Of all the dates which have been mentioned thus far, 1912 is, perhaps, the most significant. It was the year when the Associate Presbyterian Church in Chesley and the old Disruption groups in Midwestern Ontario were united to form the Ontario Congregation of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. It was the year when one of the streams which would flow into the Presbyterian Reformed Church came into its own.
The congregation’s first minister was the Rev. Walter Scott. A native of Scotland, he traveled to Australia for his health, and while there joined the Free Presbyterian Church of Victoria, a daughter Church of the Free Church of Scotland. He was ordained as a home missionary and, in 1895, inducted to a congregation in New South Wales. Changes in the denomination caused him to return to Scotland in 1909, where he applied for admission to the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
In April 1912, he was sent to visit the Canadian Mission, as it was called at that time, and was present at the meeting when the motion to seek admission to the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland was unanimously carried. He returned to Canada in November of that year as the new congregation’s minister. However, his ministry ended suddenly after a severe illness in 1915. He died on the 18th of January 1916.
The congregation’s second minister was the Rev. William Matheson. His family came from Lochalsh and often provided hospitality to the visiting Free Presbyterian ministers who came to Canada to serve the groups in Ontario and elsewhere. In 1907, during his undergraduate studies, Matheson was engaged to provide summer pulpit supply in his home congregation. From 1909 to 1913, he supplied the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland congregation in Winnipeg which became dependent upon him. In 1914, he was released from this commitment and sailed to Scotland for theological studies. He returned as an ordained missionary to the Free Presbyterian Mission in Canada at the end of 1917.
The early 1920s were a time of change, connection, and reconnection. In 1922, the Rev. Samuel Dempster of the Bloor Street congregation died, and Matheson took the funeral. William Elliot, also of the Toronto congregation, died the following year; and with his passing, went the family troubles of the previous century and some of his now-adult children made Chesley their home. In the summer of 1925, a Free Presbyterian divinity student who was studying at Princeton Seminary came for the first time to supply the Bloor East Presbyterian Church (Unaffiliated) pulpit. His name was John Murray; and this was the beginning of a long and most meaningful connection.
In 1927, the Synod of the Free Presbyterian Church expressed its strong disapproval of William Matheson’s conduct in admitting to the Sacraments members of the Winnipeg congregation who had used public transport on the Lord’s Day in contravention of a 1921 Synod resolution and issued a warning to all concerned. In 1928, the regulation was extended to cover adherents also. As there was limited public transport in the parts of Midwestern Ontario where congregants lived, the matter was moot. However, whether seen as an infringement on liberty of conscience or as an overreach of church power, the Session saw the resolutions as a change in the Church’s terms of communion and the minister and elders considered themselves not bound by them. Matheson expressed his views in his 1936 book May Sabbath Keeping Prevent Church Going?. The Synod issued an ultimatum to the Session in 1929, and to the congregation in 1930, that if they did not conform to the resolutions that they would no longer be considered a part of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
Neither did and they reconstituted themselves as the Free Presbyterian Church of Ontario.
These events affected others beyond the congregation. John Murray expressed some agreement with Matheson’s position and set himself on a path which would see him leave the Church of his birth. Bloor Street was not part of the Free Presbyterian Church, but many of its members had strong family ties to that denomination. Whatever the members' private thoughts were, corporately, they continued to invite Murray to supply the pulpit.
While Matheson preached in Chesley and the other part of the congregation until his death in 1957, Bloor Street relied upon supply preachers, many of whom were arranged by Murray. In the early 1960s with both pulpits vacant, calls were issued to Messrs. R. Quincy Caldwell and Gerald Hamstra. An ad hoc Presbytery comprised of Prof. John Murray, OPC, the Rev. John Macsween, Toronto Free Church of Scotland, and the Rev. Hamstra (Gerald’s Father), Old Christian Reformed Church, was created to examine, ordain, and induct them. Gerald Hamstra was inducted to, or installed in, Bloor Street on one evening in January 1963, and Quincy Caldwell to Chesley the following evening.
Both congregations being settled, John Murray presented them with a draft basis of union. On the 17th of November 1965, that basis of union was ratified, and the Presbyterian Reformed Church was constituted.