With Love, Lydia: The Story of Canada's First Woman Ordained Minister (Book Review)
- Elaine R Kelly
- Mar 2
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 13
Book Review: With Love, Lydia: The Story of Canada's First Woman Ordained Minister
Author: Rev. Patricia Wotton earned a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Manitoba and then a Master of Divinity at St. Andrew's Theological College in Saskatoon. She became an ordained minister with the United Church of Canada in 1986 and, in her retirement, pursued her fascination with the story of Lydia Gruchy. Wotton and her husband currently live in Winnipeg.
The author's extensive research for this biography is reflected in 40 pages of appendices and sources. Wotton visited various towns and cities for interviews, collecting living memories from those who knew Lydia Gruchy, copying articles from various past newspapers, ceremonies, church services, and university archives. The author includes Lydia Gruchy's graduation thesis, a study of Psalm 122. She also includes historical records of the 1935 United Church vote to ordain women: 79 For, 26 Against, and 9 Abstained.
Publisher: D & P Wotton, 2012, biography 251 pages, plus 40 pages of End Notes.
Genre: non-fiction, biography & memoir, history, gender and religion, inspirational
Why I Chose It:
I have been researching and writing about women preachers and pastors through history as evidence to contradict those who would say that women in ministry is a recent development stemming from a secular movement. Women have been working as evangelists, missionaries, preachers, pastors, and ministers since the time of Christ. Here are a few of my past articles on that topic:
How Did Lydia Gruchy Break the Stained Glass Ceiling?
I chose this book to discover what Lydia Gruchy did to become the first woman ordained by a mainline church in Canada.
What I discovered is that Lydia Gruchy's focus was not on becoming ordained, breaking barriers, or fighting for women's rights. That was not her calling.
Her focus was on teaching, preaching, pastoring, and serving the church and the community that the church served. She needed to be ordained to be able to do the work to which she was called.
Others needed to be the ones to open the door for her, advocate for her ordination, and vote to let her in. That was their calling. I see that as my calling: to open the way for women and men to do whatever God gifts and calls them to do.
Summary:
I loved this biography of Rev. Dr. Lydia Gruchy, the first woman ordained in a mainline church in Canada. It outlines the need for female ordination and for advocates like those who opened the doors for Lydia Gruchy.
Lydia Gruchy preached, taught, visited and served her congregations in every way possible. She travelled by horse and sled or by car and led 3-4 services at various remote locations each Sunday. She also taught Bible lessons at several public elementary schools and led youth in confirmation classes. Her focus was not on gender equality or women's rights; her focus was on serving God and serving her community.
"The work had to be done, and so I did it!" - Lydia Gruchy
From her graduation with a degree in theology in 1923 until 1936, she did all the work of ministry, but she was not permitted to perform sacraments. Being unordained was making it more difficult to do the work God called her to do.
When she finished teaching a youth confirmation class, she would have to call on a male colleague to welcome them into membership and offer them communion. When members of her congregations wanted communion, baptism, or a wedding, she would cover a male colleague's pulpits, preaching for their congregation, while they performed sacraments for her charges. It was her male colleagues of Saskatchewan who repeatedly presented her name for ordination at the national meetings. While she did not push her way into being ordained, she became a test case for those who did want to push that door open.
Advocates Lobbied to Vote for Women's Ordination
Fortunately for the church, others were focused on gender equality and ensuring that the church benefited from both women and men who were called to the ministry. Two prominent advocates for female ordination, using Lydia Gruchy as a test case, were:
(1) Dr. Edmund H. Oliver, president of the Presbyterian Theological College and Moderator of the United Church of Canada. When he could not find any male theology student interested in a scholarship to specialize in Christian Education amongst New Canadians, he invited Lydia Gruchy to be the first woman to enter the university's theology program. Later, he advocated for Lydia Gruchy's ordination with the United Church. Unfortunately, he died before his dream of female ordination was realized.
(2) Nellie McClung, an activist and one of the Famous 5 who petitioned the Supreme Court of Canada to declare women as persons eligible for public office as senators. McClung was ridiculed, criticized, and misjudged by many, but she strongly believed that all people in God's realm were equal heirs of the right to speak God's word. The denial of a woman's right to preach denied a woman's equal worth. McClung was an active church-woman who based her fight on the biblical statement that in Christ, there is no more male and female. In Nellie McClung's 1937 book, More Leaves from Lantern Lane, she commented on Lydia Gruchy's ordination:
"So the United Church of Canada has at last endorsed what Saint Paul said more than eighteen hundred years ago, that there is no "male or female bound or free," but all are one in the service of God." - Nellie McClung, 1937 (1)
Only men had the right to vote for or against women's ordination. Finally, in 1936, after 13 years of serving congregations as an unordained minister, the men voted to allow her in. She remained unmarried and without children. The first married woman ordained by the United Church of Canada was Elinor Leard in 1957.
Biography
Lydia Gruchy's biography is portrayed as similar to the Bible stories of Exodus and going to the Promised Land. Immigrants left war and persecution, came to Canada, where they were promised land and a way to make a living. A central goal in Canada's Constitution was to establish "peace, order, and good government." The church was influential in the community and national life of early Canada, and church leaders were conscious of establishing God's kingdom in a new place, a nation with a social safety net to help those in need.
Lydia Gruchy was born in Britain, raised in France, and immigrated to Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1913. It was a stark contrast to live in a rural area without water on tap. Lydia trained to be a teacher, and during WW1, she worked at internment camps for "enemy aliens". This included Ukrainians, who had immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an enemy during WW1. She also taught pacifists and conscientious objectors such as German Mennonites or Russian Doukhobors. After that, she received a scholarship to attend the Presbyterian College of the University of Saskatchewan. She was the first woman to enter a regular course in theology training, graduating in 1923.
"I was on horseback for awhile and then I got a buggy. Then I got a car. I went through all those pioneeer stages." - Lydia Gruchy
Initially unable to get a position as a church minister, Lydia Gruchy worked as a missionary to New Canadians. Women could be missionaries, doing outreach, sharing their faith, and fulfilling the great commission. However, women were not permitted to be ministers or elders, which would be leading a hierarchy and a threat to male authority. As a missionary, she could perform funerals, but she did not have the authority to officiate baptisms, weddings, confirmation of new members, or holy communion.
Her first post was serving the Doukhobor community in Saskatchewan. When the Presbyterian Church joined the United Church of Canada in 1925, Lydia Gruch continued her work as a missionary serving a remote two-point charge in Saskatchewan, with mainly Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Anglo-Saxon New Canadians. The droughts forming the Dust Bowl of the 1930s made farming difficult for her parishioners. During the Depression, farmers marched on Ottawa calling for unemployment insurance.
In 1936, she was posted in Moose Jaw, where there had previously been a large Chinese population and where there were still underground tunnels where Chinese lived and worked. Many of the Chinese had dispersed by the time she moved to Moose Jaw, since Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act in 1923, preventing Chinese from entering the country or bringing their families. During the Saskatchewan Prohibition 1917-24, these tunnels were used for rum-running, gambling, and prostitution. Wives and children were left destitute and the Women's Christian Temperance Union advocated for votes for women and equal pay.
In 1947, the United Church submitted "A Brief to The Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons appointed to examine and consider The Indian Act". It concluded by saying as long as the law required the church to offer education, the government should provide sufficient funding for the purpose. The brief recommended:
Better funding for the education of Indian people.
curriculum better suited to the needs of Indian children, "re-establishing the native in his own self-esteem and self-sufficiency."
establishing education that is not segregated according to religion,
examine using day schools instead of residential schools.
Conclusion
Lydia Gruchy's ministry occurred amid WW1, the Dust Bowl of the Dirty 30s, WW2, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement. She was a pioneer in Canada's prairies, doing the work that needed to be done, whether with the United Church head office or as a pastor in the communities where she served.
The author, Rev. Patricia Wotton, concludes by reflecting on the changes in culture and the church's place in society in the one hundred years since Lydia Gruchy graduated from theology school. Large institutions are out of vogue and are not given the blind obedience of the past. However, the church cannot be distracted by thinking about institutional survival. It needs to have a vision for God's call and the ministry and gifts of all people. The church needs to provide acceptance, intimacy and community, satisfy the need for spirituality and worship, and appeal to people's interest in the Bible. We need to remember our past stories as well as listen to today's prophets of justice, hope, and comfort.
This biography is well worth the read for anyone interested in how women and men can work together and how the church today can provide a community to support women and men whom God calls and gifts for ministry.
It is not available on Amazon.
I purchased this biography directly from the author's website.
It is also available on Chapters-Indigo.
Elaine Ricker Kelly Author is empowering women with historical fiction about women in the Bible and early church and Christian blogs about women in leadership, church history and doctrine. Her books include:
Forgotten Followers from Broken to Bold, Book 1 (2022)
The Sword: A Fun Way to Engage in Healthy Debate on What the Bible Says About a Woman's Role (2023)
Because She Was Called: from Broken to Bold, Book 2, A Novel of the Early Church, imagines Mary Magdalene's trip to testify before the emperor (2024)
Walk with Mara on Her Healing Journey: 21 Steps to Emotional Resilience (2024)
(1) McClung, Nellie L., More Leaves from Lantern Lane, 1937, https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/mcclung-moreleaves/mcclung-moreleaves-00-h.html
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