Canadian Unitarian Council - Founding

Founding

This section quoted from THE CUC: FROM COLONY TO NATION 1961-2002 by Rev. Dr. Charles W. Eddis:

The formation of the CUC was a long-held dream. Proposals to form a Canadian organization were made by G.C. Holland, minister of the Ottawa church, in 1898, Samuel A. Eliot, President of the American Unitarian Association in 1908, Charles Huntingdon Pennoyer, minister of the Halifax Universalist Church in 1909, and Horace Westwood, a Unitarian minister in Winnipeg in 1913. In 1946 The Commission on the Work of the Churches of the British Unitarians recommended that “the Assembly should interest itself in the formation of a Canadian Unitarian Association which many Unitarians there believe to be necessary.” The first native seeds were planted with the publication of The Canadian Unitarian in Ottawa from 1940 to 1946, a small newsletter distributed with the newsletters of Canadian churches. After the Second World War, the growth of the Unitarians in Canada began to show the strength which would make some Canadian organization feasible, if not imperative. Unitarians, most notably Toronto ministers, generated considerable media attention from the centre of Canada’s English-language media. The Unitarian Service Committee of Canada, founded in 1945, was receiving considerable attention both in city newspapers and on television, so much so that the word “Unitarian” became a household world, though its meaning was not that widely known. In 1946 there were six Icelandic Unitarian churches with 272 members, and five English-speaking churches with 1,049 members. The Universalists had five churches with 459 members. In 1961 there were three Universalist churches with 68 members, and three Icelandic and eleven English-speaking Unitarian churches with 3,476 members, and in addition 22 Unitarian fellowships with 773 members. The Universalists almost disappeared in Canada, outside of a small rural church in southwest Ontario, and were probably saved in the other two surviving locations by influx of Canadian Unitarians. By contrast, Unitarian membership more than tripled in the same fifteen years. In 1953 there were six Unitarian ministers serving congregations in Canada. Ten years later there were five ministers in the Toronto area alone. In early April, 1961, a meeting with delegates from ten congregations was held in Montreal. The plan was approved 8 to 1, with the understanding that “The Council will function within the framework of the continental Unitarian Universalist Association.”

(Reproduced with permission)