St. James Anglican Church

St. James Anglican Church is on Melville Street in Dundas. The city’s heritage inventory records that the congregation was organized at a meeting on 2 April 1839 called by the Rev. William McMurray, who served Ancaster and Dundas together, and that its original church, on Hatt Street on land given by the mill owner James Bell Ewart, opened on 31 December 1843. Dundas became a charge of its own in 1870 and a separate parish in 1895.

A munitions factory beside the Hatt Street church during the First World War led the congregation to look for a new site, and the present Gothic church of stone on Melville Street was completed in 1926, followed by a parish hall in 1951 and a tower in 1959. Fire destroyed the roof, the stained glass and the interior on 18 January 1978; the church was rebuilt by 1980 under the local architect Trevor Garwood-Jones, with a new narthex, clear glass in the windows and moveable seating, and the 1847 bell from the Hatt Street church is still in use. The parish is marking the church’s hundredth anniversary with a dinner on 20 November 2026 and an anniversary service on 22 November.

Sunday worship is at ten in the morning, in the church and livestreamed. The rector is the Reverend Canon Leslie Gerlofs, and the Reverend Deacon Ann Vander Berg is the parish deacon.

What Anglicans believe and how they worship