St. John's Anglican Church

St. John’s Anglican Church stands at the corner of Wilson Street East and Halson Street in Ancaster, beside its churchyard. The city’s heritage inventory records that the Rev. Ralph Leeming, a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel who arrived in Ancaster in 1816, led the building of a Union Church for Anglicans and Presbyterians here in 1824, and that when the Presbyterians sold their share in 1826 the Anglicans named it St. John’s. After fire destroyed the frame church in 1868, the present stone church, designed by Gundry and Langley of Toronto and built around a stone chancel added in 1866, was completed in 1869. The church is designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.

The parish says more than 1,700 people have been laid to rest in its churchyard, whose graves run from the 1820s to the present, and burials still take place there. St. John’s became a separate parish with its own minister in 1870 and passed to the newly formed Diocese of Niagara in 1875. Its rector is the Reverend Canon Joseph Asselin.

On Sundays a said Eucharist from the Book of Common Prayer is held at 8:00 a.m., and a Eucharist from the Book of Alternative Services, with organ and choir, at 10:00. A said Eucharist is also held each Thursday at 10:00 a.m.

What to expect

The 8:00 service is a traditional said Eucharist from the Book of Common Prayer, with no music or singing, lasting about 40 minutes. The 10:00 service uses liturgy from the Book of Alternative Services and the wider Anglican world, with organ, choir and congregational singing, and lasts about 50 minutes. Coffee hours follow both services. From the rear parking lot a path through the churchyard leads to the front door of the church.

What Anglicans believe and how they worship