A rousing worship service in Toronto on the morning of Wednesday, June 10, 1925, formally inaugurated The United Church of Canada. In a flash, nearly all the Methodists and Congregationalists of Canada, as well as most Presbyterians and many independents, blended into one vast new nationwide body. The heat wave of previous days broke during the night of the ninth, just in time to help make the event 'an hour of palpitating joy.' Eight thousand people filed inside The Arena, a wrestling palace and professional ice hockey venue, transformed for the occasion into sacred space. Thousands of others in Toronto and across the country attended parallel services, and thousands more listened to the proceedings broadcasted live on the radio. Still more saw exhaustive reports in the newspapers the next day. The venue and the numbers spoke volumes. The United Church of Canada aspired to be Canada's church, a church of the people.And from Phyllis Airhart's A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada:
The church that was ceremonially born in Canada on 10 June 1925 is usually cast as a new and youthful player on the international religious stage. Critics often panned it as modernist and depicted its founders as innovators who had been captivated by the novelty of church union. There was within the uniting traditions a strong progressive element, to be sure. Canadian churches were not the first to propose 'organic union' between rival confessional families, but such a proposition had never actually been consummated elsewhere on such a large scale.
Personally, I can't think of anything more fitting for a Canadian church than being founded in a hockey rink.
