St. Mark's Anglican Church

St. Mark’s stands on First Avenue, a block from Broadway in downtown Orangeville, and belongs to the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. Its website lists the Rev. William Willis as priest-in-charge, with the Rev. Canon Lynne Thackwray and the Rev. Canon Stephanie Pellow as honorary assistants and the Rev. Richard Beaudoin as deacon. The Ven. Peter Scott, rector for 24 years, left at the end of October 2025.

The parish dates its beginning to 1837, when Seneca Ketchum, an Anglican lay preacher who had settled in Mono Township, built a log church on his own land about a mile east of the town site. In 1854 the Rev. John Fletcher built a small stone church on the present site, on land given by Jesse Ketchum, and the name St. Mark’s passed to it. The present church was built in 1868, early in the forty-year ministry of Canon Alexander Henderson, the first rector to live in Orangeville. The church’s spire blew down in a storm in 1887, and the present tower was built in 1891. In 1875 Orangeville passed from the Diocese of Toronto to the newly formed Diocese of Niagara. The parish hall was enlarged between 1953 and 1955 and a Christian Education Wing was added by 1960, and in the summer of 1965 the church’s deteriorating brick was covered with a plastered veneer scored to look like brick.

Sunday services are a traditional Eucharist at 8:30 a.m. and a Choral Eucharist at 10:00 a.m., which is livestreamed, with a Eucharist and Bible study on Thursday mornings. The parish runs a food cupboard at its south-east entrance at midday on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, hosts The Beacon, a drop-in centre, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, cleans a stretch of Highway 10 through Adopt-a-Highway, and has helped sponsor refugee families from Afghanistan and Syria.

What to expect

The parish says it will not single out guests or visitors. Greeters, known as sidespeople, help newcomers, pews are not reserved, and the bulletin gives the order of service with page numbers for the green Book of Alternative Services and the blue Common Praise hymn book. Most people kneel to pray, but sitting is fine. All baptized people, including children over seven, may receive Communion at the rail; anyone who prefers not to receive may come forward for a blessing with arms folded across the chest, or stay in the pew. Children in The Lions Sunday school come into church as a group toward the end of the 10:00 a.m. service for Communion and a short talk, The Lion's Tale, and are picked up downstairs afterwards. Coffee is served in the hall downstairs after the 10:00 a.m. service.

What Anglicans believe and how they worship