The St. Matthias’ Sunday School has been through many changes since 1873, including years of simply not existing. Although it is always tempting to see the Sunday School as a somewhat parallel organisation…
Read MoreBefore the War Memorial was moved to the Memorial Chapel in the North Transept, there was a much less military bent to the chapel’s overall décor. But the differences are not really all that major…
Read MoreThe earliest documents we have in our archives are financial ones, and they are certainly the most numerous as well. In the 1880s…
Read MoreWhere would St. Matthias’ be without the Chancel Guild?...
Read MoreMarch of this year, we considered a letter from a mysterious “John,” who detailed several physical remnants of the original church persisting to the new 1912 building. One of John’s pieces was the Memorial Chapel altar. John’s letter says that “the altar in the North Transept came from the old church and was stored down in the furnace room of the present building until Canon Oliver found it there after the transept was built and put it back in use.” But was he right?
Read MoreSt. Matthias’, like many Protestant churches in Canada, is covered in memorials to dead soldiers, many in their late teens or early twenties. Whether you’ve read a plaque, looked up at a stained-glass window, or taken a moment to peruse the honour roll in the Memorial Chapel, it’s hard to avoid the reminders of what, and whom, this parish lost during the World Wars. The desire to memorialise these boys coincided with two important aspects of St. Matthias’ life from the 1920s through the 1960s…
Read MoreBy the early 1970s, the St. Matthias’ Association of Women had expanded to include enough subsidiary groups that they occupied over half the page count of each year’s annual report, had financial statements as long as those of the church proper, and were getting a little tired of being ignored when it came to church governance…
Read MoreToday’s St. Matthias’ choristers get their weekly assignments via email (and whiteboard), but they otherwise aren’t all that different from the assignments of the 1930s and 1940s…
Read MoreReading lessons and welcoming people into the church are two tasks that have been with St. Matthias’ as long as we’ve been a “we”! Each piece of scripture read and each bulletin handed out or collection plate circulated is the result of slowly evolving traditions…
Read MoreThe St. Matthias’ Annual Vestry Meeting is this Sunday! In lieu of a regular blog post, we’ve compiled a list of Vestry Attendance Dos and Don’ts, based on some curiosities from past Vestry minutes and attendance sheets…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MoreIn January 1938, then-rector Rev. Gilbert Oliver complained in his report to Vestry that “whereas there were over 700 families in the Parish who look upon St. Matthias as their church, approximately only 400 families are regular attendants, and only about half of those families attending bear their share of the expense.” It was not the first such complaint from a Rector or a Warden, nor would it be the last, but in Rev. Oliver’s case, concern about attendance may have been exacerbated by an issue in the parish that had been ongoing since before his appointment a decade previous…
Read MoreAfter the new church building was finished in 1912, St. Matthias’ occupied two buildings on their single property: the old church, and the one we now call home. But in 1933, a stray comment at the Annual Vestry meeting about the difficulty the Sunday School was having trekking back and forth between buildings started a conversation that would grow, in two short years, into the hall where Miss Vicky’s now welcomes Westmount’s pre-schoolers…
Read MoreThings at St. Matthias’ haven’t always been as serious as vestry meetings, financial reports, and lost bells. The parish has a long and vibrant history in the arts – our choir, of course, and the succession of organs, but also operettas, fashion shows, and Christmas pageants…
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