A little over one hundred years ago, in January 1911, Westside Methodist Church opened with great fanfare and festivity.

Designed in the Akron Plan style, it was the most up to date church building in Owen Sound. When it was dedicated, it was completely and fully paid for. The Methodist Church would not allow it to be otherwise. Debt was seen to be something which held a congregation back and placed an unfair burden upon them.

Westside was debt-free largely because of the dedicated work of the minister, The Reverend Henry Fish.

Henry Fish had been sent to a divided congregation in 1909. Half wanted to build a new church, replacing the overcrowded West St. Methodist Church (now the BME church on 11th St. West in Owen Sound). Half thought it was too expensive and they could “make do”.

In the first few months of his ministry, Fish raised thousands of dollars from the church members.

Then he went to his friends and former ministry partners, the Massey family of Toronto, for assistance. They pledged $100,000 for the new church.

Then Fish went to the Carnegie Fund to ask for a grant for a church organ. They pledged $5,000 on condition the congregation matched their grant. And thanks to Fish, they did.

The story of Westside Methodist Church is not unusual in Canadian church history.

In a recent book by Barry Magrill, “A Commerce of Taste: Church Architecture in Canada, 1867 to 1914", the building pattern of Westside Methodist was typical for the day.

Magrill points out that in the first fifty years of Canada’s existence there was a pattern of church building which was interesting, to say the least.

I first heard of it in an off-hand remark by the late Dr. Bob Greenberg, architectural consultant to the city of Owen Sound, before he passed away.

Bob told me that “You know, most of these designs of churches all came from catalogues.”

Magrill’s book fleshes this out and explains why so many churches in Canada are often copies of church buildings in England and the United States.

There were, in general circulation, books of drawings of English parish churches which were seen as exemplars of how churches should look.

The result was that as Canada developed, our religious architecture mimicked that of Great Britain and, eventually, the United States. Churches built before the First World War largely came out of plan books as opposed to reflecting local or indigenous architectural styles.

The other important influence on church buildings was that of commerce.

Again, Magrill points out that while Canada did not have an Established church as in England, church development and building was supported by large corporations and wealthy capitalists.

The church was seen as an agent, working hand in hand with the capitalist empire of the CPR and industrialists such as the Massey family and merchants such as Timothy Eaton. These groups gave land for churches, provided money for building of churches or built churches themselves as wealthy patrons and then named them after themselves. Even Andrew Carnegie, distributing his steel-making wealth, funded libraries and thousands of organs in auditoriums and churches across North America and Europe as a reflection of his own belief in improving community and culture through music.

Owen Sound has both a Carnegie funded library building and a church organ.

The strong connection between church and commercial empire continued until just before the Second World War. Perhaps the best example was Riverside Church, New York, built and funded by the Rockefeller family and dedicated in 1930. The first preacher was The Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Those days are long gone, however. New church buildings tend to be “design built”, or as one of my colleagues recently called them, “church in a box”; pre-fab, industrially designed and looking like they came from a cookie cutter. In some ways it’s a bit of a shame.

But then the church itself is changing, moving towards a mission focus and reaching out to those on the edges of society.

We don’t need big cathedrals for that work. Not at all. Nor do we need churches from books. But those decisions are for the next generation.

Rev. David Shearman is the minister of Central Westside United Church, Owen Sound and the host of Faithworks on Rogers TV - Grey County, Cable 53.