Find a church in Arthur

A village at the top of the county

Arthur sits on Highway 6 where the land flattens out north of the Grand River watershed, about 25 km north of Fergus and 20 km south of Mount Forest. Settlers arrived in 1840, the year after the survey line was run, and the place took the name of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. Mills on the Conestogo River drew people in: 22 residents in 1841 had become more than 1,500 by 1900. The village was incorporated in 1872, when the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway came through, and in 1897 it was among the first villages in Ontario to be connected to an electricity line.

The village kept its own council until 1 January 1999, when it was amalgamated into the Township of Wellington North along with Mount Forest and the old townships around them. The 2021 census counted 2,628 residents. In 2002 Arthur was recognized as Canada’s Most Patriotic Village, for the number of its people who enlisted in the two world wars; the fieldstone cenotaph in Memorial Park carries the honour rolls, and flags fly along the main street most of the year.

The churches downtown

Three of Arthur’s congregations were meeting here before the village was fifty years old, and their buildings still stand within a block or two of the main corner.

• Arthur United Church grew out of the Methodist congregation that, from 1850, shared the village’s first schoolhouse with the Presbyterians and the Anglicans. The Methodists bought the Tucker Street land in 1892 and finished their church in 1894 at a cost of $10,000, with no mortgage ever taken against it. The congregation joined the United Church of Canada in 1925 and worships in the same building today.
• St. Andrew’s Presbyterian published its centennial history in 1974, putting its founding in the mid-1870s. Its buff-brick church with a square tower and a Gothic tracery window stands on Frederick Street East.
• Grace Anglican Church, on Tucker Street beside the United church, belongs to the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. The Wellington County archives hold a photograph of its exterior from 1973.
• St. John the Evangelist, the Catholic parish, worships in a tall buff-brick church on Georgina Street with dormers along the nave roof. It is one of three parishes served together, with Sacred Heart in Kenilworth and St. Mary the Immaculate in Palmerston.

More recent congregations

• Arthur Pentecostal Assembly, on Charles Street East, belongs to the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada.
• Arthur Mennonite Fellowship began in 2013 and meets on Eliza Street. It belongs to the Midwest Mennonite Fellowship, a conservative body, and is not part of the larger Mennonite Church Eastern Canada.
• Arthur Canadian Reformed Church held its first service on 20 February 2022, the sixty-seventh congregation of its federation. Most of its members came from the overflow of the Canadian Reformed churches at Elora, Fergus North and Grand Valley. It rents St. Andrew’s Presbyterian for its two Sunday services, so that building is in use morning, midday and afternoon.

Visiting on a Sunday

Everything downtown is walkable. The United and Anglican churches are neighbours on Tucker Street, St. John’s is a two-minute walk east on Georgina, and St. Andrew’s is a block north on Frederick Street East. Parking is free and unmetered throughout the village, which makes Arthur an easy place to visit a church you have not been to before; there is room on the street outside every one of them.

Service times are spread through the morning, from the Mennonite Fellowship at 9:45 and the Canadian Reformed at 9:00 to the United, Catholic and Pentecostal congregations at 10:30 and St. Andrew’s at 11:00. Families with children at Arthur Christian School on Eliza Street will find several of these congregations familiar.