St. Margaret’s celebrates a century of faithfulness
WINNIPEG, MB–There is a sense of stillness and permanence that one finds walking through Winnipeg's Wolseley neighborhood. Tucked away from the heavy traffic on Portage Avenue, life seems to travel a little slower here. The houses, apartment blocks, little shops and dense canopy of elm trees seem to have always been here.
It is hard to imagine that St. Margaret's Anglican Church, which sits in the centre of the neighbourhood at the corner of Westminster Avenue and Ethelbert, much of its red brick and limestone façade covered with vines, had its beginnings when Wolseley was a semi-rural area that was home to a few new houses, vegetable farms and an amusement park called Happyland.
It was Albert Woods who came to establish an Anglican mission in 1908, and he conducted the first services in the living room of a small cottage at 19 Knappen Avenue, just off Maryland. Winnipeg at the time was the fastest growing city in Canada, and as the march of urban growth came quickly to Wolseley during these years, the mission outgrew the house on Knappen and built a small church building on Arlington Street by 1909.
In 1910, St. Margaret's mission was incorporated as a parish, and 2010 marks its centennial year.
In 1912, with the city's dramatic growth and prosperity reaching a crescendo, St. Margaret's built its present church building. The next year, the fortunes of both St. Margaret's and the city began to change. The recession of 1913 was particularly hard on Winnipeg and the parish, and when war in Europe broke out in 1914, Woods left St. Margaret's to enlist as a chaplain for the Canadian forces, spending much of the war serving on the front lines.
Through the century, St. Margaret's carried on as a centre of life not just for Anglicans, but for the neighborhood at large. The church operated a tennis club on Palmerston Avenue for many years, and held activities such as girls' basketball in the church basement and snowshoe tramps on the Assiniboine River.
By the 1980s, Wolseley was transitioning into its “Granola Heights" identity–the place where Osborne Village hipsters move to when they settle down and have kids. Since then, and particularly under the leadership of the present rector David Widdicombe, St. Margaret's has attracted worshippers mostly from outside the Anglican denomination, and particularly among young academics, artists and professionals living in the neighbourhood.
While many mainline protestant congregations languish as they desperately attempt to be relevant to a secular culture, attendance at St. Margaret's has grown in recent years. Today, pews are regularly filled on Sunday mornings, and on high holy days at Christmas and Easter, one needs to show up early to find a seat.
What it is that draws people to St. Margaret's varies: rigorous preaching that engages both intellect and faith, the beauty and reverence of the liturgy, or simply the good singing.
But good intellectual ideas can be found at the library, a sense of beauty and peace can be experienced watching a sunset and good choral singing is available on satellite radio. What truly brings people to St. Margaret's today is what brought a handful of believers together in a living room at the edge of a young city more than a century ago, and sustained that congregation through a century of war, depression and the rise of a militant secularism: the chance to gather and celebrate of the saving power of Christ's death and resurrection.
It is a century of faithfulness to this gospel that the Parish of St. Margaret's celebrates in its centennial year.
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