Bloor Street United Church - Congregational History
Threads in the Fabric
The story begins on page 304 of the big leather bound book of minutes of the Toronto Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. In careful but wavery handwriting, with a scratchy black pen, between approval of calls to ministers at $1,000 a year and disapproval of permitting church membership to those who work on Sunday, the secretary records on March 2, 1886, a successful petition to establish a Sabbath School which became Bloor Street Church.
The school was needed, the petitioners argued, because the Bloor and Spadina neighbourhood, then the northwest fringe of the city, was growing fast; elegant homes were going upon its cow pastures and market gardens. But because the horse-cars did not run on Sunday, the new residents and their children were cut off from their former Presbyterian churches.
The Sabbath school, which opened Oct. 24, 1886, in a house still standing at 33 Sussex Avenue, expanded evening worship. Meanwhile work began on a permanent building at Bloor and Huron, and the petitioners were back ãcraving Presbytery to organize them as a congregation.ä
That was done on November 16, 1887. The church was ready six months later, delayed by strikes and the ãfailure of the contractor to carry out his contract.ä By then it was already too small. The Board of Managers reported in distress that all available seats were taken and still the demand continued. Fixed seats were assigned in those days, although there were no pew rents. Bloor Street was unusual in that from the start it raised its money through envelope givings, white for local, blue for mission, pink for the building fund.
Consequently the congregation of 204, only 15 months after it was organized, committed itself to build a $65,000 church to seat 1170 people. By its opening in June 1890, all the seats on the ground floor had been allotted, and many in the gallery. This building, with additions to the west and interior changes especially after the 1954 fire, is basically the church of today.
Most of its founding congregation lived south of Bloor. One elderâs district, out of five, covered everything north of Bloor. Some of the fine homes of the first leaders still stand, notably 80 Bedford road and 49 Madison Avenue. The first minister, the Rev. W.G. Wallace, lived on Madison, behind the present parking lost, in what is now the Ecumenical Forum. He was inducted in 1888 and served until 1913, beginning a tradition of long pastorates. The Rev. Ernest Marshall Howse, served from 1948 to 1970. The Rev. David Allan, who came in 1969, overlapped the Rev. Bruce McLeod from 1970 to 1975 and the Reverend Clifford Elliott from 1975 to 1986.
Sunday was a serious commitment in early decades. One attended morning service of course, perhaps preceded by a Bible class. In the afternoon there was Sabbath School, then home for tea, and back for evening service and for the ãyoung peopleä, a fellowship hour. The services were solemn and formal; ushers wore morning coats and striped trousers. Members sat in their numbered pews, and for a while numbers were listed beside names in the annual reports. Children attended Junior Congregations and did not appear in church or take communion until they were full members. Communion was conducted with military precision. Members and communion tokens, delivered by their elder before each occasion, which they surrendered, to be counted next day and their attendance recorded.
There was fun, too. By the third decade reports note a tennis club, a menâs Bible class of 60 regrettably ãcompelled to meet in a room unsuited to their natural oxygenic requirementsä, addresses on such subjects as the status of women in China and he novels of Jane Austen (sometimes with the treat of the first audio-visuals: stereopticon slides), money raised ($42) to send a fur coat to a missionary in northern Ontario and time spent teaching Jewish immigrants to read and write, and a young peopleâs society whose skating and sleighing parties attracted crowds but who interesting missionary lectures ãwere not a well attended as we would wish.ä Like all Presbyterian churches of its day, official Bloor Street was all male. Though occasional thanks are recorded to ãthe ladiesä for their assistance with what was apparently menâs work, for decades no womenâs names appear in the lists of lay leaders or minutes of the congregational meeting or the reports of Session and the Board of managers. Not until 1922 did women present the reports of their own organizations at the annual meeting. Not until the 50th annual meeting did a womanâs name appear as the mover of a business matter. While women gradually crept into the music committee, Religious Education Council and Board of Mission, it was not until 1950 that the Kirk Club dared to point out that unmarried women were contributing to the church without representation on its governing bodies (married women were assumed to be adequately represented by their husbands), and until 1969 that the first women were elected elders.
In their own organizations, however, women had almost a parallel church. The Womenâs Foreign Missionary Society auxiliary was organized only two months after the congregation itself, with 48 members. Soon after came the Womanâs Association, and later a home mission auxiliary, as well as other groups of which the longest lived were the Kirk Club and Businesswomenâs Club. The WA in its first years called on all families monthly, entertained students, collected for a furnishing fund and (in 1891) considered ãhow to aid the unemployed.ä The WMS collected clothing and cash for mission, studied the then-unknown world around us, started missionary groups for boys and girls one of which lasted 50 years, and stretched their pennies to send the Missionary Record into every home.
A number of threads are woven through the fabric of the first 100+ years. Some like a welcome for students appear in the first years and continue intermittently, breaking out for instance in the crowded Campus Club of the 1950s. Others like sponsorship of refugee families begin only after World War II. Constant through it all is missionary outreach.
From the first, the Board of Managers complained about ãample room for improvementä in weekly givings, urged more to use envelopes, adduced averages to demonstrate that bills could not possibly be met; and yet the books always balanced, mortgages were paid off, and there was money for others - in some years more for others than we spent on ourselves. In the Presbyterian Churchâs Century Fund campaign in 1900, Bloor Street, then only 12, stood second in Canada in its contribution.
The same year it opened its expensive new building, the congregation took on an outreach mission at Wychwood, which became St. Columba United Church at Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue. Later it underwrote and nurtured two other new congregations in Toronto. The Sabbath School already was supporting a French-speaking boy at the Pointe aux Trembles mission school ãto break the yoke of Romanism in our Dominion.ä The congregation supported two missions in western Canada, and in 1902 became one of the first to have its own overseas missionary. He was a minister and doctor, James Menzies, whose wife Davina Robb, was a chartered member who had been sent to China in 1896. Not only did it send $1,200 a year for hi support in China but added enough in individual fights to build a small hospital. After Menzies was killed in 1920, Dr. Robert McClure was sent to China in his place, with his support guaranteed by the Sunday school.
Another thread is the ministry of music. The first annual meeting appointed both an organist and a choir leader, at $125 and $40 a year respectively. By 1912 the Session could that ãour excellent quartet and choir has. . .maintained the high standards of excellence for which our church has become noted.ä That high standard was continued when Frederick Silvester was organist from 1937 to 1966, when Lois Marshall was soprano soloist, and there was acclaimed evening organ recitals and special choir offerings such as the St. Matthew Passion.
Still another thread is the intellectual. A number of Bloor Streetâs founders were professors at Knox College, the Presbyterian theological seminary, and partly because of its location, it has consistently attracted both professors and students. Dr. Pidgeon came to Bloor Street from theological teaching, and three of his successors have taught theological courses.
Most were influential in the United Church, the world church and in the community. Dr. Howse and Dr. McLeod were moderators of the United Church; Dr. Pidgeon was the first moderator of the United Church, and the last of the Presbyterian Church before Union in 1925. (Bloor Street voted 1055 to 311 to enter Union, and lost 400 members because of it). Sunday services were broadcast from 1924 intermittently until the 1960s. Three ministers wrote regularly for magazines and newspapers.
On our 50th anniversary the Session reported as it might report on the 100th: Growth and change bring new conditions and varied problems. But it went on to hope that ãthe strength, unity and harmony of a great congregation established by the fathers may be maintained by the children, and to this end new conditions and problems will be faced with courage, efficiency and prayerful consideration
