I gave myself a project this time: I was going to seek out the oldest place of worship in Toronto. After a bit of online research, I learned that the oldest surviving place of worship in the city is Little Trinity Anglican Church, which opened its doors in 1844.
When I stepped in the building, the first thing that I noticed was that it felt oddly familiar... for more ways than one.
My exposure to Christianity as a child was through my grandmother's church, which my family liked to joke (even though 8-year-old me didn't get it) was "rather Anglican" for a Baptist church. More recently, thanks to my wife, I've gained some familiarity with the Catholic Church. What I found at Little Trinity felt for the most part like a mix of the two: a "transitional form", if you will... or, to use what's probably a more accurate analogy, a hybrid.
I'd only been in an Anglican church once or twice before, but only for weddings and always at much more modern, 60s- and 70s-style churches. This building had much of the feel of older Catholic churches I'd been in, only "Protestantized": stained glass windows, but with geometric patterns rather than images of saints; an altar at the head of the church, but with a plain cross rather than a crucifix; a layout that might lend itself to having stations of the cross around the periphery, but in their place, engraved tablets giving the names of the prominent members of the community who helped pay to build the church.
It was these tablets that gave me another sense of familiarity, because most of them were adorned with names like "Gooderham" and "Worts": names that are immediately recognizeable to anyone from Toronto and that still adorn the buildings in the now-trendy Distillery District, where the barrel warehouses have been converted into fashionable restaurants and condos.
A few minutes before the service began, I heard something that used to be common but I hadn't heard in ages: a church bell. The church is one of the few that I've personally encountered that still has a functioning bell that they ring for the call to worship.
As the time approached for the service to begin, I looked around and noticed that the pews were only sparesly populated. It seemed like the priest agreed with my assessment, as opened the service by asking everyone to move to one side so that we wouldn't be so spread out. "Worshipping together rather than all worshipping alone in the same room", as he put it. I would later find out that he had other things in mind in doing this.
Just based on my general impression of how similar the trappings of the church were to what I was used to in a Catholic church, I expected something like the Catholic type of ritual and solemnity, so I was a bit unprepared when the priest introduced the pianist, who proceeded to explain to the audience his point of view about the meaning behind the hymn he was about to play. I didn't realize how much I'd been "Catholicized" until a voice in the back of my head said "this is all wrong! The musicians shouldn't be talking!" When the pianist referred to the priest as just "Chris", that was the icing on the cake.
"Chris'" (gee - that feels weird even to type) sermon dealt heavily with the Gospel reading, Matthew 16:13-20. He spoke about how Jesus asked Peter "what do you say I am?" and then put the question to the congregation, asking us what we thought Jesus was. People gave various answers ("messiah", "saviour", "redeemer", etc.), but he kept asking. As he walked up the aisle near to where I was sitting, I got very nervous that he might call on me. I thought to myself, "don't pick the atheist! Don't pick the atheist!" I was rather relieved when he turned back toward the altar and what would have been a rather awkward situation was avoided.
The priest then spoke about another familiar Gospel passage: Peter's denial of Jesus. He asked us how a person like this could be the "rock" that Jesus had spoken of, when he proved to be so unreliable later on. It was an interesting point that I'd never heard before. According to the priest, the answer was that Peter did the will of God.
Following the ceremony was Communion, and this is where my sense of vague familiarity was shattered: the priest called up the congregation, and most of the people present kneeled at a rail that circled the altar.
After the conclusion of the service, I left the church unsure of its relationship with its surroundings. It was obvious that the church had seen tremendous change over the past 167 years - after all, when this church was founded, Toronto had only been a city for a decade; Canada didn't exist as a nation. The church's web site remarks that it is "plugged into its neighbourhood", but at the same time, it seems to me that other aspects of Little Trinity are at odds with the changes that have taken place around it, both in terms of the physical neighbourhood around the church as well as the religious "neighbourhood" of the larger Anglican Church.
All in all, though, I think that Little Trinity is different from surroundings in one important respect. The century-old industrial buildings that surround it are now nothing more than facades: antique veneers around a new structure. Whatever the relationship between Little Trinity and the trendy neighbourhood that now surrounds it, the church is probably a better reflection of those 19th-century business and community leaders who founded it than the restaurants and bars of the Distillery District that still bear those leaders' names.
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