The United Church of Canada: A History

Introduction

The United Church of Canada has had a significant presence in English-speaking Canada for over eighty years. Its formation occasioned debate in Parliament and required the passing of The United Church Act in 1924. Its inaugural service on June 10, 1925, received extensive coverage in the national press. This kind of attention has continued throughout its history. When sixty-eight members, many of them clergy, issued a pacifist declaration in October 1939, a national public controversy erupted. The publication of the New Curriculum in the 1960s and the 1988 decision regarding sexual orientation and ordination also received extensive coverage from national news media outlets. Statements made by United Church courts and leaders on public issues like same-sex marriage or the Middle East conflict continue to attract widespread media attention.

Since its formation up until the late 1950s, when roughly 20 percent of Canada’s population belonged to it, the United Church has been present in most English-speaking Canadian communities. Though its membership and influence have diminished greatly since the end of the 1960s, it continues to have a presence in most parts of English-speaking Canada.

This reality has been in keeping with the vision that helped inspire the church’s creation. In the minds of those who laboured to form the United Church, it was intended to play a decisive role in shaping the moral ethos of Canadian society by infusing the values of Evangelical British Protestantism into Canadian citizens and society through evangelism, Christian education, social service, public activism, and advocacy. This intention was reflected in its chosen name: The United Church of Canada. It was intended to become the church, the national church of Canada.¹ Its name expressed the belief that union would consolidate and increase the already considerable influence of Evangelical Protestantism on the social structures, practices, and moral ethos of English-speaking Canada. For the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, this meant moving from being denominations existing nationwide to becoming part of a church that would hopefully grow to encompass a greater share of the Canadian population in its membership and wield an even greater influence on the morals and social practices of Canadian society.

Though the United Church never achieved this goal to the extent that proponents of union hoped it would, it has figured prominently in Canadian history during the twentieth century, influencing foreign and domestic policy, provoking public debate, and shaping the moral character of many Canadian citizens. While its influence on Canadian society has greatly decreased in recent decades, it remains the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, and Christianity continues to exert a significant influence on the Canadian imagination.²

Histories focused on particular aspects of Canadian society or Canadian church life have recounted the history of the United Church in relation to Canadian foreign policy,³ higher education,⁴ Christian–Jewish relations in Canada,⁵ and Canadian multiculturalism,⁶ to give only a few examples. Histories focusing on the changing roles of women within Canadian churches⁷ and society, changing social values within Canadian society, or the history of the Christian church in Canada⁸ inevitably discuss the United Church to some extent. Yet there exists no academic history of The United Church of Canada itself. This book attempts to fill this gap in Canadian historiography.

Several popular histories of the United Church containing some excellent work already exist. Brief Halt at Mile 50 by Grace Lane was published in 1974.⁹ Featuring many photographs and totalling 119 printed pages, it offered an upbeat, popular account of the United Church’s first fifty years. Voices and Visions came out in 1990, marking the sixty-fifth anniversary of the United Church.¹⁰ Edited by Peter Gordon White, then editor-in-chief of The United Church Publishing House, and featuring a chapter by noted Canadian church historian John Webster Grant, it offered various perspectives on the United Church’s history, amply illustrated with photographs in a coffee table book format. The most recent effort is Fire and Grace: Stories of History and Vision.¹¹ This project was initiated in 1996 by the Executive of the United Church General Council in response to requests from the United Church constituency.¹² It contains pieces averaging about six pages in length by thirty-four contributors from the United Church and beyond. It was produced to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Church Union and was intended to be a ‘popular’ publication employing storytelling as a primary tool with which to re-visit the United Church’s history as a denomination.¹³

Each of these contains valuable information and observations. The essay by John Webster Grant in Voices and Visions is particularly outstanding in its analysis and overview of the United Church’s history. However, aside from this and a few other exceptions, these books, oriented as they are to a more popular readership, do not offer the present anthology’s kind of description and analysis of the United Church’s history. This is the first academically critical history of The United Church of Canada.

The United Church itself is at a point where it needs a critical account of its history. While the popular histories it has produced contain some critical analysis of its past, they have tended to be as much celebrations as critical studies, and have often relied heavily on anecdotal observations. In general, hitherto the United Church has tended to neglect its history. The ethos created in its formation focused on the future rather than the past. But the vision of becoming a national church that provided significant impetus to its formation and guidance, and purpose to its life, no longer exists. The United Church now exists in a predominantly urban context characterized by ethnic diversity, religious pluralism, and competition for members among Christian denominations. This is very different from the context in which it was formed, when denominations like the United Church were an integral part of English-speaking Canada and a much higher percentage of Canada’s population lived in rural settings, without the many forms of social communication, mass media, and entertainment available today. At that time, depending on whether one resided in a predominantly francophone or anglophone community, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism was seen as an important ingredient of national well-being as well as a purveyor of cultural identity and common values.¹⁴ In Canadian society, religion is now generally regarded as a personal option that is not limited to Christianity. In the past, government policies and popular views might be criticized in public media as un-Christian. Today it is Christianity that is likely to be criticized in public media as an obstacle to progress or a source of violence. This change in the United Church’s context has contributed to it suffering a loss of membership, social status, and institutional vision.

In preparation for the 40th meeting of the United Church’s General Council in Kelowna, British Columbia in 2009, an invitation was issued to its membership to prayerfully consider the vision and purpose of our church.¹⁵ This was the latest in a series of actions undertaken since 2006 by General Councils and their executives designed to help discern and clarify a sense of purpose for the United Church as a whole. This particular document speaks repeatedly of a longing for a unifying vision that is compelling, attainable, and shared.¹⁶ At the time of its formation and up until recent decades the United Church had such a vision, that of being and becoming a national church.

The call for a new vision arises partly from the United Church’s inability to be what it formerly was. It can no longer sustain the level of activity that characterized its life at its four levels of governance (pastoral charge, presbytery, conference, and general council) in previous years. It has struggled to prioritize which roles to continue and which to abandon, and how to carry on in its new context.¹⁷ To find a new vision for itself, leaders and members of the United Church need to study its past and learn from its history. This anthology was written to help in this process.

However, this book was not only written to fill academic and institutional needs. The history of The United Church of Canada deserves study because of its place in Canadian culture, and because it has been a significant ecclesiastical entity, an experiment in church union in its own right. Other denominations around the world such as the Church of South India and the Church of North India were formed out of unions that are similar. But each of these unions reflects the context where it occurred. Impetus for the formation of The United Church of Canada came partly from powerful ecumenical influences that affected much of Christianity around the globe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, these influences interacted with characteristics particular to the Canadian context in the formation of The United Church of Canada. As a result, the United Church is a uniquely Canadian faith community. Its history describes how a large portion of English-speaking Canadians and Reformed and Methodist Protestants combined and interacted for over eight decades.

The United Church is also a unique church within Canada. Lacking primary identification with any one international church body, it has an autonomy that distinguishes it from most other Canadian denominations. Being both uniquely Canadian and unique within Canada, it has a fascinating history that is worth telling.

Given that the history of the United Church deserves to be studied, how should this be accomplished? At any given time, the United Church is occupied by a diversity of projects and concerns, reflected in its sermons, prayers, hymns, literature, study themes, and organized activities. For instance, while the United Church was preaching, praying, signing petitions, writing letters, and demonstrating in the 1980s for an end to apartheid in South Africa and the nuclear arms race, it was also wrestling with the eligibility of gays and lesbians for ordination, the nature of sexuality and gender roles in the church, sporadic Sunday school attendance, and the nature of Biblical authority. A denomination like the United Church is almost always engaged in mission themes, pastoral work, Christian education, ecumenical dialogue, administering pension funds, justice struggles, some form of evangelism, and frequently, rethinking its understanding of the Christian faith. Each of these spheres of activity has its own history in the United Church that quite often lasts for decades. But to appreciate the history of the United Church as a denomination, one needs to see what form and importance these different issues and activities had at any given time and how they were influenced by one another. A chronological approach exploring the many different events and issues occurring in the same time frame is necessary to give an account of this complexity of the United Church’s life as a denomination. For this reason, this book studies the United Church’s history first chronologically, decade by decade, so as to give an account of what issues were pressing the church at certain times and what activities it was engaged in during successive time periods.

At the forefront of each of these chronological chapters are lists of the persons holding the position of moderator, secretary of the United Church, and leadership positions in the national United Church women’s organizations, as well as a listing of significant General Council decisions, key issues, and major events in the life of the United Church during the time period the chapter covers. There are also listings of the number of members of the United Church at the start of the period, gleaned from the records of Statistics Canada and the United Church. The appearance of women’s names among the moderators in the 1980s and secretaries in the 1990s, and the changes in national women’s organizations listed here tell of change and continuity in the United Church over the course of its history. Women have always been a part of the United Church, but some now have access to places within its organizational structure that weren’t open to them in its first few decades, while the organizations that women built and ran for themselves are now in decline.

Yet to understand the history of any particular issue or concern of the United Church, an approach that follows a theme through the decades is also necessary. One cannot understand something like the New Curriculum, a milestone in United Church endeavours in Christian education which came into print the 1960s and was no longer widely used by the 1980s, without looking at its roots in the 1950s, with the emphasis on knowledge and learning in Canadian society then, and the subsequent changes in Canadian society and United Church life that happened through the 1960s and 1970s. To understand something like the New Curriculum, it is necessary trace its history through the decades to see how it emerged, what those who wrote it hoped to accomplish, what effects it had, and why it is no more. Topics like this need to be studied with a thematic focus reaching beyond the limits of any one period in the United Church’s life. For this reason, the eight chronological chapters are followed by six thematic chapters focusing on particular aspects of the United Church’s history.

In producing this book it was decided that multiple authors, each writing a chapter on a time period or subject in which they have particular expertise, would bring a broader range of scholarship to bear on the study of the United Church’s history than could be provided by any one author writing alone. The same complexity of the United Church’s life as an institution that led to the decision to combine chronological and thematic chapters in studying its history also led to enlisting multiple authors to write them. Taking worship as an example, to study its history in the United Church one needs to know not only about the United Church and Canada but also what was happening in Christian worship more broadly during the course of the United Church’s history. One also needs to know what the roots of United Church worship were before its formation and how its worship has been influenced over the years by developments in other denominations and in Canadian culture. The chapter on the history of worship in the United Church was written by Bill Kervin, who specializes in this topic, and this enabled a more in-depth treatment of the subject than an individual who lacked his expertise could have provided.

There are far more topics deserving attention in the history of the United Church than can be covered in one book alone. A guideline for choosing what to cover was that the United Church must be understood not only as a church with its own internal issues but also as a church resolutely engaged with surrounding society. In telling the history of the United Church, attention must be given to both.

At this point in time, worship has become a particularly contentious issue in United Church life. Entering different congregations or even the same church building at different times on a Sunday, one may encounter very different styles of worship. Signs for numerous United Church congregations advertise traditional worship at one time and contemporary or an alternative-style of worship at another. Frequently the more favoured time slot is given to the latter. It has not always been so. Worship has become the centre of attention and sometimes controversy in the United Church over the past two decades. Because of its prominence as a focus of attention and experimentation in the United Church at present, one thematic chapter is devoted to it.

Less noticed by many but equally contentious within the United Church and equally revealing about its history is the topic of ministry. The changes that have taken place in ministry in the United Church, who is doing it, its many forms, and the never-ending succession of committees and task groups studying it reveals how the United Church’s understanding of ministry has become diverse over the course of its history, but at the cost of losing a clearly defined sense of role and purpose. Because of ministry’s importance at this time as a subject of discussion within the United Church, a thematic chapter is devoted to it.

These two chapters on worship and ministry are primarily concerned with matters internal to the United Church. In terms of its engagement with surrounding society, the missionary efforts of Canadian churches among First Nations peoples have been a focus of public attention for some time, and are likely to continue to be. The controversy around this history is not simply a matter of Christian churches versus non-members. It runs right through the churches themselves, as many members of Canadian churches are First Nations peoples. For this reason, a thematic chapter with the distinctive approach of being written by two authors, one of First Nations ancestry and the other Caucasian, is devoted to the United Church’s changing mission goals in relation to First Nations peoples.

At the same time, the United Church, along with others, has been coming to terms with the history of Christian anti-Semitism. While pursuing this issue, it has also acted in response to the plight of Palestinians, at times provoking condemnation from the Canadian Jewish community. Studying the attempts by the United Church to seek justice and resist evil in its relations to Jews, Palestinians, and the state of Israel reveals significant aspects of its history and character in relation to an important international concern.

These four thematic chapters are followed by a fifth studying the nature and place of theology in the United Church. This is frequently regarded as a mystery to outsiders, and even to long-time United Church members. The history of the United Church is partly the story of the place that theology holds in it, and how its leaders have gone about developing an interpretation of the Christian faith. Studying this reveals much about the United Church’s history, character, and ethos, and how these have taken shape over time.

The final chapter provides a conclusion to the book as a whole by examining how the history recorded and analyzed in previous chapters has impacted the United Church’s sense of itself, its social imaginary. At present, many observers both within the United Church and without describe this history as one of loss. But tracking how its social imaginary has changed reveals that this is only part of the story. The United Church’s history is also one of faithfulness, of gains and achievements that, at present, are often overlooked.

This book is in no way a comprehensive history of The United Church of Canada. Since its formation, the United Church has never ceased to be active on many different fronts. It has often engaged in processes of change. Though the church has a short history, it is so varied and rich that it is doubtful whether any one book could adequately tell it all. This book gives a chronological overview of the United Church’s history, focusing mostly on its national level of governance and on themes of particular importance at this time. By doing so, the editor and authors hope to provide a resource for all who desire to understand the United Church more fully. We hope it will be supplemented in the future by many more studies.

Don Schweitzer,

St. Andrew’s College

1 Phyllis Airhart, A ‘Review’ of The United Church of Canada’s 75 Years, Touchstone 18, no. 3 (September 2000): 21.

2 Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, Toward a New Story about Religion and Ethnicity in Canada, in Religion and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2005), 224.

3 Renate Pratt, In Good Faith: Canadian Churches against Apartheid (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997).

4 Catherine Gidney, A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).

5 Haim Genizi, The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

6 Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 41–64.

7 Elizabeth Gillan Muir, and Marilyn Färdig Whiteley, eds., Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

8 John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, 2nd ed. (Burlington, ON: Welch Publishing Company, 1988).

9 Grace Lane, Brief Halt at Mile 50: A Half Century of Church Union (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1974).

10 Peter Gordon White, ed., Voices and Visions: 65 Years of The United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1990).

11 Jim Taylor, ed., Fire and Grace: Stories of History and Vision (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1999).

12 Ibid., v.

13 Ibid.

14 Airhart, A ‘Review’ of The United Church of Canada’s 75 Years, 23.

15 Called to Be Church: Toward a Unifying Vision, The United Church of Canada (n.p., 2009).

16 Ibid., 5.

17 Ibid., 6–8.

Abbreviations

AIS The Authority and Interpretation of Scripture (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1992)

ARC Aboriginal Rights Coalition

BESS Board of Evangelism and Social Service

CCIA Committee on the Church and International Affairs

DMC Division of Mission in Canada

EUB Evangelical United Brethren

FCSO The Fellowship for a Christian Social Order

FIN Committee on Finance

GC1 The First General Council of The United Church of Canada

GOVCOM Committee on Governance, Planning and Budgeting Processes

KAIROS Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives

MCF Movement for Christian Feminism

MEPS Committee on Ministry and Employment Policies and Services

MMHS 32nd General Council’s Statement on Membership, Ministry and Human Sexuality

PCC The Presbyterian Church in Canada

PMM Committee on Programs for Mission and Ministry

RCSW Royal Commission on the Status of Women

SCM Student Christian Movement

The Manual The Manual, The United Church of Canada

TFWM The Task Force on the Changing Roles of Women and Men in Church and Society

UCA The United Church of Canada Archives

UCC The United Church of Canada

UCC, Proceedings GC1, 1925 The United Church of Canada, Record of Proceedings, The First General Council, 1925

UCC, Year Book, 1926 The United Church of Canada Year Book 1926

UCM United Church Men

UCW United Church Women

UCPH United Church Publishing House

WA Woman’s Association

WMS Woman’s Missionary Society

Part One Chronology

Chapter One

Unity among Many:

The Formation of The United

Church of Canada, 1899–1930

C.T. McIntire

Moderators

1925–26 George C. Pidgeon (former Presbyterian)

1926–28 James Endicott (former Methodist)

1928–30 William T. Gunn (former Congregationalist)

Secretary of The United Church of Canada

1925–32 T. Albert Moore (former Methodist)

Presidents of The Woman’s Missionary Society

1925–26 Mrs. H.A. Lavell (former Methodist)

1926 –30 Mrs. John MacGillivray (former Presbyterian)

1930–32 Annie Orchard Rutherford (former Methodist)

General Secretary of the Woman’s Missionary Society

1925–32 Effie A. Jamieson (former Congregationalist)

Key Reports, Statements, and Actions

1899 Formal union process begins with Methodists, Congregation6alists, and Presbyterians

1904 Joint Union Committee starts formal negotiations

1906 Anglicans and Baptists decline to join the union process

1908 Basis of Union sent to the churches; first congregation of Local Union Churches

1916 Presbyterians approve union after Congregationalists in 1910, and Methodists in 1912

1924 July 19, Parliament of Canada adopts The United Church of Canada Act

1925 June 10, Inaugural Service in Toronto launches The United Church of Canada

1925 October 25, Inaugural Service in Toronto launches Woman’s Missionary Society

1926 The Manual is authorized, with the first Constitution; first published in 1928

1926 Forms of Service for the Offices of the Church, first book of common order published

1927 Songs from the Psalter, first music collection; The Hymnary is published in 1930

1928 Committee on Christianization of Industry

1928 The Ordination of Women, first report presented favouring women in ordered ministry

1928 Five new orders of worship circulated, forming the basis for the Book of Common Order, published 1932

1930 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda joins union as a denomination

Demography

1921 Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational adherents (census): 2,599,595

1921 Population of Canada: 8,788,488

1931 UCC membership (census): 2,016,897¹

1931 Population of Canada: 10,376,786

Inauguration of The United Church of Canada

A rousing worship service in downtown Toronto on the morning of Wednesday, June 10, 1925, formally inaugurated The United Church of Canada.² In a flash, nearly all the Methodists and Congregationalists of Canada, as well as most Presbyterians and many independents, blended into one vast new nationwide body. The heat wave of previous days broke during the night of the ninth, just in time to help make the event an hour of palpitating joy. Eight thousand people filed inside The Arena, a wrestling palace and professional ice hockey venue, transformed for the occasion into sacred space. Thousands of others in Toronto and across the country attended parallel services, and thousands more listened to the proceedings broadcasted live on the radio. Still more saw exhaustive reports in the newspapers the next day. The venue and the numbers spoke volumes. The United Church of Canada aspired to be Canada’s church, the church of the people.³

Organizers designed the event to emphasize the colossal scale of the achievement. It was an organic church union that crossed historical, confessional, and denominational boundaries. On inauguration day, at the critical moment, the Canadian Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Independents in the Arena shed their historic identities. No adjective was used to name their new estate. They became simply United Church. The United Church emerged almost twice the size of the Church of England in Canada, the nearest Protestant option. Only the Roman Catholic Church was larger. The hope had been to gather the Protestants of Canada into one body and transcend the clutter of denominations that defined Protestantism. But Anglicans and Baptists, as well as others, kept their distance, and French Canada was noticeably uninvolved.

The formal union process leading to this defining moment began in 1899, and took a generation to come to fruition. More than half of the original members of the Joint Union Committee that was established in 1904 to negotiate union died before its completion in 1925. It took until 1930 to consolidate the new church. Pro-union and anti-union forces among Presbyterians were locked in struggle for two decades before they split apart at the moment of the achievement of union. It took until 1939 to settle the official aspects of their division. Feelings of hurt smouldered on, prompting people on both sides to sign an open letter in 1975 calling for reconciliation, fifty years after union.⁴

Nonetheless, the Basis of Union agreed upon in 1908 held firm as the foundation document of the new church. The United Church and countless onlookers extolled the union as a marvellous triumph. On June 10, 1925, it was time to let emotions loose, thank God, and sing. Fifty years later, one member who was there testified, Without a doubt, it was one of the greatest moments in my life. After exhilarating worship, the First General Council changed mode immediately to conduct the business of the new church.⁵

As the long union process rolled forward, the world shook underfoot. The devastation of the Great War of 1914–1919 came and went. The stunning success of Canadian forces against the Germans at Vimy Ridge in France in 1917 advanced Canada to new international status. The growth of the economy after the war transformed the nation into an apparently invincible capitalist powerhouse. Women in Canada received the right to vote in 1918. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 crushed the Russian czarist regime and brought on the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics. Hitler and the Nazis emerged in 1921. The League of Nations, established in 1919, laboured to become more than a nice idea. The movement for church union struggled to respond to these world-shaking events.

The commissioners to the First General Council entered The Arena choreographed to represent four streams flowing into each other to become the river of The United Church. The assembled masses sang the hymn The Church’s One Foundation Is Jesus Christ Our Lord. One stream of 150 commissioners represented the Methodist Church of Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. A second stream of 40 represented the Congregational Union of Canada. A third stream of 150 represented the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The fourth stream represented the General Council of Local Union Churches with ten commissioners. For the Methodists, Congregationalists, and Local Union Churches, half of the commissioners were clergy and half were laity, while for the Presbyterians, two-thirds were clergy and one-third laity. Clergy held the majority overall. Just about all of the commissioners were employed or retired middle-class married men of English or Scottish heritage, and, as photos of the event made evident, they were dressed in dark suits.

The notable exceptions were the four commissioners who were women: Effie A. Jamieson, Toronto, and Edith B. Crowe, Guelph, Ontario, representing the Congregationalist Union, as well as Mrs. W.T. McGorman, Port Arthur, Ontario, and Louise Crummy McKinney, Claresholm, Alberta, representing the Manitoba Conference and the Alberta Conference of the Methodist Church, respectively. Women could not become commissioners in the Presbyterian system, and the Local Union Churches sent no women. A fifth woman also counted in the record: Annie Orchard Rutherford, Toronto, representing the Toronto Conference of the Methodist Church as a reserve commissioner.⁶

The four uniting churches gathered up four centuries of Protestant history. The Presbyterians dated from sixteenth-century Scotland, the Congregationalists from seventeenth-century England, and the Methodists from eighteenth-century England. All three denominations organized their first churches in Canada during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Portraits evoking these three traditions –– John Knox for the Presbyterians, John Milton for the Congregationalists, and John Wesley for the Methodists –– appeared prominently on the third page of the agenda of the First General Council, following the prayer of Jesus for unity from John 17: 21 on page 1 and the prayer of thanksgiving and intercession for the fulfillment of union that was about to transpire on June 10.⁷

The fourth body, Local Union Churches, was a twentieth-century Canadian creation, dating from 1908 and drawn from the heritage of British peoples in Canada. The release of the Basis of Union that year stimulated the formation of new kinds of independent churches. In anticipation of the national union, local groups of people founded new congregations unattached to any existing denomination, using the Basis of Union as their fundamental document. The first such congregation was the Union Church of Melville, Saskatchewan, organized in November 1908. The second was the Union Church of Frobisher, Saskatchewan, in January 1909, quickly followed by others. By 1912, the Local Union Churches organized an advisory council that evolved into the General Council of Local Union Churches, and by 1916 they had grouped themselves into three presbyteries. By 1925, they numbered an estimated 100 congregations in six presbyteries. They became a denomination of their own and spread from Quebec to British Columbia, with the highest concentration in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.⁸

Since 1925, in common speech as well as in scholarly accounts by historians, in the official crest of The United Church, and, for that matter, even on the page bearing the three portraits in the agenda of the First General Council in 1925, references to the founding churches of The United Church have tended to overlook the Local Union Churches, and represent The United Church as simply a union of Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.⁹

The number of commissioners assigned to each of the four streams reflected the relative size of each body. According to the census of 1921, the Methodist Church included approximately 1.2 million adherents, virtually all of whom entered union. The great majority of Methodists in Newfoundland, at the time not part of the Dominion of Canada, voted against union. They were the only conference in the denomination to do so, but they accepted the decision of the church as a whole and entered union. The Congregational Union of Canada brought almost all of its 31,000 adherents into the merger. The General Council of Local Union Churches included an estimated several thousand adherents, all of whom entered union.¹⁰

The Presbyterian Church in Canada was the special case. By the time of the census of 1911, the Presbyterian Church had surpassed the Methodists to become the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. It remained the largest in 1921 with about 1.4 million adherents, and was still the largest in 1925 with an estimated 1.48 million. But the final vote on church union, conducted early in 1925, showed that out of 374,951 votes cast among Presbyterians, 108,840 members voted against union. The figures suggest that about 30 percent of Presbyterian individual voters desired to remain in what they understood to be the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada, while about 70 percent wanted the Presbyterian Church in Canada to enter The United Church. These figures, when applied to the census numbers, suggest that the Presbyterian Church in Canada brought an estimated 1 million adherents into The United Church. The final vote by the church’s presbyteries showed similar results, with fifty-three presbyteries deciding for union and twenty-six against, indicating a 67 percent to 33 percent division.¹¹

At the level of local congregations, however, a rather different result emerged. The United Church received 3,728 of 4,512 Presbyterian congregations. The remaining 784 congregations, known as non-concurring congregations, voted against union, and carried on as the continuing Presbyterian Church. According to these figures, 83 percent of all congregations entered union and gave up their Presbyterian identity, while 17 percent remained Presbyterian. At the level of the ordained ministers, an even a higher percentage of Presbyterian clergy than congregations chose The United Church. The figures show 90 percent of clergy for union and only 10 percent against. Given the centrality of congregations and clergy to church life, the 83: 17 ratio for congregations and the 90: 10 ratio for clergy better indicate the scale of the division than the 70: 30 ratio repeatedly used by historians.

In total, all 4,797 Methodist congregations, all but 8 of the 174 Congregational churches, all of the estimated 100 congregations of the Local Union Churches entered union, as did 3,728 Presbyterian congregations, for a total of nearly 8,800 congregations. By this count, 91 percent of the congregations of the four uniting denominations chose union. Virtually all were located in the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland, but a few were also found in Bermuda, Trinidad, and Honan Province, China.¹²

The inaugural event was indeed a worship service, not a business meeting. Yet, burdened by the ongoing crisis within the Presbyterian Church, the participants painstakingly reasserted the legality of the union. The Parliament of the Dominion of Canada in Ottawa passed The United Church of Canada Act in 1924, giving the union formal recognition and legal incorporation. The legislation came into effect on inaugural day.¹³ As part of the service, the chair read the Declaration of Church Union as contained in the act, recognizing the authority of the Parliament of Canada to incorporate the new church, and affirming the freedom, independence, and authority of the four denominations to merge together as denominations to form The United Church of Canada. The heads of the four churches then consummated union by signing the Basis of Union in the name of their denominations: S.D. Chown, general superintendent of the Methodist Church, George C. Pidgeon, moderator of the Presbyterian Church, W.H. Warriner, chairman of the Congregational Union, and Charles S. Elsey, chairman of the Local Union Churches. Chown, as chair of the occasion, uttered the prayer that constituted the General Council of The United Church of Canada. The commissioners, including the four women, then formally signed the Basis of Union.¹⁴

With the inauguration behind them, the commissioners did not miss a beat. The General Council moved nearby to Metropolitan United Church, at Queen and Church Streets, which until June 9 had been Metropolitan Methodist Church, affectionately called the Cathedral of Methodism. The commissioners met daily except Sunday until June 18 in committees, subcommittees, and as the General Council. They elected George C. Pidgeon, the Presbyterian head, to be the first moderator of The United Church, and T. Albert Moore, the Methodist secretary, to be the first secretary. The magnitude and significance of the items they processed, the reports they produced, and the decisions they made were staggering. The tone was cordial and the relationships harmonious, in stark contrast with the turmoil among the Presbyterians.

Simultaneously, the Presbyterians who desired to maintain their heritage and opposed church union were also generating a whirlwind of activity. The majority of the Fifty-first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, meeting in Toronto since June 3, had voted on June 9 to adjourn the General Assembly rather than to