The Story of Howland House: Being the Church on the Margins

Abstract

In his 1951 book, The Household of Faith, T. Ralph Morton proclaimed that, “it is the duty of Christians today to make experiments in cooperative social living which will point the way to this new living society.” Howland House, begun in 1953 as an intentional Christian community connected to the Student Christian Movement of Canada (SCM) and located at 105 Howland Ave. in downtown Toronto, was such an experiment. Largely made up of those who had participated in SCM Industrial Work Camps, Howland House existed through a variety of forms for over twenty years (1953-75). As a 2008 McGeachy Senior Scholar, I have interviewed most of the living residents of Howland House and done extensive background research in order to tell “The Story of Howland House.” The people who were part of this experiment in Christian living were connected to many streams of the social movement in Protestant Churches from the post-war period to the early 1970s, including the founding of the United Church’s Lay Educational Training Centres, the continuing leadership of the SCM on campuses across the country, the Religion Labour Foundation in Toronto, and the Work and Life movement of the World Council of Churches (WCC). These many connections temptingly lead one down paths that, while not directly the focus of my Howland House project, hold promise for future research and writing about this period in Canadian church history. In the research to date, it is evident that the background and