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 MoreExactly 50 years ago today, St. Matthias’ welcomed the newest – and largest – member of its pastoral team: a gorgeous tracker organ built by German organ-maker Karl Wilhelm…
Read MoreThere’s a lot for St. Matthias’ to be thankful for, 150 years on…
Read MoreBeginning in the 1830s, the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Methodist churches set up boarding schools for Indigenous children that would become an important part of federal policy after Confederation…
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 MoreOne of the delights of our archives is just how many stories are contained even in non-narrative documents. Today, we dive deeply into the first seventy-five years of insurance…
Read MoreWhere would St. Matthias’ be without the Chancel Guild?...
Read MoreIn the 1880s, Montreal (population: 217,000 by 1891) faced the harshness of winter in a quintessentially Victorian English way: by building vast architectural confections out of snow…
Read MoreA little later this month, St. Matthias’ Parish Executive Committee will meet for its third quarterly meeting of 2023, the first to be held in person since 2019…
Read MoreOur archives record mostly notable things: significant donations, important services, matters of canon law procedure, and so on. And those things are central to telling St. Matthias’ story, but…
Read MoreIn the 1960s, the Anglican and United Churches of Canada were actively contemplating becoming a single denomination. St. Matthias’ took part in these dialogues [link to Christian Unity blog post], and in larger conversations about Christian unity that were increasingly popular during the decade...
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 MoreAs Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Queen Victoria was the highest authority to which the new congregation of St. Matthias’ owed allegiance. In fact, if St. Matthias’ had been founded about twenty years earlier, it would have had an even more direct line to the monarchy, since the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada was only granted autonomy as an ecclesiastical province in the 1850s. Next week, when Charles III is coronated, he will take up the mantle of Defender and Governor of Anglicanism…
Read MoreOn April 12th, 2020, 78 separate devices (phones, computers, and tablets) logged on to St. Matthias’ Easter Morning Zoom service, a month after the only pandemic service that St. Matthias’ cancelled. Those 78 connections…
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 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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