The St. Matthias’ Sunday School has been through many changes since 1873, including years of simply not existing. Although it is always tempting to see the Sunday School as a somewhat parallel organisation…
Read MoreAlthough many things in our archives are, as you know by now, quite well-documented, our connections with the wider Anglican Church are not….
Read MoreOver the course of the past three years, St. Matthias’ has been upgrading its audiovisual equipment, which now includes three cameras, a laptop, and a flat-screen TV. These new additions…
Read MoreIn April 1912, Matthians celebrated the culmination of more than twenty years of dreaming (and fundraising), and almost two years of building with the first Eucharist in their new building…
Read MoreExactly 50 years ago today, St. Matthias’ welcomed the newest – and largest – member of its pastoral team: a gorgeous tracker organ built by German organ-maker Karl Wilhelm…
Read MoreAs many of our stained-glass windows were installed in the years immediately before and after WWII, it was only natural that they should have begun needing repairs as they turned 50 in the 1980s and 1990s…
Read MoreBefore the War Memorial was moved to the Memorial Chapel in the North Transept, there was a much less military bent to the chapel’s overall décor. But the differences are not really all that major…
Read MoreThere’s a lot for St. Matthias’ to be thankful for, 150 years on…
Read MoreBeginning in the 1830s, the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Methodist churches set up boarding schools for Indigenous children that would become an important part of federal policy after Confederation…
Read MoreThe earliest documents we have in our archives are financial ones, and they are certainly the most numerous as well. In the 1880s…
Read MoreOne of the delights of our archives is just how many stories are contained even in non-narrative documents. Today, we dive deeply into the first seventy-five years of insurance…
Read MoreStart-Up Sunday, known affectionately by the current rector as “Hot Dog Sunday,” is one of St. Matthias’ newest traditions, started in the late 1980s by then-rector Rev. Paul James…
Read MoreWhere would St. Matthias’ be without the Chancel Guild?...
Read MoreIn the 1880s, Montreal (population: 217,000 by 1891) faced the harshness of winter in a quintessentially Victorian English way: by building vast architectural confections out of snow…
Read MoreA little later this month, St. Matthias’ Parish Executive Committee will meet for its third quarterly meeting of 2023, the first to be held in person since 2019…
Read MoreCookbook fundraisers are a tradition that goes back to the 1860s, and were so popular that over the 80 years between then and the 1920s, over 3000 cookbooks were published, mostly by churches, in North America. What began…
Read MoreLittle did the Association of Women (link to Votes for Women) know, but when they embarked on the yearlong project of developing a new edition of the St. Matthias’ cookbook in 1989, it would be their last major endeavour…
Read MoreOur archives record mostly notable things: significant donations, important services, matters of canon law procedure, and so on. And those things are central to telling St. Matthias’ story, but…
Read MoreIn the 1960s, the Anglican and United Churches of Canada were actively contemplating becoming a single denomination. St. Matthias’ took part in these dialogues [link to Christian Unity blog post], and in larger conversations about Christian unity that were increasingly popular during the decade...
Read MoreIf you were reading a St. Matthias’ parish email in the spring or summer of 2022, you may have encountered a plaintive plea from your wardens on the subject of updating the inventory. “We want you,” you were to imagine Heather Barwick or Jessica Stilwell saying…
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