Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 47
primarily from the British Isles, South Africa and other British
protectorates, ensured that Toronto would be profoundly Protestant—
and, in particular, Anglican—in orientation. In a pattern which
paralleled the American experience in New York, it seemed to the
rapidly expanding Anglican Church as if the waves of immigrants
populating and overpopulating Toronto would never stop. Beginning
in the early twentieth century, the diocesan Synod began an
aggressive building campaign in the outer neighborhoods of Toronto
and its suburbs. In the 1950s, for example, the plan was to plant a
church every mile along Bloor Street, the major east-west axis of the
city. By the early 1970s, however, the meteoric expansion of the
Anglican Church in urban Toronto came to an abrupt halt with the
cessation of the influx of British immigrants, and the marked drop in
church attendance that was indicative of the times.
Today, with the amalgamation of these suburbs into a “megacity,”
urban Toronto’s Anglican community, like New York’s
Roman Catholic, has a glut of churches in the inner city. Most of
these communities are based in expensive-to-maintain, aging, neogothic
structures. All are in financial need. Only a few have
congregations large enough to meet these needs, let alone a critical
mass of parishioners capable of ministering to the neighborhoods
around them. Indeed, were it not for the income from property
rentals or trusts established long ago, some of these Churches could
not keep their doors open, let alone thrive. It is often said that the
reliance upon rental income from community groups has effected a
reversal in the Church’s God-given vocation, such that the
community now “ministers” to the Church.
The problem of being property-rich and income-poor is not a
unique state for most urban parishes. All over North America we
need to revisit our sense that closing or consolidating urban
churches somehow represents a failure. Moreover, the
evangelization—or in some cases, re-evangelization—of the urban
core, while always a worthy ministry, is generally unlikely to yield