Reflections on the heritage, life & work of faith communities in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario
When one visits a church and hears that the congregation’s clergywoman is sometimes known as “the little Pope from Brockville,” the risk of tuning out the sermon is greatly diminished. I had the chance to visit Wall Street United Church in Brockville on a couple of occasions this summer and in each instance, I found…
When I was a kid, my dad would haul me out of bed early on a Sunday morning, order me into my ‘Sunday best’ including tights without holes and shoes that pinched my feet because I only wore them occasionally, and pack all of us into the VW van to go to church. We were…
Sixty years ago, new churches were springing up like wildflowers in the sprawling suburbs of metropolitan Ottawa. On April 4, 1964, an Ottawa Citizen article by J.A. Hume on this church boom gives a sense of the energy that surrounded bustling and growing faith communities in the sixties, especially in the case of the United…
Reverend Lynne Gardiner ministers at Bethel United Church in Perth, where the current church has stood since 1895. Rev. Gardiner began her ministry in Perth in 2019, having completed her Master of Divinity from Queen’s University in 2015, followed by ordination in 2017. In the piece below, Rev. Gardiner reflects on the unique gifts and…