Right, Left and Centre: The Politcs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 41, part one.

A Happy Couple in A Sometimes Conflicted Church. Chapter 41, part one.


      They looked like a happy couple and they were. He was a tall heavy set man from the state of Delaware. She was a short thin woman who grew up in Saskatchewan. They weren't on the same political page though. Tilda Sweet stood on the left politically speaking. Her father was a staunch New Democrat. So was she and all of her siblings. She taught English as a second language in the public school system.
     Barry Look was a civil engineer who worshipped free enterprise. "The market is the magic," U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to say. Barry Look agreed. He loved Ronald Reagan. This couple stayed together despite their political differences. They rarely fought with each other and they live in a comfortable home on Vancouver's west side which they bought before housing prices went through the roof.
    Yet the church they went to was often divided on issues of politics and some theological points. And unlike Tilda Sweet and Barry Lord's view points, these differences sometimes swelled into open if nonviolent conflict. The church they went to for years was and is the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. It came to its present place on the city's west side in the late 1950's.
      "It was an era of church building," one observer pointed out. It was also the first real age of mass affluence. For many Canadians, the 1950's, gave them their first taste of the good life. Millions of Canadians, new and old ones moved out to the suburbs. They bought, houses, cars and t.v. sets for the first time. They raised children, usually two or three of them and they were happy. Or so the history books tell us.
    Of course there were millions of Canadians who weren't affluent. Yet even many of these people later went on to enjoy the good things of life. "The 1950's was an age of innocence," former premier Dave Barrett said. Groups like the First Nations, feminists, ands others weren't on the radar screen back then. They showed up later.
     Still, to make the Unitarian Church of Vancouver really take off, you needed a strong take charge leader. Philip Hewitt was that man. He came out from England in the 1950's, a tall, angular graduate of Oxford university. . He breathed new life and ambitions into the then Unitarian congregation that worshipped in a small church near the corner of Granville and Tenth Avenue. He persuaded some Unitarians to take out mortgages on their homes and lend the money towards building a new church.
    Vancouver, he noted was spreading out north, east and south and the church should move with the times. The Unitarians for the most part agreed.  So on one Sunday in the late 1950's a new big Unitarian church with three buildings opened up on the north east corner of 49th Avenue and Oak Street.
      "I was a bit worried," one Unitarian member recalls., "because I'd taken out a mortgage to help pay for the church property. Yet in the end it all worked out."