On May 28, St. Martin’s Anglican Church offered its last service of Pentecost before officially disestablishing on June 1.
Dwindling attendance was one of the main reasons for the decision to close, but a good crowd turned out to say farewell to a beloved church building.
People remembered long family histories—weddings, baptisms and funerals—in the parish, (which began in the 1920s in a smaller church building, which is now part of the Hulse Playfair funeral home on Richmond Road before the new larger building was built in 1956.)
Longtime parishioners Marion Xhignesse attended with her mother Enid Xhignesse. After the service, Marion wiped away a few tears. “I love that altar. I love the wood….It has elegance and simplicity,” she said. “I sang my first notes as a little person here, and now, l sing professionally,” she said. “It’s been home.”
Rebecca Veale, who was a choir member and co-ordinated the church school in 1990 when there were about 40 children attending, said she is concerned about seniors in the area, particularly shut-ins, finding another church to attend. All Saints Westboro, St. Stephen’s and Julian of Norwich are Anglican churches that are all relatively close, but it is a big change for parishioners in the neighbourhood who used to walk to St. Martin’s. Many said they would take time this summer to decide where to worship.
In an interview with Crosstalk in the spring, Ian Marsh, people’s warden for St. Martin’s, described the reasons the vestry voted to disestablish in December. St. Martin’s had been a big congregation with about 300 people attending most Sunday services until the 1980s, he said. When his own family joined about 20 years ago, “that heyday had peaked, but we were still getting 100 and 120 people a service,” with six or seven kids attending Sunday school regularly, he recalled. The annual bazaar was a “monster event,” with sale tables of all sorts and a silent auction. “It was fantastic, but it was intense. We did that full on until about 10 years ago. We’re always afraid we’re going to kill somebody,” he said wryly, “because you would get 90-year-olds coming and working like you wouldn’t believe for a Friday night and a Saturday. … But the people who are still able miss it terribly. It was a wonderful fellowship event that helped bond the people in the parish.”
Prior to the pandemic, he estimated attendance averaged about 60 people, but after the pandemic that declined to 35 to 40 people, “that includes the organist and the priest and the seven-member choir, so it’s pretty thin in the ranks on the floor.”
Marsh says the formal process of deciding to disestablish took nine or 10 months, but the parish has been seriously diminishing for about 10 years, he said. “Every year our budget would get a little bit smaller, and the parish council would get a little bit smaller. We used to have 25 people at parish council meetings, and a secretary, and an agenda… and then over the years, it ends up to being six people sitting around a table,” he said. “There are a lot of skills you need to run a parish… Our core group has gone from maybe 40 or 50 people you could draw from to 10 or 12, and that’s just not enough because in a group of 10 or 12 people you’re not going to have a broad range of abilities….And we’ve had people burn out and have to take a few years off.”
When they began discussions with the bishop last June, Marsh says the parish was running out of money in the bank.
“We’ve had some great, tremendously generous donations that went into the Consolidated Trust Fund (CTF).” That money is still there, but he explained that bequests are intended as legacy gifts. “Weekly giving is used to pay the priest, pay the gas bill, to rake the lawn, shovel the driveway…. A significant bequest… should be reserved for potential capital improvements, a new bell tower, a new heating system, a new organ, or better yet, some kind of outreach program or some kind of parish development initiative….You shouldn’t use it to buy salt to spread on the driveway or to cut the grass or to keep the gas flowing to the furnace….”
“We thought that rather than run until the tank’s dry, we’ll turn it over while there’s still some something substantial in the CTF that can go towards doing something positive for the future.”
Practical and realistic, but it’s still not easy to say goodbye to a church home.
The Venerable Rob Davis, who served the parish in its last months, acknowledged that sadness in his sermon and offered some words of comfort and encouragement drawn from the message of Pentecost. One of the most important gifts God gives us, he said, is that “by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, men or women—we are all made to drink of one Spirit. We are made family by the Spirit of God. And family makes all the difference in the world, especially at a time like this,” he said.
Then he shared a story about a rather rash decision he made to go travelling to visit his mother’s family in Australia instead of going to university when he was 19 years old. “Had it been possible to back out at the last minute I probably would have because I suddenly realized as I was getting on the plane in the Ottawa airport that I was all on my own. I was alone….” After long flights and delays on his flights to Vancouver and Los Angeles, he arrived in Sydney, sick with a cold and having missed his connecting flight to Melbourne. “So there I was in.. a strange airport, 19 years old, knowing not nearly as much as I thought I knew, and trying to figure out what to do.”
After wandering around, getting some Australian money, trying to call his grandmother’s number and getting no answer, he gave up. …”I was not in good shape,” he said.
Then a man sat down beside him and asked, “‘So, how was the flight from Ottawa?’ I looked at him, totally amazed. ‘Hi, I’m your Uncle Phil,’ he said.
My family, of course, had discovered that the plane was late and had phoned Uncle Phil who lived in Sydney and had come to the airport to meet me…. Suddenly, I was home again, I was with family. I was safe.”
Family makes all the difference in the world, especially in times like this, Davis reiterated. “That’s the gift that God is offering us today. Wherever I have been in this world, I have found family. Because there are Christians everywhere, and they have taken me in, they have welcomed me. They have made me at home because we are family, because we are all born of the one spirit…. So when I have had to leave, when I felt lonely, desolate and afraid, every single time I have met family and discovered I was at home again.”
St. Leonard, Rockingham — Deanery of the Northwest