Diocese of Ottawa’s 125th Anniversary Choral Eucharist with Archbishop Linda Nicholls, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada

Jan. 17
125th Anniversary Lecture
7:30 pm on Zoom 

The Rev. Dr. Jason McKinney: on “The Church as Commons: A Theological Case for Affordable Housing.”
Register https://bit.ly/3IxnerL.

 Jan. 30
Journeying as Allies Meeting
2-4 pm on Zoom 

Life Among the Qallunaat by Mini Aodla Freeman to be discussed. Join the AMR mailing list to receive connection information: allmyrelations@ottawa.anglican.ca.

Feb. 11-12
Marriage Preparation Workshop
The Marriage Preparation Course is designed to help participants to learn and grow through online presentations given by professional speakers, online small group discussions with trained facilitators, and couple conversations.

All couples are welcome, and participation is not limited by gender, age, or previous marital status.

Information and registration formss: https://www.ottawa.anglican.ca/marriage-preparation

Mar. 27
Journeying as Allies Meeting
2-4 pm on Zoom 

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good to be discussed. Join the AMR mailing list to receive connection information: allmyrelations@ottawa.anglican.ca.

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Way back in May you arranged for your colleagues at St. Vincent de Paul in Alberta to purchase some warm winter clothing items to send together with a container that they were preparing for our community in Inuvik, NWT. Well, before the snow returned and the river turned to ice, the container arrived and eventually found its way to the Inuvik Warming Centre. Soon after the centre re-opened for the winter, we dug into the container with the new centre manager. It just so happened that Winston Moses was assisting at the warming centre that evening. Winston is a lay leader at the Anglican Church, so it was a joy to be able to hand the box of warm clothing from ACW to him. He immediately put these to good use with our homeless residents at the centre.

On behalf of the staff and residents at the Warming Centre, and the congregants at Inuvik Anglican Church, and the wider community of Inuvik, I would like to express our thanks for your generosity. May you be blessed for your kind service.

Myron Jespersen

Treasurer, Inuvik Emergency Warming Centre Society

PS: FYI, full disclosure, the NWT Housing Corporation has taken over operation of all of the shelter facilities in Inuvik (the warming or “wet” shelter, the “dry” shelter and the womens’ shelter) from July 2021. Last week, our IEWC society voted to dissolve after handing over remaining assets to NWT-HC. An informal group of us will continue to work alongside of NWT-HC to advocate for the homeless, search for long-term solutions and in the meantime supplement the government service through donations from within and outside the community.

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The earliest mention of this place is when a mission deputation visited Plantagenet Mills in 1864. Land was obtained from Peter McMartin for a church, and the frame walls of Good Shepherd Church arose in 1875. So difficult were finances that 21 years elapsed before this small house of worship was consecrated by Bishop Charles Hamilton on 15 December 1896—one of the first churches to be consecrated by him as the first Bishop of Ottawa.

In 1864 there had been talk of a Mission of Plantagenet. Three years later Plantagenet joined the Parish of Hawkesbury which had outlying stations at Alfred and L’Orignal. Building this church raised hopes, and in 1876 Plantagenet became a parish in its own right, with outstations at Alfred, Caledonia Springs (from 1883), Fenaghvale (from 1879 to 1881, and again from 1883 to 1904), Maxville (from 1903) and Ross’s Schoolhouse (1903-1904).  People moving away out west further weakened the small congregation at Plantagenet by 1905.

Small the Plantagenet church may have been, but even for a small, rural congregation no one could ever have accused it of being humble. It was built at the height of interest in the High Victorian Gothic Revival style. If there were not sufficient funds to build a tower and spire, no matter.  By locating this house of worship on high land, and by exaggerating its gables to three times the height of the side walls, the unknown designer of this building effectively turned the end walls into steeples, effectively making them appear to be huge arrows pointing to Heaven.

For lack of surviving interior photographs, we must imagine how the interior of this church was arranged.  It would appear that the huge, pointed window in the gable on the left side of this view was the west window in the narthex of the church, with the chimney above it confirming that this was so.  If so, the low entrance porch was located very close to the chancel within this small rectangular house of worship, whereas in most Anglican churches the entry usually was located closer to the narthex.  In contrast to the horizontal clapboards in the main structure, much thinner boards in the porch and porch doors were placed diagonally to accent the diagonal design of a building that was all roof.    

In 1917, Plantagenet transferred to the Parish of Fenaghvale which had outstations at Alfred, Caledonia Springs, Plantagenet and Ross’s Schoolhouse.  In 1921, local parishes were rearranged and Saint John’s, Plantagenet became part of the Parish of Hawkesbury again, with outstations located at Alfred, Caledonia Springs and L’Orignal. The church appears to have been secularized by 1923, with the property sold that August to Joseph Stanislas Gratton, with special arrangements made concerning the adjacent burial ground.  

If you would like to help the Archives preserve the records of the Diocese and its parishes, why not become a Friend of the Archives?  Your $20 membership brings you three issues of the lively, informative Newsletter, and you will receive a tax receipt for further donations above that amount.  

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Good’s novel takes readers into the trauma her characters experience while attending Indian Residential School and its impacts in their lives. Welcoming Good and the more than 100 people listening via Zoom, Bishop Shane Parker acknowledged the Anglican Church of Canada’s involvement in operating residential schools and the harm done. He spoke of the church’s two heartfelt apologies and efforts in recent decades “to put itself on a path to be a reconciler” and to build a profoundly new relationship with Indigenous peoples. 

The bishop noted that it was important for the Diocese to mark its 125th anniversary not looking back with nostalgia but looking forward and listening “to things we need to hear now as a people who face the future, things that are important to our life as a church and to the world around us.” This first lecture in a series of four was offered in collaboration with the diocesan All My Relations Working Group.

Good, who is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation on Treaty Six Territory, began working with Indigenous organizations in her teens and worked for over 20 years before becoming a lawyer in her early 40s. Her practice focused on advocacy for residential school survivors.  She thanked organizers the invitation and the chance to continue the work she has chosen, which she described as “lighting a dialogue fire between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with an urge to really come to understand what reconciliation will entail with a full understanding of the truths.”

History

She began with a definition of colonialism: “’the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically.’ There in a nutshell is the story of colonial Canada,” she said. “The people who came to this land did so with a very specific economic agenda and that agenda is one that we continue to live with to this day in terms of the never-ending exploitation of natural resources.”

Then she offered some historical “snapshots.” Some were personal — photos of her mother, aunts, uncles at the Anglican St. Barnabas Residential School at Onion Lake and her Kokum (grandmother) at the Battleford Industrial School in North Battleford, Sask.

She read a powerful passage from her novel about a young girl finding out that her friend had died of tuberculosis in the night at the residential school, her body gone, the bed already empty in the morning. Good said the story was based on her mother’s experience of watching her friend, who had tuberculosis, hemorrhage to death on the playground at school. 

Other snapshots echoed the words of some key figures in the history of residential schools. 

In 1907, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the first medical officer for the department of Indian Affairs, was commissioned to do a study of living conditions in residential schools, looking at aspects such as nutrition and ventilation. “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies. Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards,” he wrote. “Dr. Bryce, one of my heroes, was summarily fired,” she said, noting that none of his recommendations to prevent the spread of tuberculosis were put into place.

Then came remarks made by Duncan Campbell Scott, superintendent of Indian Affairs, in 1918:

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness habituating so closely in residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages, but this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian problem.”

Good pointed out that the phrase “final solution” now associated with the Holocaust was used first by Scott. And in 1920, attendance at the schools was made mandatory.

“I used to think that it was only [a policy of] assimilation, but my thinking has evolved, and in fact in my view, this is genocide,” she said. 

Good noted that a definition of genocide developed after the Second World War included the removal of children from one group to another. “This was a systematic removal of children from Indigenous communities with the specific and articulated objective of dismembering families, communities and nations.”

Reconciliation

Turning to the present, Good said: “The concept of reconciliation, as I see it in non-Indigenous Canada, has its limits. Reconciliation is okay as long as it doesn’t interfere with the existing power relations and economic relations in Canada.” 

She mentioned the dispute over the pipeline on Wet’suwet’en land as an example. 

“There is a Supreme Court of Canada decision that says that land belongs to the Wet’suwe’en, but the power of the state is brought to fore because the meaningful acceptance of their ownership of that land interferes with the Canadian economy,” she said. 

“Until there can be a meaningful sharing of resources, so that we can have the necessary resources to implement healing, growth and meaningful self-governance and self-determination, real jurisdiction and real recognition that it, in fact, belongs to us, if we don’t have those things, the rest is just words.”

Allies, she said, must do as the Indigenous allies did when they supported the British and French in conflict. “They were allies to the death. They stood until they could not stand anymore. And that is what non-Indigneous people need to do. They need to stand until they cannot stand anymore. It is not enough for performative responses to our reality,” Good said. 

“We are now… in the final stage of colonialism … when nobody needs to do anything terrible to us anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. On one hand, we have that awful reality of being the highest in all terrible statistics — incarceration, addiction, suicide, being a murder victim, being a sexual assault victim, all of those statistics, we are number one. On the other hand, we have this phenomenal will to survive as we are….If only we could have the support, meaningful support, beyond words, we would be able to re-establish, self-governance, self-determination, and healing for our own communities.”

The whole lecture can be viewed on the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa’s YouTube channel.

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Seven of those projects are part of the foundation’s Say Yes to Kids program. They will receive $33,300 in funding.

Across the country, the Foundation approved 79 Say Yes to Kids applications. The new executive director of the foundation, Scott Brubacher, said in a Zoom gathering that he believes the $468,345 grant total is one of the larges investments in children and youth ministry in the history of the Canadian church.

“I’d like to thank everyone in the Diocese of Ottawa for being so enthusiastic both in the fundraising this spring and in the creativity you showed in preparing your applications,” he said.

“This is truly great news,” said Jane Scanlon, director of communications and stewardship for the Diocese of Ottawa, thanking Brubacher and the staff and board of directors for the foundation for all the thought, creativity and positive energy that they have put into the Say Yes to Kids program, and for the AFC’s generosity. “Here at the Diocese of Ottawa we are thrilled to be the recipients of so many grants. These initiatives will have a big impact in our diocese,” said Scanlon.

Church of the Ascension in Ottawa is launching Rising Up: Art, Kids and Community, “Our program aims to bring together kids from our own parish with kids from our community to do some great, creative work around expressive movement, visual arts, and community building,” said the Rev. Rhonda Waters, who was on hand for the announcement. She added that a team of adult volunteers will make it a multi-generational project. It will start in Feb. 2022. 

Other projects that received funding were: 

• Epiphany Anglican Church Ottawa — Confirmation Choir    $3,800
• Kid-Safe Productions Incorporated — Ottawa Pandemic Burnout Help for Children & Families Through Drama, Spirituality & Music $5,000
• Ottawa Diocesan Youth  — Kairos Blanket Exercise Indigenous reconciliation $5,000
• Anglican Diocese of Ottawa  — Training for Spiritual Care in Secondary Schools Resilience & Mental Health $5,000
• St. Albans Anglican Church Ottawa —Not So Post Pandemic Gatherings Resilience & Mental Health $4,500
• Ottawa East Deanery & Epiphany Anglican — Acts of Kindness youth outreach project    $5,000

The Community Ministry St. Luke’s Table is also awarded a grant to help with renovations to better serve vulnerable people in the community — $15,000

Three bursaries were also awarded to Karen McBride, Robert Albert, and John Holgate.

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The Rev. Caroline Ducros was appointed Assistant Curate (part-time) of the parishes of St. Alban the Martyr and St-Bernard-de-Clairvaux, effective November 1, 2021. 

The Rev. Mark Lewis was appointed as Deacon-in-Charge of the Parish of South Dundas, effective Aug. 3, 2021, and is now Priest-in-Charge.

The Rev. Cynthia MacLachlan was appointed Assistant Curate (part-time) in the Area Parish of the St. Lawrence, effective Sept 6, 2021 

The Rev. Robert Sicard has been appointed as the Incumbent (half-time) at Christ Church Aylmer, effective Jan. 11, 2022. 

Appointment

The Rev. Steven Zytveld has been appointed to serve as a deacon at St. Barnabas Anglican Church, effective Nov. 28, 2021.

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As a part of his effort to get to know the community around St. John the Evangelist in downtown Ottawa, he has been reaching out to neighbours of all sorts. 

“I really think that the pandemic, in this way, has given us gifts, and that is that is allows us to go outside of our building and engage people who might never be inside our building,” he said.

After the re-opening of in-person worship in September, van der Meer continued to do videos to complement weekly worship services. In each video, he interviews someone from the community. Some of his interviews in the fall included the minister from the nearby Presbyterian Church, and the local MPP Joel Harden. He asks them to read the scripture for that Sunday and then they discuss how the text might relate to our current time and place.

“That allows me to go to the mosque, or any other group, and say ‘Could we do a talk on video about what we share?’ And that person might not never ever want to come into a church,” said van der Meer.

As the diocesan interfaith officer, he is a member of the Capital Region Interfaith Committee. Aside from the work of the committee, van der Meer says he would like to get to know the people on the committee individually. 

“For example, I would like to meet with the representative of the Sikh community. Sikh temples always have a kitchen, they always feed people for free. This would be the perfect person to talk to about hospitality. To hear about hospitality from a Sikh perspective might actually get us rethinking what do we mean, what are our core texts for doing hospitality at its best? “

Another example might be having a conversation with an Indigenous person prior to Earth Day, asking about the Creator and what that means to them, he suggested.

“Each tradition has its own emphasis, and each of these emphases are present in our religion. We may not think of them often, but these other traditions prompt us to rethink things we have just taken for granted about ourselves.”

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But van der Meer also happens to have some special skills and experience getting to know people and making friends, and that’s how he and parishioners at St. John’s came to form a new friendship with the congregation of Temple Israel in Ottawa, and how on Jan. 22 and 23, he and Rabbi Daniel Mikelberg of Temple Israel will address each other’s congregation in a preaching exchange.

But as van der Meer told Crosstalk, this story actually began when he was still in Toronto.

“I ran into an associate imam at a social justice event, and it turned out that he was the imam at the mosque nearest to my parish church, so we developed a friendship and then I also developed a friendship with a synagogue,” he explained. “Then it was a challenge of could they be friends with each other? And it was really hard, I think particularly for the Rabbi, just so much feeling put upon about Palestine and Israel and how the story is told.”

Ironically, it was horrific acts of terrorism that helped bring them together. “We created rings of peace around each other’s buildings. When it was Pittsburgh, we did it around the synagogue, and after Quebec City and New Zealand, it was around the mosque. That really helped them to get past their personal hesitation, and we became an intentional clergy group where we met every few months. It was astonishing how similar the challenges are having a congregation, whether you are a priest, rabbi or imam.”

Van der Meer submitted a proposal to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which was gathering in Toronto in 2018, offering to do a workshop on how create intentional friendships between congregations of different faiths, which was accepted. His friends, Rabbi Elyse Goldstein of City Shul and Imam Shabir Ally of the Islamic Information and Dawah Centre, co-led the workshop with him. It went so well, a representative from the government of Singapore invited them to speak at an interfaith conference in Singapore, which is an ethnically and religiously diverse country. In the end, Rabbi Goldstein wasn’t able to attend, but van der Meer and Imam Ally went together, further cementing their friendship.

Van der Meer says this interfaith work offered an opportunity to challenge stereotypes of religion common in our secular society. Christians, for example, are often presented in the media as fundamentalists, he said. “You are always doing apologetics or a defense: ‘That’s not the only kind of Christian there is.’ So, if you have the attention of non-religious people at all, often you are in a position of having to be on the defensive, of having to justify why you would even be in the church. To be very public about our friendship challenged non-religious people to rethink what they thought religions were. They couldn’t be as readily dismissive of religion if there’s the rabbi and the priest and the imam all having coffee together and talking about life and laughing with each other.”

Ottawa

When van der Meer decided to move to Ottawa, Rabbi Goldstein offered to introduce him to a rabbi here, who was part of the same reform tradition she is, and that’s how he met Rabbi Daniel Mikelberg of Temple Israel in Ottawa. Because of the pandemic, they first met online, had some Zoom conversations and then decided to do a joint Bible study of texts that would be helpful to people getting through the pandemic. “You have to be creative. What can you talk about that will be pertinent to people and find a commonality…. And so it went very well. We had good participation from both of our congregations. And just like I experienced in Toronto, it was astonishing how similar to each other the congregations of Temple Israel and St. John’s really are, in terms of their political perspective, their outlook on education, community life and the arts. They were just a very compatible group of people.”

After two online gatherings, a small group of parishioners from St. John visited Temple Israel in October. Rabbi Mikelberg spoke and they sat together in mixed table groups with people who are members of the temple.

Kathleen Arsenault was one of the St. John’s parishioners who visited the temple. “I’ve been involved in the Anglican Church for 40 years, and this is the first time we’ve ever done that,” she told Crosstalk. “I really like that approach of learning from one another.” She said she was particularly struck by all the care and reverence with which they treated the Torah.

Bea Robertson recounted how the rabbi “introduced us to the many interesting customs of the Temple, most importantly the beautiful, ancient scrolls of the Torah as well as the many symbols around their beautiful sanctuary.  We had time to chat with Temple members and many questions were answered on the very different ways of Reform Judaism,” she said. “I know that we of St. John’s left with a warm feeling about the friendship developing between these ecumenical groups and hopefully we will be able to invite Temple Israel to St. John’s in the new year.”

Rabbi Daniel Mikelberg used the Yiddish word bashert, which he said is often translated as “meant to be” to describe how he thinks of the new friendship between the temple and the church. “It … is something that has really turned into a beautiful connection, especially in these times of isolation, to be able to explore different ways to build friendships, to learn from one another, and to really seek inspiration.”

The next adventure in this new friendship will take place on the weekend of January 22 and 23 when Rev. Gary will preach at the synagogue and then the Rabbi will do the reflection on Sunday at St. John. “I will preach from the synagogue’s lectionary assigned texts and the Rabbi will preach from church’s lectionary assigned texts, which means he gets the opportunity to comment on the New Testament texts,” van der Meer says. “If you feel yourself among friends, which is how I would feel there and he would feel with us, he’s not going to regard it as his job to downplay Jesus because “he was just a man,” it’s going to be “here’s what I hear in what Jesus is saying.”

When asked what surprised him most in the friendship so far, Rabbi MIkelberg replied, “Probably that there is more that we share than separates us. Certainly, as we approach holiday season, we’re very much focused on our respective holidays, but one of the things that we discovered as we came together is that the values that really bind us together as one are parallel. As Temple Israel, our core values are inclusion, social justice and music. And unbeknownst to me, the church is committed to the same three values. What a beautiful thing to recognize that our separate communities have the same priorities and can find ways to collaborate with this mission.”

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Worship, in one form or another, didn’t miss a beat thanks to the Rev. Joan Riding, our Priest-in-Charge, who also leads St. James Leitrim.  When COVID-19 began to take hold and our doors were closed to in-person worship, Rev Joan immediately provided a printed service which was distributed for personal worship.  Within just a few weeks, with the expertise of a parishioner at St. James, we were able to offer worship services on Zoom and Webex together with St. James.  A complete service bulletin was provided to all for use when joining virtually or for personal use with printed copies being delivered to those who requested them. This is continuing for people not yet comfortable coming to church in-person

We are home to a very well visited cemetery. Each year in June, we hold a cemetery service that often overflows the church with people from near and far. This service provides a time to reflect and remember, as well as update those attending on maintenance and upkeep being completed or planned for the cemetery. The offering collected that day is the main source of funds for maintenance. In order to address isolation and promote community, we sent letters to known family visitors in lieu of a physical gathering for the service. The mailing was very well received, and led to an increase of 42% of the usual cemetery maintenance givings.

Outreach, one of our primary focuses, continued with only a few interruptions due to COVID restrictions.  Our outreach has two parts, one which touches people’s lives directly and the other providing financial assistance. The parish gardens provided fresh produce for the Osgoode emergency food cupboard and Harvest House.  Donations to the food cupboard, cupcakes to St. Luke’s Table, financial donations to Naomi House in lieu of purchased gifts at Christmas all carried on when allowed.  To assist financially, one of our major fundraisers, an annual yard sale, was moved to postings on local buy/sell Facebook groups and received amazing community support.  And, our annual end of year financial donations to various diocesan and community ministries and projects were not hindered by the pandemic with $3,600 being distributed in 2020 and $3,800 in 2021.

“Hook, Knit & Stitch,” a crafting group that is open to everyone and provides a time to be creative and socialize with friends and neighbours, did go by the wayside for a while.  When it was restarted in March 2021 on Zoom, it attracted new people, some local and some from outside our physical area.  It has become apparent that there is a desire and need to offer both in-person and virtual gatherings going forward.

So, how does a small parish continue through a pandemic?  By continuing to care for others, holding tight onto God’s hand and never letting go.

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