I went to church, and was slammed by the passage of time. Nothing, and everything, had changed.

It had been almost 25 years since I last visited Montreal’s Madison Baptist Church, the place my family attended pretty much every Sunday from 1957 to 1972. My formative years were spent there.

Intellectually I understood that it was going to be different. I just didn’t realize how different

1972 was a long time ago. People grow up, move away, die. In 2002, the last time I was there, there were still a few people attending the church who remembered my family. This time? There was one – and his memories were hazy. I remembered his family, but he was that much younger than me that I don’t remember him.

The sanctuary looked just the same. Until I went to sit in the pew my grandmother had paid for. As a pre-teen I spent a lot of Sunday mornings there being fed peppermints while I did not listen to the sermon.

When the church was built many congregants had paid for the cost of a pew and a plaque memorializing a loved one was attached. The plaques are still attached. I remember so many of the people who sponsored them.

The family pew wasn’t where I remembered it. It was four rows different. How could I get that wrong?

At first I was confused, attributing it to a memory lapse on my part. I am getting old after all, and my grandparents moved to Toronto in 1964 or 65, so it had been 60 years since I last sat there. It felt like I was in the wrong place.

After the worship service, talking with people, I realized that the carpet was new. Which means they took the pews out to lay it down. And nobody thought to put them back in the same place. Because, why would it matter? No-one knew who these people were. No-one attending the church in 2026 has any connections to these families long gone.

Institutional memory is a tricky thing. Those names on the plaques are now just part of that “great cloud of witnesses” that Scripture talks about.

People in the church today know that they are heirs of a faith tradition, but the details are now lost in time. Nobody thought to make a record. Maybe because the church is about the present and the future, not the past.

Maybe that is a good thing. If you focus on the past, your faith atrophies.

I have been to great cathedrals in Europe that were a testament to a faith that was at one time vibrant that are now little more than museums. That isn’t what Christianity is supposed to be about.

At Madison Baptist Church today, nobody knows anything about my great aunt who died very young, or about my grandmother who paid for a plaque in the pew in her memory.

What they do know, as they did in my grandparents’ day, was that there are people in the community who need to hear that Jesus loves them. That is what is important.

For me, seeing the plaque on the pew brought back some warm memories. Seeing how the church is reaching out to its neighbours today, keeping the tradition alive, was just as gratifying, perhaps more.