Religion: Safe Bet

Although he is no gambling man, the Rev. Owen Barrow, 40, a slight, blue-eyed Church of England clergyman, was willing to wager $33,000 on a hunch he had four years ago. His hunch: that Protestants of all denominations in the Canadian pulp & paper mill town of Marathon (present pop. 2,000) could worship together amicably in one church. Last week the wager looked as secure as Mr. Barrow’s trim white clapboard Holy Trinity Church in Marathon. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, members of the United Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Salvation Army were joined into one devout congregation, celebrating together the payment of the first $15,000 installment on the church mortgage.

Church union on a local scale seemed the only answer to Barrow’s problem when he arrived in the newly built paper town in 1945. Marathon’s population was nearly 80% Protestant but no single denomination was large enough to support itself. Anglican Barrow started holding services in the paper mill’s cookhouse, in a vacant barn or any other sizable shelter. In two years Barrow and his Protestant congregation had built their own church.

While Holy Trinity Church is nominally Anglican and title to the building rests with the Church of England in Canada, Pastor Barrow has made its liturgy a blend of Protestant ritual. Anglican Holy Communion services are followed by interdenominational services. United Church communion rites are performed regularly. Sunday school classes are taught from literature published by various Protestant faiths. Holy Trinity’s board is elected with such impartiality that its chairman, Dr. G. M. Bastedo, could not recall last week the denominations of its members. Said Dr. Bastedo: “It doesn’t really matter. We are all just Protestants.”

Pastor Barrow hopes that the Marathon experiment will have a broader effect than simply justifying the investment of time and money that went into the building of his parish. He travels regularly to both the Anglican and United Church synod meetings, stressing the Holy Trinity success as proof that the long-discussed union of the United Church* and the Church of England in Canada can be made to work. “God is neither Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran nor United Church,” he says. “Union … is possible as we have it here now.”

* The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 as a merger of the Methodists, Congregationalists, and some Presbyterians.