By Bob Sweetman
Chris Gort was born in Driebergen in The Netherlands in 1941. He was born into an educator’s family that followed its calling to Jakarta in Indonesia and on to Dokkum in the northeast corner of Friesland in The Netherlands. In 1960 he immigrated to Canada under the sponsorship of a great-uncle in Edmonton. Upon arrival he soon met John Olthuis, scored an invitation to John’s wedding in 1961, where he met John’s sister, Elaine, who would become the love of his life. They married in 1966 while he was studying for his MSc in Engineering which he would receive in 1968. In 1968 he and Elaine would also move to Toronto where Chris took a position with IBM. Adventures in Germany followed and then a return to Toronto in the late 1970s for good. In Toronto, Elaine could develop her own gifts in medical care and Chris left IBM to become a successful project manager overseeing his share, we might say, of the remarkable growth of Toronto throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Chris’ relationship with the Olthuis family ensured a relationship to the Reformational stream within the community of Dutch immigrants in Canada. John Olthuis tells the story of an early meeting involving himself, Chris, and Jim Visser in Edmonton that makes up a crucial episode in the earliest prehistory of the present-day Citizens for Public Justice. With John and Jim Olthuis for brothers-in-law, and Jean Olthuis as sister-in-law, there was no escaping the swelling energy of the Association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship and its fledgling educational initiatives, above all, the Institute for Christian Studies and, for a number of years, the Curriculum Development Centre. Nor were Chris and Elaine immune to the excitement around the Christian Reformed Church Chaplaincy at the University of Toronto and its Hart House Fellowship which evolved into a worship community calling itself St. Matthew’s-in-the-Basement.
For the Institute for Christian Studies, the story of Chris reached a new level when he agreed to serve on the ICS Board of Trustees in the early 2000s. The beginning of his first term was shrouded by financial crisis that led to a painful lay-off of staff. When in his second term he agreed to serve as Board Chair, ICS found itself facing new challenges that caused Chris to dive into the inner life of the ICS in a big way. In 2008 ICS President John Suk resigned. Chris approached then ICS Academic Dean Bob Sweetman and convinced him to serve as Acting President within a heightened team concept of leadership. Chris himself would chair a Leadership Team made up of himself, Bob Sweetman, and Claire Veenstra (then, Director of Finance and Administration). Together they faced down the ravages of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and began to seriously try and rethink everything about ICS. Chris took an even greater role when Bob Sweetman stepped down as Dean and Acting President in November 2010 to fight a second round of cancer. Chris became President and served ICS in that role for the next 2½ years. Much good that has slowly come to pass in the intervening years had its beginnings in those 4-plus bracing years.
Chris encouraged academic and administrative staff to come up with good ideas, but emphasized that good ideas were only a very small part of the process by which good new things come to fruition. He also modeled how effective team-building happens. He empowered academics at ICS to develop new programs of study and research. ICS’s Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics is a good case in point. The basic idea was a part of a White Paper on ICS’s future written by Bob Sweetman. The CPRSE was given its name and first concrete form by Lambert Zuidervaart, and then given its present orientation and team-building ethos by Ron Kuipers. All of these initiatives emerged out of an effective communal leadership context. Throughout his presidency Chris encouraged ideas around partnerships, preaching the need over and over again. Again, the several collaborative projects that are currently in development—with The King’s University in Edmonton, with The Teacher’s Academy/Edvance in Ontario, with Knox College in Toronto—can be seen as connected to his warm advocacy of partnering and of an openness to the changes real partnering demands. Above all, Chris’ team-building talents modeled a style of leadership—a mesh of empowerment and responsibility—that has become something of a mantra within the ICS today. Through it all, ICS has found a way to be resilient and focused on present and future service in the face of challenges that could easily have undone it. Chris Gort’s leadership has been a great blessing.
So it was that we at ICS were taken aback when Chris was diagnosed with ALS just short of 2 years ago. We have watched with wonder as he faced his disease with dignity and thoughtfulness, and were saddened by his death on April 2, 2019. We offer this memorial tribute as a token of our gratitude to Chris for his gift of self to ICS, to Elaine for lending us her retired husband when we had such need, and to our God whose loving hand was surely at work in the happy conjunctions that led Chris to ICS and ICS to him.
Requiescat in pace, Chris.
