St Ives Uniting Church

Over 60 years of community service

St Ives Uniting Church, a multi-use venue that also caters for youth gymnastics and ballet lessons and inter-school sport matches as well as Sunday religious services, is situated at the corner of Douglas St and Mona Vale Rd in the suburb’s north. 

In 2023 the church celebrated its sixth decade of community service. The 60th anniversary was also mentioned in Hansard, the official record of the NSW Parliament, when Matt Cross MP (Davidson) spoke about the church in the Legislative Assembly.

St Ives Uniting Church is born

“The St Ives Uniting Church was born in 1963 of the union between the Methodist and Protestant churches to serve the parishioners of the rapidly growing suburb of St Ives,” he said. “The church has been an integral and important part of the St Ives community since that time…”

Cross also mentioned the booklet 60 Memorable Years by Fay Laginestra and Bob Knox, recounting the church's history.

A decade earlier, in the 50th anniversary booklet, St Ives Uniting Church – Fifty Memorable Years, by Howard Walker, further details of the church’s origins were revealed.

“St  Ives, in 1963, was a serene, bushy, semi-rural  Sydney North Shore suburb with a village green and  a  showground, a suburb where you would still find cows and horses grazing in quiet pastures. It was into this pleasant but fast-growing neighbourhood, in 1963, that Rev Lockhart  Finlay, BA, OAM with his wife Carol, son Mark and daughter Michelle, moved from Bellingen, a  small town on  the  NSW Mid North Coast where he was Minister of the Presbyterian Church, to take up the role as Minister of the new St Ives Presbyterian Church, a role which he was to hold for the next 28 years.”

A new St Ives Uniting Church

The main building was designed with meeting rooms below and a large hall that, when the seating was removed, doubled as a gymnasium.

The article continued, “In 1963, the  St  Ives  Presbyterian Church was established on our present site and, in the same year, the new St Ives Methodist Church was opened and dedicated nearby on Mona Vale Road. At the time of Church Union, the congregation of the Methodist Church made the decision to move to the Presbyterian Church, to form the  St Ives Uniting Church. We are now .. celebrating.. this very successful and happy union…”

The original venue in which the Methodists met for Sunday services in the 1950s was the old Masonic Hall on Stanley St, adjacent to the ambulance station and the former Gillott’s bus depot (now a residential estate).

According to the St Ives Pymble Presbyterian Church, “In 1957, it was agreed to purchase 2 blocks of land at the corner of Mona Vale Road and Douglas Street for $11,000. A Church Hall was completed at a cost of $18,000 and opened on Sunday, 1st April 1962 by the Moderator of North Sydney Presbytery, Rev. Harold Durbin.

“On 1st January 1963, St. Ives was declared a sanctioned Charge… Talks commenced in the 1960s between the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches that culminated with Church Union in June 1977. The majority of the St. Ives Congregation voted to join the Uniting Church, a minority wished to remain Presbyterian. Buoyed by like-minded members from other Presbyterian Churches (predominantly Pymble, Turramurra and Wahroonga), a viable St Ives-Pymble congregation was formed soon after …”

Website: www.stives.unitingchurch.org.au