Chapter 4 -- "A
Cathedral in the heart of the city" 1919-1932
The search for a new rector took nine months.
When a suitable candidate was finally
found in April, 1919, the church committee
cautiously voted to take out an insurance policy on the new man against sickness, accident or death for three
months until he arrived. There was no
need to collect: the Rev. William Woodham Craig arrived in good health in June. Once again Christ
Church had the right man at the right
time.
A graduate of McGill University, Craig had
spent most of his career in Montreal.
Unlike two of his three predecessors -- and his three immediate successors -- he did not study theology at
Wycliffe College, Toronto. Nevertheless
he was a low churchman, and one who
stressed pastoral work. Losing no time, he set out to visit all the homes in the parish. The church was growing
again, and by January, 1920, Craig had
still not reached everyone. "The lack of familiarity with the City leads to sad loss of time in
this work, and sometimes to dismal
failure in arriving at my objective," he apologized in the annual rector's report. "Another
peculiar feature of our life here which
is already becoming familiar to me, is the frequent changes of residence in the congregation, and an ever
changing population in the
Parish." His sermons were as elaborate as his prose. He was
described as a "fine, rather
poetic speaker."
At an early meeting Craig introduced the new
"Forward Movement" to the
vestry. The men of the parish were set to work to bring in more envelope offering for both parish and
missionary work. The new rector
proposed repairs to the rectory. He proposed plans for electric lighting, new carpets, a chapel in a
basement room -- and later
(unsuccessfully) a church tower. Within a year he was asking for an assistant. In July, 1920, Cecil Swanson, a
31-year-old clergyman working at
Metchosin on Vancouver Island, applied. Swanson knew Vancouver from a visit he had made to Cecil Owen seven years
before while passing through Vancouver
in 1913 to his first posting, in Yukon
territory. The church committee decided to hire Swanson, and a luncheon was organized to raise his $1800 a
year salary.
Although the finances of the church were
"men's work" during this
period, many financial initiatives came from the women. There were three very active groups: the Daughters of
the King (founded in 1898) was a prayer
group; the Woman's Auxiliary (1898) involved itself in missionary and social service work; and the
new Women's Parochial Association,
formed in October, 1919, looked after the needs of Christ Church itself. It was the Parochial
association that offered to install
electric lights in the body of the church in 1920, undertook a major redecoration a few years later, and in
1921, while the men were just talking
about it, started to work on a campaign to reduce the mortgage. Two years later the men finally became involved in an elaborate "Wipe out the Debt"
campaign with two teams of canvassers
(the "reds" and the "blues"). The new Mayor of
Vancouver, Charles E. Tisdall, a former
warden, accepted the post of honorary chairman; the untiring H.J. Cambie helped raise funds. The rector's warden Frederick Beecher offered to match funds
raised, dollar for dollar, up to
$10,000. Over $25,000 was raised and the $17,000 mortgage paid off. For the first time, Christ Church was
free of debt. It was a time of
"encouragement and prosperity," wrote the rector,
"wonderfully realized."
Once again the church buzzed with activity. The
Boy Scouts succeeded the Boys' Brigade.
A lively group of Girl Guides was
established--so lively that the choir complained that the noise
they were making was interfering with
practices. The choir performed Gilbert
and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury." A large military service filled the church to capacity for the
unveiling of a memorial tablet to
Lieutenant-Colonel William Hart-McHarg. So many others wanted to install memorial windows and plaques that
the rector proposed a plan to keep
their design uniform. The church committee turned down as unsuitable the offer of a tablet containing
the ten commandments. A Christ Church
Men's Club was formed. There were collections for Armenian relief, and the church committee passed a resolution
urging the stamping out of the drug
traffic. There was ecumenical action of
sorts: Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans
met to organize a lobby to have
churches exempted from city taxes.
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|
The Very Rev. R.J. Renison, fifth rector |
In March, 1926, after nearly seven years in
Vancouver, Craig accepted the post of
dean of St. George's Cathedral in Kingston.
During his term, Christ Church was guided through the difficult post-War period, paid off its debt, and
recovered a position of pre-eminence in
a revitalized city. Again it took the church
committee nine months to find the next rector: the Rev. Dr. Robert John Renison, son of a missionary to the
Objibway on Lake Nipigon in Ontario.
Renison, 51, had been a missionary himself for 14 years, served in France during the First World War,
and held the rectorship of the Church
of the Ascension in Hamilton, Ontario, where he was an avid fan of the Hamilton Tigers
(predecessors to the Tiger-Cats). At
the time "the football games were the greatest joy of my
life," he would recall in his
autobiography. Although the Tigers were poised to win a series of Grey Cups (in 1928, 1929, and 1932), the native
of Tipperary, Ireland, gave up his
football tickets to head west to
Vancouver at age 51.
* * *
Since becoming bishop in 1910, Adam De Pencier
had wanted to establish a cathedral in
Vancouver. He had persuaded the Canadian
Pacific Railway to set aside land in their Shaughnessey Heights development for a Vancouver cathedral, and
in the early Twenties bought land and
built a See House on Nanton Avenue. However the growth of Vancouver's downtown district had convinced him that
a cathedral should be built north of
False Creek instead of south. To create
a strong cathedral parish, the bishop had considered uniting the two "daughters" of St. James
in the West End: St. Paul's and Christ
Church. However St. Paul's, practiced moderately high churchmanship, as befitted a former parish of the bishop: even
with the Crucifixion window, Christ
Church was still amongst the lowest of
the low. The bishop gave up the idea of such a union as hardly possible.
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|
The Most Rev. Adam de Pencier, Bishop of New Westminster and later Metropolitan of British Columbia, 1910-1940 |
In January, 1929, the church committee members
were startled by the bishop's offer to
make Christ Church preeminent in the diocese--to make it his cathedral. Holy Trinity in New Westminster,
cathedral since 1892, would also keep
the title--but Christ Church would be the
real centre. The news came through their rector, who at this point had been at Christ Church less than two years.
While Renison, like his predecessors,
was a low church, Wycliffe College man, a warm
relationship had sprung up between himself and the bishop. De Pencier
spelled it out in the letter containing the offer to make Christ Church the cathedral: Renison had
been "one who has given me more
help and comfort than any Rector that I have had in the nineteen years of my Episcopate."
Renison had certainly encouraged the idea of
making Christ Church the cathedral, but
the idea may have come from a visitor. In his
autobiography Renison recalled that the Chaplain-General of the British Army, the Rt. Rev. William Taylor
Smith, had visited Vancouver and
preached at Christ Church. "He was struck by the site of Christ Church and said: `A cathedral should be down
town in the heart of the city,' as
Christ Church was." A bishop of New Westminster certainly would have duly considered a British
Chaplain-General's opinion. De Pencier
had served in the 62nd Overseas Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Forces, in France and Belgium . He had been awarded
the Order of the British Empire by King
George V.
Still, if Christ Church were to become the
cathedral, the bishop insisted on some
conditions. The bishop's first requirement was that a cross be put on the altar. "We put crosses over the graves
of our men in France," the bishop
wrote in the letter read out to the church
committee at their meeting of January 14, 1929. De Pencier's second requirement was that Holy Communion be
celebrated in the morning, not in the
evening, as was occasionally the practice at Christ Church. The church committee agreed to both
conditions with little difficulty.
De Pencier's third condition, however, was more
difficult. The bishop pointed out that
the rubric directs the priest stand "before" the altar instead of to the side. "This
is the tradition that was established
by the first Bishop, continued by the second Bishop, and obtains in the majority of the Churches in
this Diocese, and I would not be happy
in making any Church my Cathedral where this was not the custom." The committee balked; a
sub-committee was appointed to
negotiate. Within two weeks a compromise was reached. In the formal memorandum of agreement drawn up with the
bishop, it read: "With regard to
the position of the Celebrant at Holy Communion, there shall be no prescribed `use.'" The Vestry
unanimously approved what their church
committee had negotiated.
The newly designated Cathedral stood in the
middle of a rapidly expanding city. By
the end of the decade, the 15-storey Medical
Dental Building to the east of the church was built, and the iron framework of the even larger Hotel Vancouver
across Georgia Street began to rise.
The 1920s had been years of renewed growth for
Vancouver. Within the decade it became a major terminal for
Canadian grain. With annexations,
population had doubled to a quarter of a
million. As soon as he had arrived in Vancouver, Renison had been excited by the possibilities of a downtown
ministry. Showing his wife the stone
building that now seated over a thousand people, Elizabeth Renison declared: "You've got what you
always wanted, a preaching
church." The rector's voice was to become well known throughout
the city, and much of the province,
thanks to the still new invention of
radio.
Radio had come to Vancouver in 1920. Craig had
broadcast a few services in 1924, but
he and the church committee decided to
discontinue the experiment as not worth the expense. Three years later, while waiting for Renison to arrive,
the church committee received an offer
from the Sparks Company asking they be allowed to broadcast Christ Church's services free of charge on station
CKWX. The new rector immediately took
to this new way of spreading the gospel
to a non-church audience. Renison was familiar with secular media: for years he had written a weekly
column in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Sunday evening broadcasts began. When the radio station started asking a fee, funds were found,
first from rector's warden Beecher and
later from the Farmer Estate. Broadcasting from Christ Church Cathedral continued for more than 40
years.
Renison was an innovative rector. He expanded
the church's ministry to Vancouver's
business community by instituting Lenten
noontime services. Every year five clergymen would be invited to
the Cathedral, each one for a week
during Lent. Weekdays they would give
25 minute sermons over the lunch hour. The very first speaker was
the rector's brother, the Rev. William
Renison of Billings, Montana. Withing
the parish, Renison proposed an Every Member Canvasses, which was carried out successfully. The increased
activities convinced the church
committee to hire a "lady clerk" at $25 per month to work afternoons in the church office. A lengthy
correspondence secured permission from
the Imperial War Graves Commission to allow a replica in Christ Church of Westminster Abbey's memorial to a million
British dead. It was unveiled by
British Columbia Lieutenant Governor R.
Raldolph Bruce on the tenth anniversary of the Armistice; 1800
copies of the service were printed.
Then he persuaded the Royal Colonial
Institute to erect a memorial to Captain James Cook. "There
are thousands of Americans who pass
through Vancouver every year," he
wrote, "...and I cannot help feeling that something from the Old
Land to show the unity of the Empire
would have a profound effect --
intangible though it might be -- in strengthening the bonds of Empire." In November, 1929, a memorial
to H.J. Cambie was dedicated. The man
many considered the "father of Christ Church" had died the year before at age 91.
Occasionally, Renison outpaced his committee.
In February, 1930, he persuaded George
Beggs, executor of the Farmer Estate, to offer
$10,000 towards purchase of another 37 1/2 feet of land north along Burrard. More money would come from the
Farmer Estate to build a proper
chancel. The church committee had to find the balance for the land, $27,500. The committee dickered for
five months. Finally they had to turn
down the offer of the Farmer Estate "owing to financial conditions." Mr. Beggs bought the land anyway,
but development was to wait until the
end of the decade.
Late in 1931, while on a train returning from a trip to Toronto, Renison received a telegram asking him to stop in Winnipeg. There he was informed the Synod of Rupert's Land had elected him Bishop of Athabasca. His ordination as bishop was held at Christ Church Cathedral on the Feast of Epiphany in January, 1932. It was a splendid ceremony with eight bishops participating. At the same service the Rev. A.H. Sovereign, former curate at Christ Church and canon of the Cathedral, was ordained Bishop of the Yukon.