The historic church of St. Andrew's, Toronto, was born of a congregation that came together in the blustery March of 1830 when Queen Victoria was about to be crowned, so beginning her great era.
We need to dismiss any notion, as we look back on the faded lithographs and photos of Presbyterian ancestors, that they were the stuffy and rigid souls so often lampooned. They were anything but colourless. St. Andrew's was founded by that hardy band of Scots that made up the muscular wave of Scottish immigration that recent historians now assure us "changed the world." Largely Lowland Scots from the Presbyterian heartland, the famed land of the Kirk which had given followers the world's most advanced public education system; they brought to North America a striking sense of individual rights and religious freedom as well as an open approach to discussion and debate remarkable for the time.
St. Andrew's came together out of devotion to the mother church, the Church of Scotland. But it was also progressive in many ways. Other congregations were shocked when, in 1852, St. Andrew's established a choir, a newfangled musical wave that appalled the older Kirks. Soon after, St. Andrew's was dragged before the Synod and warned of excesses when it dared to become the first Presbyterian church in Canada to acquire an organ. The organ stayed and the choir continues joyfully on to this day.
From the beginning, members were anxious to mix religious contemplation with active social work. In the rutted and ramshackle Victorian Toronto of the time, St. Andrew's was keenly aware of the high levels of poverty and suffering and earliest records show widows and local poor being cared for. A Stranger's Friend Society was established to run soup kitchens and gather collections for the destitute. Women were in the forefront of organizing relief and from the 1840s on ran a spreading network of community services. Years before the Ethiopian famine and Live Aid efforts of the 1980s, St. Andrew's mobilized a Famine Relief Drive for India in 1851.
St. Andrew's was also recognized for its intellectual curiosity. It was the lead Presbyterian congregation in the establishment of Queen's University and its famed Philosophy department, which so influenced Protestant thought in the latter 19th century.
Such innovations helped make St. Andrew's so popular that pews were soon overflowing. There was no option but to move and grow larger. So in 1876 the congregation raised $100,000 to build the current majestic church at King and Simcoe Streets, smack in the busiest heart of the downtown. Renowned architect W.G. Storm used Georgetown stone to create the Norman Scottish or Romanesque style of the exterior. Inside, the works of curved wood and granite pillars made St. Andrew's an instant sensation.
Socially, St. Andrew's had become a curious institution, known both as the pinnacle of Toronto's Scottish society and for its devoted work among the poor. Historian Charlotte Gray has noted St. Andrew's "was best known for its preachers and its good works" and in the 1870s this combination was to produce a remarkable epoch in its history. The arrival of Rev. D. J. Macdonnell brought a dynamo at a time of tumultuous change in Presbyterianism and the wider church-the period after Darwin, the arrival of the Age of Modernism and new debates over the church's role in society. Macdonnell was quickly to become one of the most famed churchmen in Canada, according to Gray, "a fiery orator with burning eyes and an unquenchable ambition to improve the world. Macdonnell filled the pews of St. Andrew's three times each Sunday-not only because, in his rasping Scottish burr, he preached such powerful sermons, but also because he generated controversy."
In an age when the press eagerly covered the sermons of leading ministers, Macdonnell in 1875 caused a theological scandal that was the sensation of all Ontario. After a sermon in which he cast doubt on the "doctrine of eternal punishment" the minister was hauled before a heresy trial at General Assembly. The case caused a near schism within the church at the very time the church union movement was struggling to bring together the various streams of Presbyterianism in Canada. Despite a media firestorm, the congregation rallied solidly behind their young minister. Macdonnell not only survived, but quickly established St. Andrew's as a centre in the fight for religious tolerance in Canada.
What most made St. Andrew's stand out, however, was an intense involvement in new social work, a drive that would make the church a leader in the coming Social Gospel movement in Canada. This downtown church was a witness to some of the worst conditions of squalor and disease in North America. Toronto slums near the railway yards held thousands in a state of poverty almost unimaginable today. It was a Dickensian world of tarpaper shacks and tenements where child prostitution was rampant, and sweat shop exploitation of women and barefoot children commonplace. A royal commission in 1886 noted illiterate children as young as 10 worked 64-hour weeks in unventilated factories for as little as $1.50 a week.
Mobilized by Rev. Macdonnell, St. Andrew's moved forcefully to establish literacy classes for working children, assistance for distressed mothers, church schools and visits to the sick and dying. The historic Penny Savings bank was opened to help the working poor save money (the government later expanded this bank into a nationwide institution).
Even in our time, when the concept of outreach is so accepted, St. Andrew's record of social work in the 1880s and 1890s makes astonishing reading. It founded the famous Nelson Street Institute just two blocks north of the church, which would soon become a model for other churches across Canada. There it operated night schools, a mother's meeting association, boys and girls' clubs, gymnasium, sewing and cooking classes. A holiday house was opened on Lake Simcoe to give needy downtown children a chance to escape the heat and pollution of Toronto summers. Teams of formidable St. Andrew's women started dropping into the overcrowded tenement houses to offer immediate help to immigrants and urban poor.
This new era of Social Gospel in Victorian times proclaimed the often-controversial message that the church must pursue Christ's work within the world. The works of St. Andrew's deeply inspired a frequent visitor, future Prime Minister Mackenzie King, whose famous mother, Isabel, was one of the church's most vigorous social workers. Later, when the Nelson Street Institute became the St. Andrew's Institute (1912) at the site of the current Church Hall, King was on hand to proclaim his own dedication to such efforts, a commitment that would later have profound effect on Canadian social reform. King used St. Andrew's as his example when he insisted, "The church would have no place but the world in which it finds itself, it is but one institution, but… its mission is to breathe upon the others the spirit of life."
What is ironic now is that Presbyterians have allowed much of this remarkable past to be forgotten. Indeed, with habitual self-deprecation, they have allowed an absurd version to take hold of an uptight Church of joyless and gloom addicted elites resistant to all change. In fact, St. Andrew's was also in the forefront of progressive theology. To quote from a non-Presbyterian, Canadian historian Ramsey Cook, "by the 1890's theological liberalism had made a noticeable impact on Protestant thinking in English Canada. Nowhere was that impact more obvious than in the Presbyterian Church."
The strain of operating downtown took its tool. In 1896 Reverend Macdonnell died prematurely at age 53, worn down by a quarter century of exhausting ministry. The church often wearied of the depressing surroundings and constant struggles to help impoverished neighbours. Yet over coming decades it would reject repeated proposals to leave the grit behind for greener, more prosperous areas of Toronto.
At times morale was badly shaken, never more so than during the appalling tragedy of the First World War. Church members of the 48th Highlanders-associated with St. Andrew's since its founding-were among the first to march off to the trenches in 1914. By 1918 fully a quarter of the congregation, 137, were off serving, including six St. Andrew's women who were nurses in France. Of the terrible cost, we read in the church history "the young life of St. Andrew's was drained increasingly year by year in the marshes of Flanders" and by war's end 19 young men of the congregation had been killed, including two in one day on August 17, 1918.
After such losses, the beginning of the '20s seemed to some in the congregation a sad period of drift and demoralization. Then, quite dramatically, in 1924 St. Andrew's found a place in history as Canada watched the great Church Union Debate. This was the move to unite Presbyterians, Methodists and the Congregational Church in one body as today's United Church. This movement, pressed by unionist advocates for a decade, met strong resistance within St. Andrew's, which began to lead a chorus of angry congregations who complained they were being unfairly and undemocratically dragooned into Union.
Though General Assembly was ready to opt for Union, many individual churches were not; and St. Andrew's voted 94 per cent against. The battle was joined as another remarkable St. Andrew's minister, Stuart Parker rose to deplore "the rending of a great church." Furthermore, he thundered, there will not be one united church "for we Presbyterians stand apart." Across Canada, Presbyterian congregations rallied to this stand and St. Andrew's quickly became recognized as the headquarters of Presbyterianism. In June 1925 national delegates descended on Toronto and in unique sessions, which overflowed St. Andrew's and spilled out onto the surrounding grounds, a continuing Presbyterian church was proclaimed and duly organized.
Revived by a renewed sense of mission the church carried on its downtown ministry, through the Second World War, the 50s and 60s, when suburbia pulled so many in the congregation away and financial problems multiplied.
By the early 1970s the management committee and Rev. Douglas Stewart (full disclosure: my late uncle) developed an ambitious renovation plan, which began major church improvements. The discovery of Air Rights in this forest of skyscrapers brought 11th hour financial relief. Two remarkable bequests: the Ely Estate and the Heritage Trust, became a lifeline that still continues.
By the 1990s, years of concern over survival gave way to an extraordinary period of enthusiasm and growth-now spearheaded by Rev. Dr. Cameron Brett, an orator of considerable power, learned theologian and a leader thoroughly committed to St. Andrew's strategic vocation: "The people of St. Andrew's are called by God to serve in faith, hope and love in the core or Toronto." Of many new programs launched the involvement in Out of the Cold has been both the most demanding, and most rewarding. Here too the link with St. Andrew's past is made vivid.
When the congregation recently celebrated its 175th anniversary-including 130 years at the same site-it did so with a deep sense of gratitude to those distant ancestors, who were able to found not only a church, but a sense of mission that still resonates so strongly within St. Andrew's today.
