April 23rd: Anniversaries Part One

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. This is the first of a multi-part series on anniversary services at St. Matthias’. This week, we cover the first service in the new building and the celebration of the building’s 50th anniversary.

The morning of April 28th, 1912 dawned cold and clear after an unseasonably warm but cloudy Saturday. Matthians on their way to church would have donned their hats and gloves, made sure their prayerbooks were in hand, and then set foot for the first time into a service held in the building they’d been dreaming about for over twenty years. Their service of morning prayer would have been rather different than ours; The Church of England in the Dominion of Canada used an English Book of Common Prayer from 1662 until it developed its own in 1918, and we use a substantial revision of that Canadian prayerbook, first authorised for use in 1962.

Looking at the hymns, psalms, and special readings selected for this first service, the air of joy is palpable. From a small group of young people meeting in the front rooms of houses in 1873, the St. Matthias’ congregation had swelled in number and in prosperity, and although this first service saw an undecorated church, décor would come, and come substantially.

The committee was also responsible for planning the anniversary service on St. Matthias’ Day 1962, which fell on February 25th. Spirited discussion about the contents of the bulletin ensued for many months, including formal memoranda and proposals and concerns about printing costs. Another concern was for Rev. Jack Doidge, who would arrive in Montreal to be inducted as rector of St. Matthias’ only three days before the anniversary service. As the committee noted to Rev. Doidge in an apologetic note in the late fall of 1961, the date had been set fifty years previous so they really couldn’t do much about it. Rev. Doidge’s return letter is full of the good humour that St. Matthias’ would come to know and love. But the excellence of the service, the balance of the bulletin, and the ultimate success of the anniversary project are due not to clerical leadership but to lay.

The church St. Matthias’ decided on as a 50th building anniversary memorial would be in the Diocese of the Arctic, which the Bishop of the Arctic had suggested would cost about $7000 – almost $70,000 in today’s dollars. The chair of the anniversary committee, one J.M. Linnell, was the driving force behind this decision. His firm belief in the importance of work outside the parish and of what we might today call economic justice (the redistribution of wealth to rectify historical disparities), paired with his true skill as a correspondent, resulted in possibly the most successful fundraising campaign in the history of the church. Because the Anglican community in Igloolik, Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) was growing so rapidly that it could no longer fit in Rev. Noah Nasook’s tiny home, and because the Hudson’s Bay Company shipped only once per summer, the Bishop of the Arctic told Linnell in May 1962 that the materials for the church would need to be purchased that year, even though St. Matthias’ would need the approval of Vestry to begin to fundraise.

Undaunted, Linnell suggested that the Bishop find an alternate revenue stream to cover the immediate cost on a temporary basis, assuring him that St. Matthias’ would cover the cost. At the September meeting of the Advisory Board, the Board opted not to wait for Vestry’s approval and instead established a mid-October 1962 start date for fundraising. The Bishop and his staff duly forwarded a history of the community, a short profile of Rev. Nasook, and photographs, of which we have a detailed listing only as the photographs themselves were returned to the Diocesan office in Toronto at the close of the fundraising period.

Perhaps some members of the community recalled the joy their own new building had inspired, or perhaps they recalled the difficulty of worshipping in a too-small space. Whatever the reason, by January 1963, a week before the Bishop visited St. Matthias’ to put in one final appeal and less than three months after the first appeal, $6,188 had been raised. The Bishop was presented with a $7,000 cheque at the service on February 3rd.

And, a year later, in February 1964, the Rev. Noah Nasook preached at St. Matthias’, Westmount. So many years later, St. Matthias’, Igloolik, holds Sunday services at 11am. Perhaps, as our service reaches its crescendo and theirs begins, for a brief time, the two sets of Matthians are rejoicing together.

**A small note: some of the correspondence between Linnell and the Bishop of the Arctic, whose Diocesan seat was in Toronto, uses language to refer to Inuit that we now recognise as a slur. While it’s important to allow that the Anglican Church in the 1960s was limited to the knowledge of the 1960s, the role the Church played in Canada’s growing control over the North is just as important to acknowledge. The last Anglican-run residential school would not close until 1969, and while reconciliation discussions on the national level often focus on more Southern Indigenous groups, Indigenous-led Northern ministry is at the heart of the Anglican Church of Canada’s strides toward healing.

Today, the Diocese of the Arctic is part of the Anglican Church’s Council of the North, which is allied with Indigenous Ministries.