The United Church of Canada (UCCan; , abbreviated EUC) is the largest Protestant church in Canada. The history of the United Church of Canada began in 1925 with the merger of four Protestant denominations: the Methodist Church (Canada), the Congregational Union of Canada, two-thirds of the congregations of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Association of Local Union Churches located in the Canadian Prairies.
Founded with the aim of becoming a national church, it supported the development of Canada's welfare state and was an active participant in the Canadian residential school system. Other historical priorities included evangelism and the temperance movement; following the 1960s, the church has broadly taken a progressive stance towards social issues and has endorsed religious pluralism. Membership peaked at 1.1 million in 1965; controversies surrounding liberal theology in the church marked significant declines in membership in the late 20th century. In 2023, the church reported having 325,315 members.
The United Church of Canada is organized into 16 regional councils, which elect commissioners to the national General Council. The church's spiritual leader is the moderator, who is elected by the General Council and can either be a member of the laity or the clergy. Regional councils are responsible for ordaining ministers; both ordained and diaconal ministers are permitted to administer the sacraments. The ordination of women into ministry has been permitted from 1936 onwards.
A mainline Protestant church, it considers the Bible to be central to its beliefs and conducts two sacraments: baptism and communion. Baptism is performed with the Trinitarian formula, and communion is offered to both members and non-members. Worship styles vary across congregations; church service are structured through the voluntary use of lectionaries and liturgical books. The United Church of Canada affirms same-sex relationships and has faced controversy over its liberal stance on social issues.
History
Beginnings
By the early 20th century, several Protestant groups in Canada had formed national organizations for their respective denominations: these included the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1875, the Methodist Church of Canada in 1884, and Congregational Union of Canada in 1906. In addition, local churches had been established in the Prairies that served Methodists and Presbyterians alike, many of whom came together to form the General Council of Local Union Churches in 1912. Motivated by a de facto union in the western provinces and the desire to have a single national church for English-speaking Canadians, a committee of Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians produced a document called the Basis of Union in 1908. The document, which outlined the Protestant doctrines and governance structure of the proposed united church, was soon ratified by the national Methodist and Congregationalist organizations. The General Council of Local Union Churches also entered the church merger process in 1921, which added a fourth denomination to the uniting church.
However, a substantial number of Presbyterians dissented from the movement to merge with the Methodists and Congregationalists, and several votes were held at the congregational level to settle the issue. A final ballot was cast in 1925, in which a third of Presbyterian congregations chose to remain separate from the other denominations as a continuing church.
To finalize the process of church union, church leaders approached individual provinces and the government of Canada to pass legislation on the transfer of property rights. With the provision that individual churches could vote to remain outside the union, the United Church of Canada came into being through an Act of Parliament that passed on June 27, 1924, and was effective June 10, 1925. On the same day, the church was inaugurated at a large worship service at Toronto's Mutual Street Arena. Hymns from its major denominations were printed on a 38-page order of service and sung: "All people that on earth do dwell" from the Presbyterians; "O for a thousand tongues to sing" by the Methodist leader Charles Wesley; "O God of Bethel" from the Congregationalists; and "When I survey the wondrous cross" by the nonconformist hymn-writer Isaac Watts. At the time of its founding, the United Church was Canada's largest Protestant denomination. The Synod of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda joined the church union in 1930.
The ecumenical tone of the new church was set at its first General Council. The former Methodist General Superintendent, Samuel Dwight Chown, was considered by the General Council to be the leading candidate to become the United Church's first Moderator because of his denomination's overwhelming support for union. However, Chown stepped aside in favour of George C. Pidgeon, the pro-union moderator of the Presbyterian Church, in hopes of preventing partisanship from emerging between the union's two largest denominations. Chown typified the early United Church's theological beliefs through his efforts to reconcile evangelism with political action inspired by Social Gospel. The Canadian church's early activities included the establishment of the Woman's Missionary Society, the running of hospitals, international missions, and residential schools for the assimilation of Indigenous children.
Early 20th century
The church's finances were devastated by the Great Depression, leading to the closure of several pastoral charges. Competing social movements within the church advocated for different responses to the era's crises. This ranged from the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, which championed radical Christian socialist ideals, to the conservative Oxford Group, which emphasized personal morality. Church leadership occupied a middle position; they were invited to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations and supported measures that would lead to the Canadian welfare state, such as the federal funding of pensions. Women entered ordained ministry for the first time in the United Church of Canada with the ordination of Lydia Emelie Gruchy in 1932. However, the church maintained its predominantly male clergy into the late 20th century; only 4% of its ordained ministers were female by 1978.
The church's response to World War II was divided between pacifists and those who supported the war effort. Several clergy members signed the pacifist declaration A Witness Against War in 1939, and church officials defended conscientious objectors. At the same time, the church provided military chaplains and saw to profit from members purchasing war bonds in its name. Responding to the internment of Japanese Canadians, the General Council announced in 1942 that it recognized "the need of such action" and that it planned "to follow [Japanese congregations] with its ministry and to assure them of sympathy." Local church leaders in British Columbia opposed the government's measure by establishing an Emergency Japanese Committee to advocate for those who were relocated, while the Woman's Missionary Society provided education to interred teenagers in lieu of the provincial government. The United Church of Canada pursued inter-church dialogue by becoming one of the founding bodies of the Canadian Council of Churches in 1944 and the World Council of Churches in 1946.
Late 20th century
The period between 1945 and the early 1960s was marked by a surge in active members, brought on by the mid-20th-century baby boom and evangelistic campaigns in Canada. The high tide mark of membership was reached in 1965 when the church recorded around 1.1 million members; it was followed by the addition of new congregations after the eastern Canada Conference of the Evangelical United Brethren merged with the United Church in 1968.
The church experienced internal division in 1962 over its theologically liberal New Curriculum, which was followed by the loss of 100,000 students from its Sunday school services in a single year. In 1966, the United Church lost 2,027 members, marking the first time since amalgamation that membership had fallen. The church's Evangelism and Social Service Committee (E&SS) implemented an outreach campaign titled the National Program in the 1960s, which eschewed traditional evangelism for social advocacy. Official stances on domestic issues also shifted in the 1960s; the General Council called for the adoption of universal healthcare, softened its position of total abstinence regarding alcohol and supported remarriage after divorce.
The United Church of Canada recognized the People's Republic of China in 1952 through its General Council, and the E&SS organized sponsorships of Vietnam War draft evaders from the United States. Relations with Canadian Jewish community reached a nadir in 1972, when A. C. Forrest, the editor of the United Church Observer, published an article titled “How Zionists Manipulate Your News". Forrest, a longtime critic of Israel and a supporter of Palestine, received criticism from individual members of the United Church and from B'nai Brith Canada. In 1975, Anglican bishops vetoed a Plan of Union with the United Church of Canada due to the United Church's non-recognition of the historic episcopate. This put an end to a series of intermittent negotiations for union that began with an invitation from the Anglican Church in 1943.
Beginning in the 1980s, the church experienced significant controversy and division over its stance on homosexuality. A 1988 statement by the General Council titled Membership, Ministry and Human Sexuality formally permitted the ordination of openly gay men and women. The controversy surrounding the change resulted in split congregations and the resignation of ministers. Organized opposition was led by in-church conservative groups such as the Renewal Fellowship and the then newly-formed Community of Concern. The United Church went on to ordain its first openly gay minister, Tim Stevenson, in 1992. From 1991 to 2001, the number of people claiming an affiliation with the United Church decreased by 8%, the third largest decrease among Canada's large Christian denominations. "The largest decline occurred among Presbyterians, whose numbers fell 36% to about 409,800. Pentecostals recorded the second largest decline, their numbers falling 15% to almost 369,500. The number of United Church adherents declined 8% to over 2.8 million; the number of Anglicans fell 7% to about 2.0 million; and the number reporting Lutheran dropped 5% to 606,600."
The church's official relationship with the Indigenous peoples of Canada in the late 20th century was marked by several apologies, starting with a 1986 apology to First Nations congregations for the church's role in the colonization of Canada. Following lawsuits filed in the late 1980s against the United Church of Canada by students abused in its residential schools, church leadership made formal apologies for its role in the Canadian Indian residential school system. This was followed by the establishment of a donation-led fund for Indigenous communities by the church in 1994.
The church's internal shifts on sexuality and Indigenous relations were concurrent with appeals to the federal government on major social issues. In 1990, the church testified against Bill C-43, a proposed law that would have banned abortion in Canada unless the woman's life or health was threatened. Beginning in 1999, the church supported the legal recognition of same-sex unions through civil unions.