St. Mark’s, located at the corner of Gottingen Street and Russell Street, has been operating since 1866. “St. Mark’s was in a situation where we were running out of money and we are not a huge congregation and we weren’t sure what our future was going to look like,” says the Rev. Tammy Hodge Orovec, incumbent.

If it wasn’t for the partnership with the developer, the church would cease to exist, she says. “Through some ingenuity and hard work from some very faithful people here at St. Mark’s, they found a partner, someone who was willing to buy our property so they could redevelop it but were also able to preserve the church and help us to live into the future.”

The developer bought the land owned by the church and will build a 10-storey high-rise apartment building. It also plans to revive the church and make it more energy efficient.

The developer is leaving creative control of the sanctuary and worship space up to the church. The church hall and a late addition to the church will be torn down but the basement will be completely renovated and the church will get a professional kitchen, banquet space and possibly space for offices and meetings for the congregation and the wider community.

The church has a special history in the community. It is the last remaining north-end church that existed prior to the Halifax explosion. “Hopefully we can become a real community hub for the north end,” says Ms. Hodge Orovec.

CTV News

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In 2013, John Sweeney, a plumber from Ireland, started a Facebook page called Suspended Coffees. His message was simple: Buy a cup of coffee for a stranger, because an act of kindness can change a life.

Eight hours later, the page had attracted more than 20,000 likes.

Suspended coffee, or “caffe sospeso,” is a tradition that comes from Naples, Italy, where when customers buy coffee, they also pay in advance for a cup to be given to somebody else – usually someone who otherwise couldn’t afford it.

“Jill Craig and Jennifer Taylor became enthusiastic organizers of our own suspended coffee program,” says Ms. Shepherdson, incumbent of the Parish of Woodstock, which includes the churches of St. Luke’s and Christ Church.

“We went a step further and partnered with Tim Hortons, our neighbour across the street from St. Luke’s, to offer a hot drink and food to our local folk in need of some kindness, and a place to be indoors as legitimate customers during the fall and winter months.”

That was last fall. They told fellow parishioners in the parish of the plan to pay for a simple coffee and snack, and set up a donation box at the back of the church.

“All we did was share through the parish that we were starting this initiative,” says Ms. Craig. “People have been very generous.”

At first, they bought gift cards for Tims and had the staff there give them out to those likely to need them. But that was a bit cumbersome for the staff and embarrassing for the recipients, so they came up with another plan.

Both Ms. Craig and Ms. Taylor have volunteer and professional connections with those who work with people seeking assistance. In particular, they approached the Regional Resiliency Project, which works one-on-one with people in precarious situations.

This group has identified four people in town as being unhoused, four more with no income and many more who cannot feed their families.

“I contacted a friend who had connections with two outreach workers,” says Ms. Taylor. “They talk to people, so the cards go to these people.”

Now the outreach workers have the gift cards and give them out as needed.

“Dignity matters in any undertaking of this nature, and we wanted to ensure that rather than having to go and ask, those most in need had a Tim Hortons prepaid card worth $10 to use as they wished,” says Ms. Shepherdson.

It’s all done with receipts, so each group knows exactly what has been bought and given out. To date, since last fall, more than $900 has been raised, meaning 90 $10 gift cards –  enough for a coffee, soup and a donut – have been purchased and given out.

One benefit of the cards is if a person doesn’t use all $10, the balance is still there for them to use next time.

The next phase of the project is underway. There is a significant need for underwear, socks and warm undershirts amongst those the coffee project has supported, so the parish has just launched Bloomers and Long Johns, placing a box at the back of the church for those who need clothing.

There used to be three churches on the downtown stretch of Main Street. “We’re the only church on the street now,” said Ms. Craig. “We want to be seen as the place you can come to freely, and we’re doing what we can to help the community.”

The New Brunswick Anglican

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The Communion Forest is a global initiative within the Anglican Communion focused on tree growing, ecosystem conservation, protection, and restoration as a practical, spiritual, and symbolic response to the environmental crisis. It is a Christian hope for the well-being of humanity and creation.

With a $7,500 grant from the Anglican Foundation and matching funds by the Diocese of Niagara, Climate Justice Niagara was able to hire Green Venture to assist with the implementation of the initiative.

Initially, 23 parishes completed the survey used for the selection process. Based on elements like water access and number of volunteers, 13 parishes ended up moving to the next step, which involved completing a tree inventory on parish property. In the end, four parishes were chosen to move ahead to plant a variety of trees before the end of last November.

The first to plant was St. Paul’s, an urban parish that identified a gap on the west side of the building for four beautiful trees. St. David, Welland had the perfect spot to plant a special tree for its 75th anniversary. St. John, Nelson had room to plant 14 trees. With advice from Green Venture, it chose a mixture of seedlings: red maples, sugar maples, balsam firs, and white pines. The parish volunteers received extra help from the Rainbow Kings and Queens, a diocesan group that supports LGBTQ2 refugees from African countries with homophobic policies. St. Paul, Caledonia planted a mini-forest, a mix of 400 trees planted in a 10-metre square. The forest includes black maple, red maple and yellow birch.

Climate Justice Niagara is currently looking for other grant opportunities to continue tree planting in the communities within the diocese.

The Niagara Anglican

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I didn’t intend to review this book. Knowing almost nothing about the encampments of unhoused people that are springing up in towns and cities across Ontario, I thought I should find someone else to write it, someone qualified.

But then some tents and tiny homes moved into the park beside the Synod Office, where I work, and I began to ask myself some questions. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they sleeping outside? And most pressingly, how do they make it through the winter?

So I began to read Encampment, just to see if it would provide me with some answers, and I’m really glad I did because it gave me so much more.

The story revolves around the encampment at St. Stephen in-the-Fields church in Kensington Market in Toronto and the efforts of its priest, the Rev. Canon Maggie Helwig, and her colleagues to look after, defend and advocate for the people who called the place home. The encampment lasted from about 2022 to 2024, when the City finally tore most it down, encircled the ground with a tall fence and put concrete blocks inside it.

“I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside,” writes Canon Helwig at the beginning of the book. A little further on she writes, “This is one story, flawed and incomplete, of people who have been trying to look after each other in very hard times, and some of the ways in which we have been changed.”

Canon Helwig lives in and alongside worlds that most of us could scarcely imagine. Ministering to an encampment and its inhabitants is hard, grinding work. It is a world of non-stop need, of exhausting battles with bureaucracy, of endless loss, of disappearance and death, of angry neighbours and apathetic officials, of harassment and humiliation, of heartbreaking vulnerability.

Indeed, it would be almost impossible to read this book if it weren’t for the fact that Canon Helwig is a natural storyteller who effortlessly weaves the various threads of her worlds into a rich, compelling tapestry. She is a candid and surprisingly non-judgmental writer. She also has a wonderfully dry sense of humour with an eye for the comical and absurd – a precious asset for a book such as this.

And she’s entirely at home in the worlds she writes about. “I have never been much more than a tourist in the land of the well,” she writes. “And probably I should have been more patient, and I should have been more understanding. But the land of affliction is, one way and another, my home.”

Wisely, she doesn’t try to write a step-by-step account of the encampment at St. Stephen’s and its eventual and inevitable destruction – the media did a pretty good job of that. Rather, she tells the story of those strange and trying years through the stories of the people who lived there, stories that she was given either formally or through long relationships. “I have a profound responsibility to these stories, a responsibility to tell them, and to tell them as truly as I can,” she writes.

We learn about Chaz the Agent of Chaos, about Douglas and Robin and Isaac, about Jeff and his dog Taurus, about Pirate and the Artist. We learn about the Jane and John Does who come and go and the unnamed girl who died of an overdose beside the church. It’s not a pretty picture but it’s endlessly fascinating. These people keep going despite unbelievable odds against them. They are tenacious and fragile, difficult and loveable, hyper-vigilant and too trusting. They are creative and funny, exasperating and argumentative. They just want to live in peace like everyone else. Most of all, they want to belong somewhere.

As Canon Helwig writes, they’re pretty much the same as the rest of us, except we get to hide it all behind walls.

To her credit, Canon Helwig doesn’t demonize the folks on the other side of the great divide – the city staffers who suddenly show up and frighten everyone, the bylaw enforcement officers serving notice after notice, the jaded bureaucrats, the bogus neighbourhood improvement groups calling for change, the local councillor, the right-wing political candidate who shows up to make a speech, Mayor John Tory, the police and firefighters, the principal and parents of the local Montessori school. Even the Claw, the monstrous machine that the City uses to pluck up tents, tarps, plastic wraps, sleeping bags, boarding and anything else people use to shelter themselves in encampments.

If it wasn’t so tragic, the whole thing would be a farce. And it’s not going to end anytime soon, writes Canon Helwig. As the fight for resources intensifies and the social fabric continues to unravel, there will be more encampments, more unhoused people, more confrontations, more Claws.

But she’s not without hope. Interspersed throughout the story are passages of scripture, quotes from a book by Archbishop Rowan Williams and excerpts from her own sermons given during that time. Her faith is steadfast. Her strength and inspiration is Jesus. “We must love,” she writes. “We must love among the hate and the injustice, among the ruins, we must love those who do nothing to earn our love…”

There are two other aspects of this book that make it worth reading. One is that it provides a rare glimpse into an inner-city parish that is trying to operate in the most challenging of circumstances. The other is that it touches on one of the strangest times in Toronto’s history, from about 2014 to 2024, a decade that included searing heat, orange skies, woodsmoke, a serial killer in the Gay Village, social distancing, masks, COVID-19 and the commodification of housing. It is a vivid snapshot of our recent past, whether we like it or not.

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First, I beguiled them with my presentation on charting growth in the Diocese of Toronto. For over a decade, I’ve made an annual presentation to Synod Council on how demographics, faith identification, giving patterns and attendance are impacting the Christian experience in our diocese. Typically, the news has been less than encouraging – that is, until the pandemic hit and attendance and giving patterns were jolted in a positive direction thanks to a spike in online worship.

The audience of 25 souls was most fascinated by the transition in faith adherence since the mid-1960s and the growth of the so-called “nones.” Those with no faith affiliation now comprise 33 per cent of the Canadian population, according to our latest census (c. 2021) and is the fastest growing component of identifiers (if you can use that word).

What I really wanted to share with the group is the impact of the Bishop’s Company. After all, the first presentation was supposed to be the side show. The original intent of the invitation was to showcase the work of our fund to assist clergy in need.

Each year, our bishops receive numerous requests for help. Some may be small, like travel assistance to a conference or help with paying for an online theology course. Others are not so small: counselling, dental reconstructive surgery, and speech and occupational therapy for children. Most years we get over $100,000 in requests. All of this is funded outside the operating budget of the diocese. It’s not covered by parish allotment; not a penny.

For 64 years, the Bishop’s Company has hosted an annual fundraising dinner. It has proven to be an important fundraising event in the diocese, generating over $5 million since its inception. It was at this point that I asked the men at St. John, York Mills if they would sponsor a table or two for our event on Oct. 17, and they happily obliged.

The Bishop’s Company has provided financial support to Indigenous programs and stipendiary assistant for clergy. It provides annual bursaries for theological students and postulants and a purse to clergy widows at Christmas, and it gave seed funding for our employee assistance program.

I am grateful for the work of the Bishop’s Company in supporting our clergy and their families who are in need. The work our clergy do is significant, and often their struggles come from a place of real vulnerability.

I would be happy to repeat my presentation 10 times over to any fellowship group in the diocese that is interested. But you’re going to get the sales pitch as well. Invite me anyway, as I love speaking about the important ministry that goes on in the Church and across our diocese.

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However, in 1861, the first time the port authority decided to hold this event, a silk top hat was a pretty big deal, because it was the key to the city: for 24 hours the captain and crew could eat and drink for free! And the $100 bonus in the briefcase was about a month’s salary for the captain, perhaps worth as much as $5,000 today.

On March 28, however, the hat was held above Captain Sergei’s head, as it’s over 200 years old now. The briefcase cost more than the $100 it contained, but the gesture was greatly appreciated! And we at the Mission to Seafarers brought gift bags for all the seafarers on board as a welcome-to-Toronto treat.

The rough seas added a week to the ship’s transit from San Sebastian, Brazil, where Captain Sergei and his crew picked up more than 19,000 metric tonnes of sugar to deliver to the Redpath Sugar Refinery at the foot of Jarvis Street in Toronto. After it’s been refined, the sugar will find its way to various factories and stores around Ontario – and ultimately to our homes in one form or another. And the seafarers will, once again, have ensured that a delivery of something important and precious that we don’t grow anywhere in our country has arrived safely on our doorsteps.

By weight, 90 per cent of everything that arrives in our country comes by way of ship. The kinds of goods we receive today haven’t change appreciably since 1861: the construction materials we need to keep our ever-expanding city and province growing; and the food items that don’t grow locally, such as coffee, tea and sugar, to name only a few. In 1861, bolts of cloth such as wool, linen and cotton would arrive. More often these days, the finished garments by the container-full find their way here from various countries such as China, India, the Philippines and Thailand.

And the seafarers continue to sacrifice so much of their lives to ensure the safe arrival of all these and many more products, living apart from their families and loved ones because in spite of the low pay at sea, it is still better pay than they would make in their countries of origin such as Myanmar, the Philippines and Indonesia. And this pay usually supports not just their immediate families but their extended families as well. Remittance payments often make up a huge percentage of the GDP of these countries.

But what can make up for the time the seafarers are away, putting the health and happiness of others always ahead of themselves? Knowing that they are not forgotten, that they are not invisible, that we on land appreciate their sacrifice and the danger of their work. “The Ministry of Small Gestures” is how the work of the Mission to Seafarers is described; small gestures indeed, compared with the huge gesture of the seafarers. We get to go to our homes and families after our shifts but shift’s end for them sends them alone to a small room with a small bunk on a large ship that makes noise day after day. Not to mention bouncing around on an ocean.

So the gift of a small bag of treats that includes warm hats and scarves, and yes, even chocolates, is warmly welcomed – more kudos to our team of wonderful volunteer knitters from around the province! Even a small gesture has great meaning. And the bigger gestures of the work we do – the Happiness Index, the Ship Visiting App and the Happy@Sea app – help us to provide the things that seafarers need to make their lives better while at sea.

As the 2025 shipping season begins on the Great Lakes, as you drink that first cup of coffee in the morning or your last cup of hot chocolate in the evening, remember the seafarers who made sure you had that cup to brighten your day. And find a way to thank them for their sacrifice for us.

To make a donation through CanadaHelps, visit www.mtsso.org.

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The service, composed by the Rev. Canon Dr. Stephen Fields, the cathedral’s vicar and sub-dean, was inspired by the theological perspectives and lyrics of the reggae superstar. It included some of Bob Marley’s songs, played by a Toronto reggae band.

In his homily, Canon Fields told the congregation that he was sure that none of them had ever imagined that they would have lived long enough to hear Mr. Marley’s music performed in an Anglican church such as the cathedral.

“That’s because we grew up in a world bound by the chains that Bob Nesta Marley spoke and sang about, chains that not only bound our hands and feet but shackled our minds and held us captive. And today, still do so,” he said.

He described Mr. Marley, who died in 1981, as a prophet of the oppressed. “His songs echo the cries of the oppressed, the call to unity and the hope for liberation. He challenges us to see God not as a distant observer but as an active force in the struggle for justice. He invites us to embody love that is bold, transformative and inclusive. Marley’s theology is a call to action – a reminder that faith is not passive but revolutionary. It calls us to resist the ‘Babylon system,’ to stand with the oppressed and to believe in a God who is not only with us but within us.”

He said Mr. Marley’s legacy invites people to ask: “How does our faith challenge the oppressive systems of today? How do we live out a love that seeks justice? How can we, as individuals and communities, participate in the liberation that Marley envisioned and that God desires? In answering these questions, we move beyond simply appreciating his music to embodying its message.”

The service included a response by Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, founder and artistic director of the Nathaniel Dett Chorale. He reflected on the way Mr. Marley’s music continues to speak to the body, mind, soul and aspirations of the oppressed and underprivileged. He showed that Mr. Marley’s music is a direct descendant of the Spiritual genre that spoke to the lives of Black people who faced oppression.

Joan Pierre, former executive director of Caribana, expressed her satisfaction with the celebration. “What an evening of pure joy and blessings,” she said. “St. James Cathedral was packed and everyone left filled with love. What a gift Bob Marley left us all!”

Dean Stephen Hance of the cathedral said, “We were so excited to see the level of participation in the Marley Mass, in person and online, following the success of the Leonard Cohen Eucharist last year. Clearly many people are open to a worship experience which engages with music and the arts in a creative way, and St. James Cathedral will offer these from time to time.”

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