A pastor wants the United Church in Nanaimo's Old City Quarter to expand the ways in which it helps its community.
Rev. Foster Freed is on appointment at St. Andrew's United Church on Fitzwilliam Street till the end of June. While the number of church-goers occupying pews on Sundays has dropped, Freed is proud of work that parish is undertaking, pointing to the Wednesday coffee and conversation social, where hall doors open to all for baked goods, coffee and tea from 9:30-11:30 a.m.
He wants to see that community assistance grow, pointing to how St. Andrew's shares space with Selby Street Mission on Thursdays.
"We're clearly both … showing an awareness of some of the needs of this downtown Nanaimo community, which involve hospitality above all, and giving people who may not have many spaces where they can feel at home … come in for [90 minutes], hear some music, sit with some friends, have a cookie and a cup of tea. For me, that's a very important part of just through geography, what this place should be," he said.
Jenny Vincent, St. Andrew's music director, chairs the newly formed non-profit Old City Arts Hub, which will use church space as a home base and for performances. Freed hopes the arts hub will also benefit the community and revitalize his parish.
"Realistically, there have been many congregations that I'm aware of in other cities that have experienced congregational renewal as a result of that kind of co-operative effort with an arts hub," he said. "There's no guarantee, but we will discover whether what we have here, down the road, is mainly an arts hub or an arts hub that sparks renewal for the congregation itself."
He also elaborated on what he thinks needs to happen in order to fill the church on a Sunday, so that people aren't wondering why they didn't sleep in. St. Andrew's is blessed to have "an extraordinarily gifted musician" such as Vincent, the pastor said.
"That’s helpful because part of the reality of our culture is that we're all spoiled … We all have at our fingertips access to the most wonderful music, and it doesn't matter what genre of music we like," said Freed. "So when you come into a church and the music has some vibrancy and some skill behind it, and we offer that, it certainly means that one obvious barrier that can go up very quickly doesn't."
Census data from 2021 suggested Nanaimo is the Canadian city with the highest amount of people who don't affiliate with a specific religion, something not lost on Freed. He recounts a conversation with an intern from the Maritimes at a Parksville funeral home after he moved to B.C. in the 1990s.
"She was basically saying that in Prince Edward Island, it would be a rare, rare, rare occurrence where somebody had requested to not have a funeral," he said. "By the late '90s [here], it was more the rule than the exception, and I think that's a very telling sign of a culture that's become quite secular, where even church people say, 'No, I don't want to put my family through that. Let's not have a service.'"