March 4th: A Shifting Budget
St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.
In the 1880s and 90s, when Vestry was still held at Easter (no wonder there were sometimes only a dozen or so attendees!), financial reporting was fairly simple. St. Matthias’ was still a small church, and the entire balance sheet for the year could fit on a single page. By 1945, the financial statements had sprawled to cover such extensive paper real estate that the Wardens and Treasurer made the decision to stop providing detailed accounts for all the areas of the church’s work, and to instead simply supply an overview of core expenditures and receipts. But this decision was partially reversed within 15 years, as the various Women’s Organisations began to make a significant financial mark on the parish. As you read your 2022 Annual Report, with the included financial statements, you’ll notice yet another change: a narrative budget.
The Women’s Organisations continued to grow in number, size, and financial impact well into the 1980s. From the very beginning, they sponsored a wide variety of mission work around the world and in the city, hosted parish events and learning activities, ran rummage sales, donated proceeds to the church, and made quite a lot of tea. Although the parish had a Coordinator, whose role was to advise the Diocese on how to disburse St. Matthias’ assessment, the vast majority of St. Matthias’ outreach work went through the Women’s Organisations. In 1957, they began to be invited to submit annual reports, which reached such an extensive length that in 1970, the reports began to be prefaced by a “summary,” so that those not interested in reading pages upon pages of women’s activities might do with a shorter document to explain the past year at a high level.
But the Women’s Organisations weren’t the only special funds in St. Matthias’ historic budgets. Whether the beginning of the Building Fund (1893) that was launched to finance additions to the 1875 building and would eventually result in the present church, the New Rectory Fund that purchased a residence at 270 Kensington in 1945, or contributions to global Anglican projects like the British Flood Relief Fund, St. Matthias’ has a history of special financial projects.
Most notable of these, or perhaps most notorious, is what we now call the Memorial Fund. In the 1920s, a War Memorial Fund was established, resulting in the Honour Roll that resides in our Memorial Chapel. That fund became the Memorial Organ Fund in 1951, as the organ was in dire need of replacing, and was renamed the Legacies and Memorials Fund sometime before 1972. Around the same time, a Centennial Fund was established to help pay for the costs of the 1973 Centennial, including our current organ; this Fund and the Legacies and Memorials Fund were rolled into one in 1976. It was renamed in 1981 to the St. Matthias’ Memorial Fund, and appears in our current statements as simply the “Memorial Fund.” In 1972, the Legacies and Memorial Fund had its first withdrawal to offset the church’s deficit: a little over $14,000. In 1986, that practice became standard, and would not be officially stopped until the late 2010s.
Decisions like those around the Memorial Fund are one of the main subjects of Vestry minutes going back to the very beginning of our archives. In one case, controversy around the 1976 General Synod decision to allow the ordination of women, made while Rev. Dr. Patricia Kirkpatrick was a Student Assistant at St. Matthias’, prompted Vestry 1977 to consider withholding funds from the National Church in protest. The idea was defeated, but even in the careful language of the minutes of that year, echoes can be read of high emotion, a not-unusual feature of financial discussions. In fact, 1985 is the only year on record where there was not a single point of debate, a fact the minutes attribute to then-treasurer Rosalie Parsons-Brown’s clarity of explanation. While we hope that this year’s Vestry won’t have quite so much controversy, we can predict with reasonable certainty that a lot of Vestry 2023 will be taken up with budgetary concerns!