, and would not have taken seriously if it had. A lot of good things start out quietly, in humble church halls.

'Even here'

There were other moments: with Bishop Tutu in Soweto in South Africa under apartheid, as he counselled Christians of all races how to mobilize against injustice without losing one's humanity ­ and as Reverend Martin Luther King had done in America's segregated south, after he'd got his movement rolling in some Birmingham church halls.

I witnessed so many other church efforts. Saving children in Mozambique from life on garbage dumps; schools for illiterate ex-field hands in the slums of Brazil; the quiet comforting of runaways and addicts in a thousand asphalt city jungles; small groups of Christians visiting the lonely and mentally fragile in low-income boarding house flats; the Out of the Cold Program right here in Toronto.

Groups from many churches work in famine camps ­ feeding, saving, comforting the dying, and somehow keeping everyone's morale up on the worst days.

In my mind, I was struck by some words tolling again and again, like a bell: 'Even here,' churches seemed to say. 'Even here' ­ however remote or wretched or dangerous ­ 'even here' we will be by your side, even to the end . . . This very night, somewhere in El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, some hillside in Brazil, volunteers from a local parish will be out trying to protect the weakest from political or criminal attacks ­ saying "You don't harm them, without coming through us first." For 'even here,' God's message will be heard. And I know that today in Southern Sudan, aid workers are likely guiding bands of women and young children across rivers to safety, as they flee modern day slave raiders . . .

Foreign legionnaires

These Christian 'foreign legionnaires,' as I've come to think of them, never cease to amaze. Once, flying to a disaster story, our twin-engine plane had to make an emergency refueling stop at a nearly deserted landing strip in the dense jungle in central Africa. We stepped out into the middle of absolutely nowhere, it seemed ­ only to be greeted by a cheerful Dutch Reform minister offering tea. My veteran cameraman, Mike Sweeny, later sighed in exasperation: "Do you think you could ever get us to a story ­ somewhere, anywhere ­ where those Christians aren't there first?" I was never able to.

I rather regret that the term 'muscular Christianity' has gone out of use, because a lot of the Christianity I've seen is very hard, muscular work, where there's lots of sweat and dirty hands. The spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is alive.

Many of us in news crews noticed something else, hard to put into words. So often, after a day in the field filming volunteers at work, we'd be sitting back over our nightly drink ­ and one of us would say something like: "Strange people those, know what I mean? There's just something different about them. They've got something that we don't."

I believe that a form of human happiness emerges, when based on a flourishing life in which spirit and intellect are used to the full, for the purpose of the good of all. Yes, they seemed to be 'flourishing.' C.S. Lewis wrote of Christianity producing "a good infection." Christian work on the front lines infects those around them, even those who are not Christian, with a sense of Christ's deep mystery and power. I've felt it. It changes the world. Still.

I'm often asked if I lost belief in God covering events like Ethiopia, then called "the worst hell on earth." Actually, like others before me, it was precisely in such hells that I rediscovered religion. I saw so many countless acts of human love and charity, total respect for the most forsaken, for all life.

I was confronted by the miracle of our humanity. And I felt again the 'good infection' of Christian volunteers, and heard again those words tolling: 'Even here . . . 'even here' . . .

So, summing up my own experience has convinced me that Christianity is best shared with others. I'm no longer one who can say I'll just do it my way. Christianity needs organization ­ and dare I say the word, even institutions. Beyond organization, the church must have trained people to deal with the perplexing, endlessly challenging intellectual depths of Christianity ­ theology that is profound, but also capable of being shared and spread out before all.

It needs guides ­ who can mobilize mind and spirit, as well as work in that humble church hall, with its coffee, biscuits, and triangular shaped sandwiches.

For. of course, the 'front lines' I speak of are not only found on some hilltop in Ethiopia, or in the sinister dusk of a distant jungle. You don't have to go abroad in the 'Christian foreign legion' to find yourself in the thick of action. The front lines run through our own society, through this city, perhaps through this campus. Yes, 'even here.' And the church is to the fore ­ far out in front of the media and politicians ­ in dealing with the needs of our fragmented society.