Every Sunday morning, on the westernmost edge of Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, a devoted gathering of roughly 45 worshippers crams into the tiny chapel at Saint Luke’s United Church. Every single seat in the wooden pews is spoken for, requiring extra chairs to be squeezed tightly into the narrow aisles. Yet, despite the cramped quarters, the physical limitations have done nothing to dampen the congregation’s vibrant sense of community.
For decades, Saint Luke’s has proudly carried the moniker of the “House of Friendship.” Longtime congregants, a significant portion of whom are of Filipino heritage, eagerly welcome every newcomer who has arrived via a quick online search for a “church near me” or simply wandered in off the bustling downtown streets. During the traditional passing of the peace, the room instantly comes alive with a flurry of warm hugs, hearty handshakes, and friendly fist bumps.
David Hallman, the chair of the church council, still vividly remembers the day he and his late partner first walked through those doors in the early 2000s. Even before the Sunday service officially began, more than a dozen welcoming churchgoers had approached them to introduce themselves. However, sustaining that level of radical hospitality and deep-rooted community care has ultimately taken far more than good intentions and goodwill alone.
A Grand Heritage Building and Mounting Financial Pressures
The physical scale of Saint Luke’s stands in stark contrast to the small size of its active congregation. The church is housed within a grand, landmark Richardsonian Romanesque structure that dates all the way back to 1887. But that architectural heritage has also proven to be its greatest operational hurdle, as maintaining a historic building requires deeply robust financial coffers.
In recent years, the magnificent sanctuary—complete with its historic pipe organ and famously beautiful acoustic qualities—began to visibly deteriorate. A persistent leak in the roof eventually led to spreading water damage, causing plaster to break loose and tumble down from the ceiling. While the Toronto United Church Council stepped in to provide a loan to repair the structural integrity of the roof, the space remained unsafe for public gatherings, forcing the congregation to relocate its weekly services into the much smaller chapel starting in 2022.
Historically, Saint Luke’s brought in revenue by renting out space to various local community organizations. However, by 2019, ballooning maintenance and operational costs had outpaced that rental income by roughly $60,000 annually. Just five years later, the church had completely drained its financial reserves and was teetering precariously on the absolute brink of bankruptcy.
A Crucial Community Lifeline
The potential dissolution or closure of Saint Luke’s would have sent shockwaves far beyond its Sunday morning worshippers. The church operates a vital food bank and a dedicated Out of the Cold meal program, serving a surrounding neighbourhood heavily populated by affordable rooming houses, street encampments, and emergency shelters.
“Our impact is much greater than our footprint,” notes Rev. Jim Harbell, capturing the heavy social responsibility carried by the small congregation.
Fortunately, acting in the collaborative spirit of the United Church’s Toward 2035 strategic plan—which actively encourages individual churches to join forces—two local congregations stepped up to funnel multi-year financial donations directly into Saint Luke’s ministry and ongoing operations. Additionally, five other area congregations gather together once every month to meticulously assemble 200 sandwiches, supplementing the hot meals distributed through the Out of the Cold program. This critical wave of external support has allowed the historic church to pull back from the very edge of permanent closure, inadvertently setting the stage for a much more radical transformation.
Paving the Way for a 48-Storey Redevelopment
Last year, the church reached a formal agreement with housing development firm Kindred Works to launch an ambitious redevelopment project, backed by financial support from a loan provided by the United Church’s Shining Waters Regional Council. The comprehensive plan involves razing the current structure—while preserving three of the original historic church walls—to construct a towering 48-storey apartment building. Crucially, one-third of the development’s estimated 440 rental units will be designated as affordable housing, rented at rates below the local market median.
With construction officially slated to begin this year, the congregation’s Sunday worship will once again be temporarily displaced to an as-yet undetermined location.
This is not the church’s first attempt at tackling such a major redevelopment initiative. Back in 2012, a previous proposal failed to clear municipal hurdles due to local concerns regarding the proposed height of the structure. However, in the years since, the City of Toronto has aggressively pursued urban densification as a primary strategy to ease the region’s mounting housing crisis. Recognizing this shift, the city officially approved the Kindred Works proposal this past February.
Rev. Harbell acknowledges that temporarily relocating Sunday morning services will be relatively straightforward logistics work, as the church has successfully navigated displacement before. The more pressing challenge, however, will be securing a temporary space with the adequate physical infrastructure required to keep its essential outreach programs alive, including functioning industrial refrigerators, freezers, and a commercial-grade kitchen.
Other practical hurdles carry even more weight, particularly securing complex financing from private investors and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Fortunately, Harbell brings unique professional experience to the table, having previously worked as a partner at a Bay Street law firm where his legal practice focused on housing development. It is a complex redevelopment process that he thoroughly understands and feels uniquely equipped to guide his congregation through.
Grieving the Past While Embracing the Future
As the congregation prepares to say a temporary farewell to the existing structure, Harbell notes that an emotional process of grieving is naturally taking place. The historic building has faithfully supported the Cabbagetown community for generations and is deeply imbued with spiritual touchstones: the baptismal font, the traditional communion table, and solemn memorials dedicated to community members who lost their lives during times of war.
While some of these sacred objects will likely follow the congregation to its temporary new home, others will be carefully packed away into safe storage. Meanwhile, Saint Luke’s striking stained-glass windows will be carefully extracted and professionally restored before eventually returning to their original positions within the preserved historical exterior walls.
Once the construction dust finally settles and the Saint Luke’s community is able to return home, leadership hopes that the commercial rental income generated by the new tower will do far more than just fund the Sunday worshiping congregation. The revenue is intended to financially sustain the entirety of Saint Luke’s expansive mission work, including a specialized newcomers’ program designed to support African refugees.
David Hallman anticipates that the finished development will feature a flexible, multi-use worship space equipped with movable chairs, though beyond those broad strokes, church leadership is still figuring out what the final physical facilities will ultimately look like. Even with the uncertainties, Hallman notes that the congregation is deeply excited that a viable path forward has been secured, with some eager members already inquiring about how to get their names on the list for a new apartment rental in the building.
Despite the many unknowns ahead, Hallman remains profoundly confident that the community’s decades-long history of radical hospitality will easily buoy it through the upcoming period of transition.
“It has nothing to do with fancy structures or bells and whistles,” he says. “It has to do with how people relate to each other and care for each other.”
“We’ve lived with fragility for a long time,” Hallman adds. “We’re not a wealthy congregation. But there’s something about that that allows the spirit to be so palpable and present.”