Four churches hold one service in Souris

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/07/2024 (640 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SOURIS — On Sunday in Souris, worshippers put the finishing touches on a union not between two people but two churches.

Representatives from St. Luke’s Anglican Church and St. Paul’s United Church put the final signatures on a document outlining a partnership that sees them sharing resources, including their priest.

While both congregations have been worshipping together for some time now and ran a joint float at last year’s Peacock Days fair, Sunday marked the official start of their partnership.

Last December, the Sun wrote about Jonathan Hoskin, an archdeacon with the Anglican Church of Canada who has found himself providing ministry to four churches from three denominations.

Sunday also marked the first time that all four of Hoskin’s congregations attended a joint service together at St. Paul’s, doubling the regular number of attendees to around 100.

In Brandon, St. George’s Anglican Church found difficulty maintaining its aging building but had Hoskin leading their flock. Redeemer Lutheran Church had a building in good condition, but its pastor retired.

As both denominations are in full communion, the congregations worked out a deal last year to share Redeemer’s building and have Hoskin provide services with both Lutheran and Anglican elements.

In late 2022, St. Luke’s and St. Paul’s found themselves in a similar situation as congregants Debbie Clevett and Heather Tymoschuk explained to the Sun after a lunch provided by the Souris-based worshippers, where a raffle for a shawl was held to help raise funds to purchase new front doors for St. Paul’s.

“Our numbers dwindled down to about five, maybe seven,” said Clevett, who originally attended St. Luke’s.

“Five people can’t do a food bank, five people can’t do a thrift shop. But together, we can participate in that. That is very much a part of being Christian, being able to serve.”

In an agreement between the Anglican churches in Brandon and Souris, St. Luke’s provided the rectory, Hoskin’s living accommodations, while the other paid his stipends. So they had a priest available, but few congregants.

Over at St. Paul’s, their minister had retired and a search committee had been struck to find a replacement.

However, most of the applicants were from out of the country or were in Canada but encountered issues with language barriers.

As a short-term solution during that search, an agreement was struck to have Hoskin perform a maximum of 10 services at St. Paul’s during that church year.

“But what we found out from our congregation and talking to them is they had already fallen for Jonathan,” said Tymoschuk, who has attended St. Paul’s for decades. “They thought he was the one that they wanted and so our search committee was disbanded and we decided to work towards an agreement.”

Unlike the partnership in Brandon, the one in Souris was a little trickier to navigate. The United and Anglican churches are not in full communion.

However, it’s not unheard of for those denominations to partner, even in Westman. In 2020, Neepawa United Church and St. James’ Anglican Church of Neepawa marshalled their combined resources to form the Neepawa United-Anglican Shared Ministry.

Tymoschuk and Clevett said that group was generous enough to provide a copy of their agreement to be used as a template for the churches in Souris to follow.

Their arrangement accounts not just for finances and assets, but also how the shared congregation will run services.

“At the very beginning, when we were talking at the worship committee, one of the things that everyone appreciated was the music,” Clevett said. “So we were working out how we could continue to have the choir and the anthems and those kinds of things into the service.”

Tymoschuk said she thinks the adaptations to communion for the joint congregation are “really neat.”

“The United people come up and they get their bread, they get their wine and they go back to their seat,” she said.

“And then they have the wafer and the common cup, so then (Hoskin) serves the Anglican people who are still standing at the front and as they take the bread, we take the bread together. It’s sort of the coming together of us all at the Lord’s table.”

At Sunday’s service, there were elements from the United and Anglican tradition, as well as Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” as a nod to the Lutheran guests in attendance.

The women said they appreciated the larger than normal crowd, which helped swell the size of the choir. But beyond the connection between the two established congregations, they said new congregants have started attending since the partnership started.

“I think it’s so much the service that pulls us together,” Clevett said. “That sense that we are the body of Christ. It’s not a building, it’s we the people and that’s what makes the church work.”

In his sermon, Hoskin used a reading from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus healing a bleeding woman and raising the daughter of a synagogue leader from the dead as an example of how while there are different approaches to dealing with Jesus and Christianity, Jesus helps those in need regardless of status — a clear nod to the multi-denominational nature of his audience.

“I don’t choose the lessons, they’re chosen for us,” Hoskin said after lunch. “We just trust the Lord knows what he’s doing.”

Since he last spoke with the Sun, Hoskin said he thinks things have gone well with his four congregations. They continue to be gracious with each other and respectful of both their commonalities and differences.

He admitted that one of his worries is that sometimes he might default to traditions he’s more familiar with instead of the ones he’s learning from his new congregations.

“I pulled one today, in the Apostle’s Creed,” he said.

“Instead of saying ‘the Holy Spirit,’ I said ‘the Holy Ghost,’ which is an Anglicanism that is a leftover from the 1962 Book of Common Prayer, which is a part of my daily devotions. The danger I foresee is that because I’m so comfortable in the Anglican world that we would sort of hedge out the other things, and so I’ve been really conscious of that.”

However, he said he has seen members of both the United and Anglican congregants express an openness to make things work in incorporating both their traditions and becoming an integrated community, which “has been really refreshing.”

Hoskin said there has been only the occasional crossover between worshippers in the two communities, with most people staying in their home town. As time goes on, he said he hopes they become more comfortable cross-pollinating between events in both communities.

Going forward, Hoskin said he hopes to make the joint Brandon-Souris service a yearly tradition. As Souris hosted the service and provided lunch this year, the plan is for Brandon to take its turn in 2025.

St. Paul’s is set to close for July and August, with services switching temporarily over to St. Luke’s for the summer. In the fall, plans are being made to host a celebration to commemorate their union and their shared faith.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» X: @ColinSlark