Mission, Ministry, and Money

How does a small parish of one hundred households, located on the wrong side of the tracks, engage in significant outreach to those within its parish boundaries and beyond? Perhaps the story of St. John's Anglican Cathedral Parish can give some pointers and encouragement to similarly situated parishes. St. John's is in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, just a few kilometers west of the center of the North American continent. It is the oldest Anglican parish west of the Great Lakes on either side of the Canada-U.S. border, having been founded when the Reverend John West arrived in the Red River Settlement on October 14, 1820. The Anglican clergyman had come to the prairie wilderness to serve as chaplain to the officers and men of the Hudson's Bay Company, as missionary to the Saulteaux, Cree, and Oji-Cree people who inhabited die region, and as pastor to the Selkirk Settlers. The Selkirk Settlers had been victims of the Highland Clearances in Scotiand and, under the aegis of Lord Selkirk, a director of the Hudson's Bay Company, had found a haven on the western bank of the Red River. The fact that the Selkirk Settlers were, by and large, Presbyterian left the Reverend John West unperturbed, and he set to and ministered to them for three years before returning to England. He was succeeded by the Reverend David Jones, who labored in the vast territory of Rupert's Land for the next fifteen years, holding regular worship services, attending to the needs of his largely non-Anglican flock, establishing a school for the children of the settlers, the Hudson's Bay men, and the indigenous peoples. St. John's exerted great influence in die community over the years, influence that continued when the territory of Rupert 's Land was carved into the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba (in 1870 Manitoba was the first province to join the original Canadian Federation, founded in 1867), and the rough-and-ready fur trading fort and farming settlement was transformed into the city of Winnipeg, a hub of commerce and trade. Goods were transported in and out of Winnipeg by rail to and from the east and the west, and by steamboat from the south. This happy situation continued until the opening of the Panama Canal, which made it cheaper to transport goods from east to west. Despite the decline of Winnipeg's importance as a center of trade, St. John's continued to be a power in the city and the province. Archbishop Machray, who came from Scotland as Bishop of Rupert's Land in 1865 and remained until his death in 1904, established St. John's College, the founding college of what is now the University of Manitoba, to train clergy to serve the spiritual needs of immigrants who were beginning to arrive in the west in great numbers, lured by Sir Clifford Sifton's promises of cheap land. Machray was also instrumental in establishing what is now the independent Anglican Church of Canada (although in his day it was still the Church of England in Canada), and served as the first Primate of Canada. Through the years, four different buildings housed the community of St. John's. The first, a Red River frame building, was destroyed by the great flood of 1826, and the second, built of stone in 1832, was severely affected by the great flood of 1850 and was eventually pulled down to make way for the first actual cathedral (the first bishop had arrived in 1849), which was built in 1862. By the early years of the twentieth century, the walls of the third church were being propped up with poles, and while the new century was still in its teens, the 1862 cathedral was deemed unfit for use. The present cathedral, a massive Norman-Gothic style structure, opened its doors in 1926. With the crash of 1929, the cathedral parish entered decline. It managed to live off its endowments for several years, but population shifts in the years following the Second World War left the cathedral high and dry in Winnipeg's North End, a neighborhood now home to mostly Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, and other eastern European immigrants and their descendants. …

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