How ‘free faith’ took root in our city
Unitarians formed church 60 years ago
Ask Ruth Patrick about the founding of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton 60 years ago, and she talks about the powerful bonds within the small group that made it happen.
“I remember above all the high value we placed on each other, and the freedom we felt when we were together, and the eagerness to include anybody who was curious or wanted to explore,” says Patrick. This 90-year-old, matriarch of the congregation, still has a keen memory for those long-ago events.
The Unitarian Church was then, and still is, a small denomination. If people wanted a Unitarian church in their town, they had to do most of the work themselves. The Edmontonians in 1954 got some help from church headquarters in Boston — today, Canadian headquarters are in Toronto — but most of the heavy lifting was done by volunteers.
And they were eager to do it. In the conservative, largely Christian society that was Edmonton in the early 1950s, some people longed for a community of people who were questioning the traditional religious answers. The Unitarian Church was a liberal spiritual community that welcomed everyone from atheists to liberal Christians and Buddhists.
There had been a Unitarian church in the city in previous years, founded in 1912. Its driving force for many years was W.H. Alexander, a classics professor at the University of Alberta. It folded in 1937, a victim of the Great Depression.
The man who got things going again was Dick Morton, a local man who was a Unitarian without a congregation — a member of what Unitarians call The Church of the Larger Fellowship. In 1951 Morton decided that wasn’t enough. He contacted five other local Larger Fellowship people and they started meeting.
By 1953 they had several dozen members and decided it was time to try to relaunch the church. They appealed to Unitarian headquarters for help, and Boston sent them a young minister to help the effort, with his salary paid by headquarters for a year.
At this time, Unitarianism on the Canadian prairies consisted of a few small groups in cities plus several collections of Icelandic immigrants — many Icelanders adopted Unitarianisn when they moved to Canada. Until Rev. Charles Eddis arrived in Edmonton in June 1953 to help set up a church, there was no Unitarian minister between Winnipeg and Vancouver.
A document in the Unitarian Church of Edmonton archives boxes, which are stored at the Provincial Archives, captures the passion of this Edmonton group. It is unsigned, but the writing style is very much that of Dick Morton as he led the church-creating effort.
It says: “It is a challenge to every one of us to do everything possible to the extent of our talents and gifts to see a Unitarian Church is established in the shortest possible time. … The future of religious liberalism in this city — indeed, in this whole section of Canada — is in our hands.”
Eddis has called Morton “the prince of the congregation.”
Ruth Patrick remembers Eddis’s first visit to Edmonton, as a shy young man not yet married. When he arrived, there were 33 people on the membership list.
Dick Morton talked about those early days in a 1986 sermon. “We were a motley assembly as far as ideas were concerned,” he said. “A few very liberal Christians like me, a number of scientific humanists, some followers of Dr. (W.H.) Alexander, a deist or two, and two former orthodox ministers. What held us together: probably more what we didn’t believe than what we believed.”
Weekly newsletters that Edmonton Unitarians began publishing in September 1953, 10 months before the church was officially launched, show the mountain of things that the founding members had to deal with.
For starters, they had no building to call their own. In October 1953 they started renting the Odd Fellows Hall downtown for their Sunday services. There was a desire that this second-edition Unitarian church in Edmonton be less university-centred and have a wider appeal; a downtown location suited that goal.
Other things got going that fall: a Sunday school, a vocal group, a local branch of the Unitarian Service Committee charity, church suppers.
Above all else, there was a membership drive. To qualify as an official church, organizers needed to recruit at least 65 families as charter members. They had to triple their membership in a year.
That gigantic effort went on right to the last minute: the 65th family was signed up just four days before the grand launching ceremony, held on May 17, 1954. From six people three years earlier, there were by then 97 official Unitarians in the city.
To make that happen, they did everything. Eddis contacted anyone he could find who had been part of the old congregation. The group ran a series of provocative ads in the Edmonton Journal, with titles like Is It Better to Think or Believe? They often paid double the ad rate to have the ads placed on general news pages, not the religion page — to reach people not typically churchgoers.
Church members held neighbourhood gatherings around the city, with the aim of recruitment. Morton wrote in the church newsletter at this time: “No amount of newspaper publicity can compare with the personto-person testimony you can give about what this modern free faith of ours can mean. Be a missionary. Tell your story. Issue an invitation.”
Obviously they did, because the numbers grew and grew.
Among the new recruits was Ruth Patrick. The Oct.15, 1953 newsletter noted that church member Freeman Patrick had brought his bride, Ruth Clarke of Weyburn, Sask., to the previous Sunday service.
Freeman was already a committed Unitarian, but as Ruth recalls, that didn’t mean his wife automatically signed up as well. Unitarians think for themselves, so Freeman insisted that his new wife think carefully about whether to join the church.
Ruth Patrick would go on to become the national president of Canadian Unitarians.
Intriguingly, there was a connection between the Unitarians and a Jewish synagogue, Beth Shalom. Patrick says that Eddis and Rabbi Louis Sacks of Beth Shalom became good friends. In February 1954, Eddis gave a sermon at a Friday night service at Beth Shalom, and the following Sunday, Rabbi Sacks preached to the Unitarians. Unitarians were encouraged to attend the Sabbath Eve service at the synagogue.
A few years later, Eddis would invite the imam of a local mosque to speak at the Sunday service at our church.
The founders in 1954 built a strong church which Edmonton Unitarians today have inherited. And as Patrick says, they had a wonderful time doing it: “You ended up that everyone was so precious to you. There’s no other way to put it.”