Sharman, Henry Burton, 1865-1953 : Henry Burton Sharman was born 12 August 1865, in Stratford, Ontario, the eldest of eleven children. His father operated a farm near Stratford and a foundry which manufactured agricultural implements; his mother was a schoolteacher and church organist. After attending school in Stratford, Sharman entered the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) at Guelph in 1882 where he received a Diploma in Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science in 1884. He then interrupted his education to travel to England on his father's behalf to supervise the importation of the first full-blooded Hereford cattle to arrive in Stratford. In 1885 he worked as a book-keeper at his father's foundry. In the following year, the family moved to Manitoba where his father and uncles had purchased large tracts of farm land. After a brief stint of farming, Sharman attended a normal school in Winnipeg and taught for one year in Birtle, Manitoba, before returning to the OAC in Guelph in 1890. He received his B.Sc. degree in 1891 and stayed on for two years as an instructor in chemistry.
Showing considerably more interest in agriculture and business than in religion during his youth, Sharman was profoundly affected by the visit of T. H. Crossley, a Methodist evangelist, to Stratford in 1884 at a time when the Protestant churches of North America were being swept by religious revivals. He soon became a leader in church work and was active in student Christian life, joining the YMCA at the OAC. During his final years there, John R. Mott, noted American evangelist and founder of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) for Foreign Missions, discovered Henry with the result that he left his teaching position to move to Chicago to join the staff of the SVM. From 1893 to 1900, Henry worked as Corresponding Secretary for the SVM and as Bible Study Secretary for the Student Department of the International Committee of YMCAs. During this period, he published his first book, "Studies in the Life of Christ" (1896), based on his experiences leading student Bible classes. In 1896, he married Abbie Lyon, also employed as a secretary for the SVM.
Henry entered graduate studies in 1900 in the Department of New Testament History and Literature at the University of Chicago where he studied church history, modern and ancient languages, theology and ethics, and Old and New Testament studies, and was particularly influenced by his contact with Professor Ernest De Witt Burton. He received his Ph.D. in 1906 and was retained by the Divinity School at the University of Chicago as a lecturer for several years. His dissertation, "The Teachings of Jesus About the Future", was published and widely reviewed in 1909. An advocate of the new "higher criticism", which encouraged the application of the critical methods of historians, scientists, and literary critics to the Bible, Henry found that his modern liberal views made him popular with students but often created difficulties with his more conservative colleagues and he felt increasingly uncomfortable in an academic setting. Nor did he feel sufficiently free to express his own views in the setting provided by the SVM and the YMCA. In 1909 he left the University of Chicago to return to Canada; in future he would hold university positions on an honorary basis only.
This dramatic step was taken with the deliberate intention of setting himself up in business as a way of achieving a degree of financial independence that would enable him to pursue his religious vocation in his own way. Accordingly he founded, with his associates R. W. Gladstone and John N. Lyon, his brother-in-law, the Ontario Metal Culvert Company based in Guelph, Ontario, which became the Canada Ingot Iron Company in 1915 (it eventually became Armco Canada Ltd. in 1946). Henry Burton Sharman served as President from 1908 to 1920, and as a member of the Board of Directors until 1931; after only six years his goal of financial independence had been achieved. Among his other business ventures, he invested in an attempt to develop an alternative to the internal combustion engine by an American inventor, Arthur J. Paige, during the First World War. He was also invited to serve as a mediator of labour disputes.
Even during these early years of intense involvement in his business when he travelled back and forth across the country, Henry did not lose contact with students. He remained intimately involved with the Canadian student YMCAs and YWCAs as a leader of Bible study classes and, after its formation in 1920, with the Student Christian Movement of Canada, also holding a position as part-time lecturer at the University of Toronto; the Sharman home was often "open house" to students during the evenings. After 1914 he devoted several years to the writing of "Records in the Life of Jesus" (1917) and "Jesus in the Records" (1918). In 1922 he attended the meeting of the World's Student Christian Federation in Peking (Beijing), China, on behalf of the Student Christian Movement of Canada. In 1926 Henry Sharman returned to China where he remained for three years as an exchange professor in the History Department at Yenching University in Peking. This was followed by a move to Wallingford, Pennsylvania, to accept an invitation to teach at Pendle Hill, a graduate school conducted by the Society of Friends. In 1933 he retired to California, continuing to conduct classes in the study of Jesus at YMCA conferences at Asilomar, California, and other locations. During the 1930s and 1940s, he also published a number of influential works including "Jesus as Teacher" (1935), "Studies in the Records of the Life of Jesus" (1935), "The Son of Man and Kingdom of God" (1943), and "Paul as Experient" (1945), and supervised the translation of some of his works into Chinese and Japanese.
Perhaps his most lasting and significant contribution to Christian thought was the Iota Sigma Seminar, held every summer with one exception between 1923 and 1945. (The name given the seminar was taken from the first and last letters of the Greek name for Jesus). These seminars of approximately six weeks' duration were attended by a select group of about thirty-five graduate students and university faculty who came from Canada, the United States, Europe, China and Japan to experience Sharman's unique teaching methods. The purpose of the seminars was to study the life and teachings of Jesus as disclosed in the original records using no other books of reference and without any underlying assumptions as to the origin or person of Jesus. There were no lectures but results were to be reached by group discussion and individual research in the original records. The participants, many of whom were involved with the YMCA, YWCA, and Canadian Girls in Training, frequently testified that their lives were profoundly affected by their experiences attending the lota Sigma Seminars. Most of these gatherings where held at Camp Minnesing, a site in Algonquin Park, Ontario, leased and then purchased in 1930 by Henry Sharman for this purpose. Shortly before his death, he and his wife took steps to ensure that the work of the seminars would be continued under the auspices of the Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation, a project conceived as early as 1928 and described as "a natural nucleation of college and university people, in Canada and the United States, who are interested in the unfettered and thorough study, the adequate understanding, and the sound evaluation of Jesus of Nazareth within the academic community."
Following Henry Burton Sharman's death, 2 December 1953, in Carmel, California, the establishment of the foundation was overseen by Abbie Sharman and subsequently by Professors Harry Rathbun, Glenn Olds, and other close friends and long-time participants in the Iota Sigma Seminars. This same "Group of Friends" also supervised the preparation and publication of "This One Thing: A Tribute to Henry Burton Sharman", published by the Student Christian Movement Press in 1959.
Sharman, Abbie Lyon, 1872-1957 : Abbie Mary Lyon was born in Hangchow, China, on 14 September 1872, to American missionary parents and spent her childhood years in China, her parents returning to the United States in 1880 to settle in Wooster, Ohio, for the sake of the education of the children. In 1886 her father returned to China, leaving her mother to raise seven children, the second of whom was Abbie. After graduating from high school, Abbie attended the University of Wooster, receiving a B.A. in 1894 and an honorary M.A. in 1897. Apparently it was while attending the Chicago World's Fair with her family in 1893 that she met Henry Burton Sharman for the first time. Having decided to join her father in China as a missionary, Abbie went to Chicago in 1894 to study at the Moody Bible Institute in preparation for her career. The Institute was located in the same building as the office of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) which employed both Sharman and her closest brother Willard. In 1895 and 1896 Abbie, too, travelled as a secretary for the SVM, recruiting students for the mission field on both American and Canadian campuses. In the summer of 1896, Abbie having been accepted for service with the Presbyterian Board of Missions and the date of her sailing set, Henry Burton Sharman arrived for an extended visit with the Lyon family. Shortly thereafter, the planned missionary career was cancelled and the two were married in December of that year.
The couple established residence in Chicago and in 1900 Abbie embarked on graduate studies with her husband, receiving a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 1906. Following graduation, Abbie worked in the university library and began writing book reviews, adopting the pen name, Lyon Sharman. She remained in their Chicago apartment for some time while Henry returned to Canada to established his iron culvert business. Every summer during these early years of their marriage, the Sharmans, both of whom suffered from poor health, summered together at Cape Cod. In 1910, the couple moved their residence to Winnipeg where Abbie remained while her husband travelled across the country on business. On her arrival, she wrote a series of newspaper articles on her impressions of the city and on the attitude of the locals to "the American woman." Soon, she became involved with the Winnipeg branch of the Canadian Women's Press Club, serving a one-year term as president in 1911-1912 and travelling to the Edmonton conference in 1913. The Sharmans left Winnipeg in 1915 for Chicago where Henry spent an intensive period of work on his books. After another move to Toronto, Abbie maintained the Sharman home at 67 Queen's Park, from 1919 to 1926, which was always "open house" to the many students in the area.
In 1912 she arranged for the private publication of a children's story, "The Horse That Educated the Children", and in 1914, "Bamboo", a collection of autobiographical short stories about her childhood in China, was commercially published and well received. In 1920, she edited "The Cape Cod Journal of the Pilgrim Fathers". In 1922, Abbie was able to return to China for the first time since her childhood when the Sharmans travelled to the meeting of the World Student Christian Federation in Peking (Beijing). This visit served to intensify Abbie's interest in Chinese art work and led to the publication of "The Sea Wall", a collection of verse illustrated with her own Chinese-style graphics, in 1925. This was followed, in 1926, by "A Somersault to Love". Following her husband's appointment to Peking University, Abbie returned to China for a much longer visit of three years duration, returning to the United States for the summers of 1926 and 1928, but remaining in China without Henry in the summer of 1927 when she travelled in Shanghai. During the China period, she studied at the Peking Language School and researched the biography, "Sun Yat-Sen: His Life and Its Meaning", published in 1934.
In addition to her writing, Abbie displayed considerable interest in art and music. She played an important role in the success of the Iota Sigma Seminars by supervising dramatic productions, poetry readings, discussion of artists and their works, and evenings of music. For much of her life she was an avid amateur photographer. Her artistic sensibility is evident in many of her attractive landscapes taken in Canada and the northeastern United States, and particularly in the large body of photographs she produced in China which reveal a fascination with Chinese landscapes and architecture. A great deal of her energy and talent was also directed to supporting the work of her husband. She supervised the moving, furnishing, and maintenance of their many residences, and made sure that their home was an inviting place for students to congregate; the Sharmans had no children but they remained surrounded by young people for most of their lives. She took lengthy notes on the discussions at the Iota Sigma Seminars for her husband's use, offered critical comments on his manuscripts, and helped to edit them for publication. His letters to her during his frequent absences testify to her important role as her husband's "sounding board", as he confided all details of his business and religious work to her and often sought her advice. Following their return from China and Henry's teaching appointment at Pendle Hill, the Sharmans established a new residence at Wallingford, Pennsylvania, where they remained until 1933 when they retired to Pebble Beach, California, taking Abbie's widowed mother with them.
During the 1930s Abbie attended the Iota Sigma Seminar during the summers and continued with her writing, editing several missionary journals and accounts by her parents, Mandana E. Lyon and David N. Lyon, known collectively as the "White Cloud Papers", for private publication. She also published "Town and Forest" in 1942. In 1944, she supervised the establishment of the last Sharman residence at Carmel, California. During the late 1940s she cared for her husband as his health began to fail and assisted him in drawing up plans to ensure the continued existence of the Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation. Following Henry's death in 1953, Abbie's own health deteriorated rapidly. Her last years were spent as an invalid in the care of her sister Lois Lyon Mattox. She died in Duarte, California, on 21 July 1957.
