A Short History of First Baptist Church at Kingston , Ontario , 1840-2002

The Nineteenth Century
1. Kingston was founded by the French under Frontenac in 1673. In the eighteenth century it became a naval base and a garrison city for the British. After the American revolution, a number of United Empire Loyalists settled in the Kingston area. The Rideau Canal was opened in 1832 and shortly afterwards a boatyard began to produce steamboats for travel on Lake Ontario . It officially became a town, King's Town, in 1838 and was briefly the capital for the United Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, the year in which Queen's College, now Queen's University, was granted a charter by Queen Victoria . The Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics all had churches in Kingston by 1840, long before Toronto became an important town. The First Baptist Church was founded in Kingston in 1840 with 12 members through the support of the Baptist Colonial Missionary Society of London and with the efforts of the Rev. John Gilmour, later the founder of Montreal Baptist College . Because of an unfortunate controversy in the first year, the congregation was reconstituted in 1841 when it obtained a parcel of land on Johnson Street , now the site of the Greek Orthodox Church. The first church building was made of wood, probably from the sawmill at Kingston Mills, and the Sunday School started there in November 1842. By 1851, a parsonage was added to house the family of a full-time pastor. There were ten pastors in the first twenty-seven years and the first long-term pastorate, from 1868-1878, was that of the Rev. George Gafferty. The pastor from 1883 to 1887 was Dr. E. Hooper, MD, who went on to become the first Medical Superintendent of Kingston General Hospital . The longest pastorate of the nineteenth century was that of the Rev. Douglas Laing from 1889 to 1917, near the end of the First World War. Although the congregation consisted primarily of British settlers, a prominent member with his family was an American from Clayton , N.Y. , D.D. Calvin, who settled on Garden Island where he was one of the founders of a shipping and ship-building enterprise in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1891, a new Sunday School was commenced on Union Street, west of Queen's University. A new building was erected there in 1893 and in 1897, fifty members of First Baptist Church were released to constitute the Union Street Baptist Church . It lasted for only twenty years and today the site is occupied by the Union Street Gospel Chapel. Some significant initiatives in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were the beginnings of the Girls' Mission Circle and the Ladies' Missionary Society in1879 and of the Baptist Young People's Union (the BYPU) in 1888.
2. One of the interesting people of the first few years of the church was a young immigrant from Scotland, Alexander Mackenzie. A stone mason by trade, he built a number of defense features around Kingston at that time including an arch at Fort Henry. Mackenzie was immersed in Scotland before he emigrated to Canada. During his Kingston days, he was courting the daughter of another immigrant from Scotland, Helen Neil. For one winter, he lived over on Wolfe Island. Often he would walk across the ice to visit her. On one occasion, he fell through the ice but managed to pull himself out of the freezing water. After that he carried a long pole with him whenever he crossed the ice. Baptist ministers in Upper Canada were not allowed to perform marriage ceremonies at this time. Consequently, Alexander and Helen were married in an Anglican church. After the capital was moved from Kingston, the economy declined. Mackenzie moved his family to Sarnia, Ontario. From there he launched a political career which would include serving as Prime Minister of Canada from 1873 - 1878. Some of Mackenzie’s accomplishments included the establishment of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Royal Military College here in Kingston. The Mackenzie Building at RMC with the Canadian flag on top stands as a tribute to this man who had a reputation for impeccable integrity.
The First Half of the Twentieth Century 1900 – 1952
The present property at the corner of Johnson and Sydenham Streets was purchased in 1901 during the pastorate of the Rev. Douglas Laing, a sturdy Scot who had been a Presbyterian originally but became a convinced Baptist. He baptized many members of the Calvin family of Garden Island and also members of the Friendship family, whose descendents are still active in First Baptist Church . The present church hall on Sydenham Street , built of Kingston limestone, was started in 1904 and completed in 1905. It served both as sanctuary, with its mullioned north window, and as church hall with a balcony on the east side with rooms below which could be divided from the sanctuary by roll-up doors. A parsonage was built on a second lot to the west of the Sydenham Street lot. The last family to occupy the parsonage was that of the Rev. Fred Jillard and his wife Madeleine with their seven children. After their departure and the fire in the church hall in 1966, the house became the home of the Helen Tufts Nursery School downstairs with offices and Sunday School rooms upstairs, much as it is in 2002.
Construction of the new sanctuary at the corner of Johnson and Sydenham Streets began in 1912 and the cornerstone was laid 2 June, 1913, by a prominent Baptist layman, the Hon. John A. Boyd, Chancellor of Ontario, in a ceremony involving many leading citizens of Kingston and presided over by the Rev. Douglas Laing. The first World War began soon after and 31 people from First Baptist Church joined their compatriots in a costly and destructive four years of warfare. A framed certificate lists the names of those who served in the armed services and a bronze plaque on the east wall of the sanctuary records the names of those who gave their lives in the service of their country. Another 44 men and women from First Baptist Church served in the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 and there was one casualty. Their names are also recorded on the framed certificate and plaque. A long pastorate of the period was that of the Rev. Dr. C.B. Freeman from 1930 to 1940. His daughter Olive later became the second Mrs. John Diefenbaker and Hal, one of his sons, became head of the Department of French at McMaster University . There were three pastors in the 1940-1952 period. The last of these, the Rev. R.G. Quiggan, had come from First Baptist, Ottawa , where he had ably replaced the Rev. Stuart Ivison during the latter's wartime service as a chaplain.
The first Mission band was started in 1909, the Grace Kenyon Mission Circle began in 1923 and the first Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT) group began in the early 1920s. The Explorers outreach program of First Baptist for pre-teen girls was started in 1948. Under Mim Soles and Vivian Henderson, the Explorers grew to some fifty girls, many of them from families who had little or no connection with First Baptist or with any other church. Until the founding of the Helen Tufts Nursery School in 1966, the Explorers represented the greatest community outreach program of the church.
During this period of time, a young member of this church represented Canada in the pole vault event at the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. While he didn’t win, his athleticism impressed Conn Smythe, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey club. Syl Apps was signed on to the team. He would eventually become captain of the team and lead them to a few Stanley Cup victories. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Apps would later serve as a Member of the Provincial Parliament and a Provincial cabinet minister. He remained active in this church for many years.
The Syl and Molly Apps Centre at Kingston General Hospital serves as a tribute to this family from our church.

The Last Fifty Years 1952 - 2002
The Rev. Ottis Davidson, the late brother of a current member, Ruth Murphy, was called to be the pastor of First Baptist in 1952, and the church enjoyed a harmonious period of steady growth and expansion from 1952 to 1960, a period which saw the arrival of many Baptists from the Maritimes. A very active adult fellowship group was initiated by Mr. and Mrs. Davidson and many of those involved in that group are still serving and worshipping in First Baptist. During Mr. Davidson's pastorate, the 1953 Convention of the BWMS was held in the church and the 1959 joint assemblies of the BCOQ and of the Baptist Federation of Canada were held at Queen's University. One of the social highlights of the assemblies was a picnic held on Garden Island through the good offices of a stalwart deacon, Jonathan D. Calvin, the grandson of D.D. Calvin and the son of H.A. Calvin, the donor of the stained glass window on the east wall of the sanctuary. A second church extension project was begun in the Glen Arden – Strathcona Park area in 1955 by Arden and Florita Smith, their daughters Marjorie (Colwell) and Ruby (Purdy) and son Paul with assistance of Lloyd and Mary McKnight. The Sunday School grew until there were 8 officers and 50 members. However, the Baptists constituted less than one fifth of the church that developed and a Rev. Mr. Dickieson was called to be its first pastor. First Baptist dropped its connection with the extension project which developed into the still existing Strathcona Park Presbyterian Church. The BYPU was very active in Mr. Davidson's time and one of their members, Walter Johnson, a medical student at Queen's, went on to become a medical missionary. Another initiative begun at the end of Mr. Davidson's pastorate was an extension Sunday School on Rideau Street north of Queen Street in what was then an underdeveloped area with many low-income families. Ken and Elsie Grace were prime movers in starting this Sunday School and although it did not survive, it spurred an interest in the problems of the intercity that bore fruit in the following decade.
Mr. Davidson was succeeded by the Rev. Fred Jillard who with his wife Madeleine, five sons and two daughters, moved into the cramped space of the old parsonage adjoining the church. Mr. Jillard was primarily a "people person" who was very supportive of all the church groups, especially those for youth such as Cubs, CGIT, Explorers, the BYPU and the Sunday School. Because of his older sons' interests in hockey he became a strong supporter of the Church Athletic League in its formative years. The BYPU had many highly motivated and mission-minded young people, three of whom (Charlie and Joanne Huskilson and Bonnie Hartley) went out to South Asia to serve with CUSO. Bill Forrest (later head of the Anatomy Department at Queen's) and his wife Marilyn played a large role in organizing a seminar in 1965 on the social problems of low income families in Kingston . This was an outcome of the abandoned attempt to maintain a Sunday School on Rideau Street and was a precursor of the founding of the Helen Tufts Nursery School in 1966. Many of the participants in that seminar became key members of the School's Board of Directors.
An unfortunate schism in the church developed over the proposed "New Curriculum" launched jointly by the BCOQ and by United Church of Canada. Although the controversial curriculum was never adopted or even advocated by the Christian Education Committee of the church, it led to division. Some people joined the new Bay Park Baptist Church , partly because the curriculum had not been rejected outright; others joined St. Margaret's United Church because the curriculum had not been adopted. Fred Jillard resigned precipitously in August 1966 because nothing had been done to heed his concerns that the parsonage was inadequate for his family. The vacant parsonage turned out to be a prime asset in First Baptist Church 's subsequent ministry to disadvantaged children in Kingston .
Even though the church was without a pastor for several weeks, a major development took place when Mary Straw, the wife of an engineer at Alcan, obtained the church's permission to open the Helen Tufts Nursery School in the church hall on September 29, 1966, with a staff of trained childhood education specialists drawn from First Baptist and Sydenham Street United churches. The school was named after an American Baptist missionary to Burma who had greatly influenced Mary Straw in her youth. Early in the morning of 6 December, 1966, a fire began in the kitchen of the church hall which led to its gutting. Providentially, fire walls saved the parsonage and the sanctuary; there was some smoke damage to the organ. The church hall was uninsured and the only insurance money that could be claimed, about fifteen thousand dollars, was due to the damage to the organ. As the rebuilding of the church hall would require about seventy thousand dollars (three times the annual budget of the church), the church's board weighed rebuilding against moving to the suburbs. A crucial decision was made in late 1966 to commit the church to a downtown ministry and to raise the rebuilding funds in a single financial campaign. The relocation of the Helen Tufts Nursery School to the now-empty parsonage ( which is its locus to this day) and the conversion of its other rooms to Sunday School classes were the first steps in keeping the 215 Johnson Street site viable. An interim pastor in the person of the Rev. Dr. Thiessen, an ebullient Dutch Reformed pastor (jocularly called the "jungle doctor" by George Rawlyk), who had been a missionary in Indonesia , was appointed and the church began its preparations for both a new full-time pastor and the purchasing of a house suitable for a parsonage. The year 1966-7 was far from disastrous and the seeds were sown for new life and new outreach!
The search committee recommended unanimously in the spring of 1967 that the Rev. Ronald H. Noble, pastor of the United Baptist Church in Bridgewater , N.S. , be appointed as the new pastor. Because the new minister was bringing his wife Marian and his three youngest sons with him to Kingston , it was essential that a new parsonage be found. The special committee appointed to complete this task was singularly blessed when an appropriate house at 66 Van Order Drive came on the market privately at a very reasonable price. The decision to take out a mortgage and buy the house turned out to be good for the Nobles, who liked the house so much that they later bought it from the church as a retirement home. It was also good for the church which then later possessed funds to help provide a future parsonage.
During the pastorate of Ron Noble, outreach to the Kingston community was extended by the founding of the Helen Tufts Tutorial Friendship Program in 1968 and by the invitation to the Rev. Alan Matthews and his wife Jean to set up Project Reconciliation as an outreach ministry to prisoners, parolees and their families in the refurbished basement of First Baptist Church in 1978. The Tutorial Program still carries on two nights a week at both First Baptist and Sydenham Street United churches where about sixty children of ages 6 to 12 are paired with students from Kingston 's post-secondary institutions. Every person in the program, including the drivers of cars but not including the driver of the 18-passenger bus, is a volunteer. Project Reconciliation has had several directors (Don Hill, Sam Breakey, Muriel Bishop and Jane Warren) since the retirement of Alan Matthews in 1982. McMaster University 's Divinity College recognized both Ron Noble and Alan Matthews by awarding them honorary D.D. degrees for their contributions to community ministries.
A by-product of Project Reconciliation, during Alan Matthews' term as Director, was the formation by the Rev. Dr. Don Misener, a prison chaplain, of a Yokefellows group after the Elton Trueblood model. This group persists to this day as a Thursday morning breakfast fellowship. Ron Noble's long ministry came to an end with his retirement in 1981. One initiative begun by Ron that continues to this time is the Maundy Thursday communion service by candlelight in the church hall. In the last year of Ron's ministry, the Cataraqui Community Church was established in the Bay Park area with Cam Watts, a recent graduate of Acadia Divinity School , as the extension pastor. Cam's wife Nancy (nee Fallis) was a Kingston girl and the young couple attracted young families to the services which were held in Archbishop O'Sullivan Catholic School with the financial support of First Baptist Church , which participated in the governance and also supplied resource people.
In order for his successor, the Rev. Mark Parent, to make a clean start, Ron Noble and his wife Marian, volunteered to serve the African Brotherhood Churches in Kenya for the 1981-2 year. Subsequently, the Nobles sponsored young people from Kenya to study in Kingston and Ron served on the board of Canadian Baptist Ministries. Ron was appointed as Minister Emeritus after his return from Africa . After attending the annual Christmas Eve Service in 2001, he died three days later as the result of several strokes.
The Rev. Mark Parent, a graduate of Acadia and York Universities , began his ministry in 1981. He and his family wished to establish equity by buying their own house with the help of the Trustees of First Baptist Church who were able to provide funds for a second mortgage from the sale of 66 Van Order Drive to the Nobles. Mark and his wife Cathy as a young couple appealed especially to young adults and to students and generally to all age groups. Mark's preaching attracted growing numbers of students from post-secondary institutions. Some of these were students from Baptist families who had been attending other churches and others were from other denominational backgrounds. The youth ministry took a big surge forward when Devona Wiederick, her husband Harvey and three teen-age children left a neighbouring church, where she had been youth director, to join First Baptist Church . A College and Career group was fostered by the Wiederick family and its success led to Devona's preparation for ordination as a Baptist pastor. She was ordained and appointed as Part-Time Co-Pastor in 1988 with Mark Parent as Full-Time Co-Pastor. As the church grew with an influx of new members, extra chairs had to be placed at the back of the sanctuary to accommodate all those who attended the morning worship service. With the augmented pastoral services, First Baptist decided in 1988 to discontinue combined services in the summer with neighbouring United Churches and began to offer worship services in our own church throughout the summer, a practice that still survives. It is regrettable that part of this growth in 1984 was due to an exodus from Cataraqui Community Church , after the call to the Rev. Cam Watts to another BCOQ pastorate, and the demise of that experiment in expansion to the western suburbs.
Another outreach program that began at the end of Ron Noble's ministry and that came to fruition during Mark Parent's term was the Refugee Sponsorship project. This began in 1980 when the fledgling ad hoc Refugee Committee at First Baptist joined forces with three other churches in the Kingston area, under the leadership of Ruth Kennedy of Kingston 's Alliance Church , to sponsor an extended family of Kampuchean refugees. Approximately six thousand dollars had been collected in earlier years for such sponsorship and this was used to augment the funds needed to bring 24 members of the Van Chek family to Kingston . The Hon. Flora MacDonald, M.P. for Kingston , Minister of Immigration and a friend of the Nobles, played a key role in expediting the immigration process. Many members of the church, especially the Nobles, assisted the Van Cheks to settle in Kingston . This fruitful collaboration may have motivated Jim and Ruth Kennedy and several of their children to move to First Baptist Church where Jim and Ruth have subsequently given leadership to the program of refugee sponsorship. The next successful sponsorship by First Baptist Church was that of Herbert and Marta Romero and their two boys from El Salvador via New Jersey . Subsequently, the Romeros had three girls born in Kingston and the church was able to assist the Romeros to sponsor Herbert's mother and financially support Herbert's cousin Gilberto and his wife Nidia in their successful attempt to bring their three children from El Salvador to Kingston . It should be noted that King Cole Homes , a geared-to-income housing project initiated in the 1970s by a number of Kingston churches including First Baptist, provided the first homes for the two Romero families in Kingston . Because of the arrival of these and other Spanish-speaking people in Kingston , an Hispanic congregation was founded at First Baptist Church in 1989 with a charismatic Salvadorean athlete, Will Anzora, as acting pastor. Attempts to sponsor Anzora as a refugee in 1990 were not successful and his departure from Kingston , coupled with personal rivalries in the congregation, led to the departure from First Baptist to a Pentecostal church of many of the Spanish-speaking families. However, a nucleus still remains at First Baptist and some social and spiritual links continue to exist between those who departed and those who stayed. Later, Ruth Kennedy, who was raised in Bolivia , was appointed by First Baptist to be the pastor of the Hispanic congregation.
The very fruitful collaboration between Mark Parent and Devona Wiederick ended in early 1990 when Mark announced his resignation to become pastor-elect at First Baptist Church in Moncton. The church was then planning its extensive 150 th Anniversary celebrations. These celebrations involved a series of guest preachers whose sermons were collated and published by the late Dr. George Rawlyk, who was then our church historian. Anniversary projects such as the enhancement of the church hall and the construction of an elevator to bring those with physical disabilities from street level to the sanctuary were successfully completed. An anniversary cruise on the Miss Kingston was held during the summer and an anniversary banquet was held in the MacGillivray-Brown Hall of Chalmers United Church. The banquet was the last event attended by the Parent family before their move to Moncton The search committee charged with finding a replacement for Mark unanimously recommended at the end of the summer of 1990 that the Rev. Craig Rumble be appointed as Full-Time Co-Pastor to begin his term in December 1990 with Devona to retain her original position as Part-Time Co-Pastor. The Rev. Devona Wiederick submitted her resignation to be effective in May, 1992.
Devona Wiederick, after two years as a volunteer student counsellor at St. James Anglican Church near the Queen's University campus, was ordained as an Anglican deacon by the Bishop of Ontario in May 1994 and was appointed to a pastoral charge at Elizabethtown in Eastern Ontario . She retired after the recent death of her husband.
During Craig's final months as pastor, a Portuguese congregation was formed under the leadership of the Rev. Francisco Brandao and his wife Francesca, both immigrants from Brazil . Application for support of the Portuguese congregation was successfully made to the BCOQ in 1994 and this grant continued until the end of 2000 with an annual decrement. Craig submitted his letter of resignation on February 9, 1994, to be effective March 6, 1994. Shortly afterwards, he and his wife, the Rev. Deborah Ban, were called to Temple Baptist Church in Windsor, Craig's home church, as co-pastors. A successful search for an interim pastor resulted in the appointment of the Rev. Clarence Lohnes, a retired Baptist minister and a former president of the BCOQ, who was residing in Brighton, 110 km west of Kingston . Clarence began his ministry in early June 1994 and by the end of August had made some forty pastoral calls to shut-ins. Mr. Lohnes presided at the communion service on Sunday, October 2, 1994, when the restored Casavant organ, augmented by a new digital Artisan Classic Organ Co. Custom Series Model A, was dedicated. The restoration of the organ, under the Ad Hoc Organ Committee involving interim organist Bruce Cross, organist Joan Egnatoff and choir director Bill Egnatoff as well as chairman Steve Knechtel and several members of the congregation, was a 150 th Anniversary Project that had been deferred in 1990 because of lack of funds. Mr. Lohnes was the unanimous choice of the Worship and Pastoral Care Committee to be the anniversary preacher on November 13, 1994.
A search committee chaired by the Rev. David Ogilvie had been formed to find a successor to Craig Rumble. The search committee reported in the autumn of 1994 that it had looked at several candidates and had decided to recommend unanimously that the Rev. William E. Adams, a graduate of Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary, be appointed as our next pastor. At that time, Bill Adams was in Toronto after serving as a pastor in Toronto and in several churches in Alberta and Saskatchewan . His wife Phyllis, who was an elementary school teacher in Toronto , would not be free to join him in Kingston until her forthcoming retirement. The congregation enthusiastically approved the recommendation of the search committee and Bill Adams moved into a small apartment in Kingston in early 1995 to begin his pastorate. A year later, the Adams purchased a home in a new community east of Kingston .
Around this time, Dr. George Rawlyk, a professor of history at Queen’s University and member of the church was involved in a car accident. During the recovery period, Rawlyk suddenly took a turn for the worse and died on November 23, 1995. Rawlyk’s legacy is that he was one of Canada’s most respected church historians. He was the author and editor of numerous books.
One of the challenging tasks facing the new pastor was an attempt to understand the alienation of those who thought that either Craig or Devona had been badly treated. Along with one or more deacons, he visited every family that might consider reconciliation. This effort, while worthwhile in itself, did not stop some families from leaving the church. Bill's non-confrontational attempts at healing certainly helped to defuse some of the anger and frustration. His concern with reform in worship and his careful preparation for biblical exegesis won him great respect. One of his legacies has been the emphasis upon Advent and the special observances on the Sundays of Advent. In the years 2000-1-2, Bill and others successfully organized Alpha and Beta programs.
During Bill's ministry, there arose a new awareness of the plight of Christian refugees from fundamentalist Islamic regimes. This began with the baptism by First Baptist of an Iranian refugee who was converted in prison. He had been unjustly sentenced and threatened with deportation on the basis of planted evidence. This led five years ago to the church's sponsorship of an Iranian Christian family who had taken refuge in Turkey . Now there is a nucleus of three Iranian families, each with a child, in the church. In the last two years, the Portuguese services of worship have been terminated although Bible study and prayer in Portuguese continues. This is partly a consequence of children of Portuguese and Brazilian families wishing to function in English and not in the language of their parents.
In the spring of 2002, Bill Adams announced his retirement, effective June 30, 2002, to the regret of many. A large number of members made a special effort to be present at the reception in the church hall at the end of June in honour of the Adams . Tributes came from far and wide.
In the summer of 2002, a number of Kingston clergymen preached at the Sunday morning services. These included the Rev. Paul Frost, the Rev. David Higgs and the Rev. Ike Wilkins from First Baptist Church , retired Anglican rector Rev. Bob Brow and retired Presbyterian minister Rev. Bill Duffy. From September 2002 to June 2003, interim pastoral duties were ably shared by Bill Duffy and Paul Frost. Summer services were again conducted by a number of guest preachers in addition to Bill Duffy and Paul Frost. These were David Higgs and Ike Wilkins again and also the Rev. Ken Roth, recently retired pastor of the Free Methodist Church . During the sixteen months following the retirement of the Rev. Bill Adams, the guest preachers and interim ministers admirably held the church together in anticipation of the arrival of a new fulltime pastor. In August, 2003, on the unanimous recommendation of the Search Committee, the church voted to appoint the Rev. Kevin Smith, Pastor of Oxford Baptist Church in Nova Scotia , as our new pastor, effective September 1, 2003. After four months of excellent ministry, an induction service for Kevin was held on Sunday, January 13, 2004, with the Rev. Dr. Mark McKim of Germain Street Baptist Church in St. John as guest preacher.
The Rev. Jane Warren retired as Director of Project Reconciliation on February 28, 2002, after more than twelve years of dedicated service. A retired United Church chaplain and pastor, the Rev. Don Chisholm, acted capably as Interim Director for thirteen months until March 31, 2003, when the Rev. Greg Rodgers, formerly pastor of Wentworth Baptist Church in Hamilton , began his ministry as full time Director and Community Chaplain following the unanimous decision of the Project's Search Committee in January 2003. The induction service for Greg was held on Sunday, November 18, 2003, with the Rev. Harry Nigh, Community Chaplain for the Toronto area, as guest preacher. n July 2007, the Rev. Greg Rodgers left the directorship of Project Reconciliation to become a chaplain within one of the prisons of Kingston. In January 2004, the Rev. Francisco Brandao was appointed as Outreach Pastor to the Portuguese community after his two years as principal of a Baptist college in northeast Brazil . In September, 2005, Joshua Mutter began as the Next Generation Pastor of First Baptist Church.  Over the next three years, he worked exceptionally well with children, youth, and college and careers.  In September of 2008, he returned to theological studies at McMaster Divinity College.

Postscript
Before 1849, First Baptist Church belonged to the Johnstown (near Prescott ) Association of Baptist Churches and the Canada Baptist Union, which allowed open communion and was founded in Toronto in 1844. The Canada Baptist Union was dissolved at the Kingston meeting of 1849 and the Regular Baptist Union of Canada, which insisted on closed communion, took its place in Upper Canada . In 1889, the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec , uniting open and closed communion churches, was constituted and First Baptist has been a member of the BCOQ since that time. It also belongs to the Canada Central Association of Baptist Churches with thirteen other churches in an area bounded by the St. Lawrence Seaway in the south and the Ottawa River from Arnprior to Deep River in the north. The nearest "Convention churches" are in Belleville to the west, Brockville to the east, Perth to the north and Delta to the northeast. Coupled with the fact that Kingston is the site of three post-secondary institutions of learning, a number of federal prisons and several branch plants of well-known transnational companies, the lack of nearby "Convention churches" has led to a considerable diversity (cultural, economic, linguistic, racial and theological) in the congregation of First Baptist. Diversity concerning the authority of scripture was a factor in the crises of 1966 and 1993. This has become clear to the congregation as a whole.

The above account has been prepared by David McLay and assisted by Donna Fox, one of the most senior members of the congregation. Our pastor, Rev. Kevin Smith added additional information. Lt. Col. Bert Hovey's 1990 monograph and minutes and reports over a period of several decades were consulted in the preparation of this short history. A more authoritative and complete history should be written in the near future.