What We Believe

Who We Are

Our Leadership

Our Neighbourhood

St. Bartholomew’s

Anglican Church Regent Park

509 Dundas Street East

Toronto, Ontario M5A 3V3                      

An Anglo Catholic Parish

A word from Father Robert Conway:

 

 WHO WE ARE—AN ANGLO CATHOLIC PARISH

 

St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Parish Church, affectionately known as St Bart’s, was founded in 1873 on the west bank of the Don River at the bottom of Wilton Avenue. In 1910, it was physically moved to its present location. Unlike most Anglican churches at the time, St Bart’s was not founded by a wealthy benefactor.

Instead it was the Anglican citizens within its parish boundaries who worked hard to pay for the land and the construction of the church. This background had a lasting effect on our church.

 

St Bart’s is an Anglo-Catholic parish that follows the Canadian Book of Common Prayer. Its worship life is highly traditional and pious, augmented by a rich music ministry through the able talents of our organist and through the exceptional leadership of our choir director. The parish has a rich legacy of traditional worship and is one of the very few churches left in the Toronto area where you can experience church life as it has been historically.

 

In our history, we have had periods where membership was high and this can be seen in the rich variety of vestments and chalices that the church has. But most of our history has generally been one of challenge and struggle. The parish boundaries were rebuilt in the fifties to house the poor in an urban social experiment called Regent Park. Over the history of Regent Park, St. Bart’s fell upon challenging times in two ways.

 

The demographics of Regent Park were in a continual state of change. Often the community was host to the latest wave of immigrants who would remain a few years, adjust to their new culture and then move away as they became increasingly more independent. As a result, the parish experienced a significant decline in membership and revenues. Increasing numbers of immigrants were not Anglican, and gradually very few of them were even Christian. Those who did come were also desperately poor. That was the first major impact on the parish.

 

The next one was just as challenging. Being surrounded by the poor, the parish leadership naturally felt an urgent Christian need to assist as best it could. As a result, the few resources we had gradually led to the formation of a food bank serving fifteen hundred souls. A breakfast program was started where, until this year, two breakfasts were served every week. This ministry has served twenty thousand breakfasts a year. There was a Christmas Hamper program which, at its peak, gave away up to 1,500 Christmas Hampers so that poor families would have a good Christmas dinner. The parish opened a Children’s Program to encourage the development of children after school. All of these activities and more were funded by generous donations of parishioners and by friends of St Bart’s.

Today the parish is at a new crossroads. It’s severely challenged currently because Regent Park is being rebuilt in the next ten years. Over this period the few parishioners we have had within the parish boundaries are being relocated so the buildings can be demolished and new ones can be built. Eventually when the renewal is complete half the new population will be the poor and the other half will be middle class families living in homes they own. At this point there is every expectation that the parish will finally become strong again assuming it survives the next two or three years.

 

Our mission statement, as we developed it with our Vestry is …

 

St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church worships God with the Book of Common Prayer, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, giving us strength to reach out to all sorts and conditions of God’s family.

 

We are also called the “Miracle on Dundas Street”, a miracle not only in terms of the number of people we are helping each year, but also a miracle in the sense that when our future seems at its darkest, something always happens to give is a new lease on life.