The History of ICNL

The House on Paton Street

How a minister's home became a musallah, and how it almost stopped being one

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If you walk up Paton Street in St. John's on a Friday afternoon, you might not notice anything. A modest house. A driveway. Shoes by the door.

Nothing about it announces itself. There is no dome. There is no minaret. There is no sign carved in stone telling you that people have been putting their foreheads on the ground in this building for years.

But they have. And the story of how that came to be is stranger and more fragile than most of us who pray there realize.

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A House Built for a Minister

The story does not begin with us. It begins in the years after the Second World War, when St. John's was growing fast and pushing north.

The old city was clustered around the harbour. But in the late 1940s and 1950s, new neighbourhoods rose up around Churchill Park and Elizabeth Avenue, the "northern suburbs," as they were called then. New streets. New families. New schools. Prince of Wales Collegiate went up nearby. Paton Street filled in with houses.

Where families go, houses of worship follow.

In September 1958, a brand-new United Church congregation chose its name: St. James. Their very first Sunday service was held that November in a school auditorium, because they had no building yet. Within weeks, a building committee sat down and drew up a plan: a sanctuary big enough for roughly 500 families, and a manse.

That word matters. A manse is the house a congregation provides for its minister. It is not incidental to a church; it is part of how a congregation cares for the person who cares for them. You build the sanctuary for the community, and you build the manse for the one who will stand in front of it.

The sod was turned in June 1960. The sanctuary on Elizabeth Avenue was finished by October 1961. And a house on Paton Street entered the ledgers of St. James United Church as property held in trust. Sometimes it housed ministers, sometimes it was rented out, and the income folded back into keeping the lights on and the doors open.

For decades, that was its life. Ordinary. Unremarkable. A house doing quiet work for a congregation.

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The Emptying

Then came the slow part of the story. The part nobody plans for.

Across Newfoundland, and across Canada, congregations began to thin. The pews that had been built for 500 families held fewer every decade. Ministers retired and were not replaced one-for-one. Buildings that had been raised with pledges and personal bank guarantees became line items in budgets that no longer balanced. Churches in this province have closed, merged, sold, and disbanded, some of them after nearly a century and a half of service.

And a manse without a minister is just a house with a mortgage.

This is the part of the story where I want to be careful, because it is easy to tell it with a note of triumph. It should not be told that way. What happened to St. James and to congregations like it was a loss for real people: people who had guaranteed a bank loan with their own names, who had buried their parents out of that sanctuary, who had sung in that choir for forty years. Their grief is not our victory.

But history has a way of handing keys from one set of hands to another. And around this time, something else was happening in St. John's.

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The Community That Kept Outgrowing Itself

Muslims had been in Newfoundland for a long time, but for most of that time there was nowhere to go.

In 1990, that changed: Masjid-an-Noor opened on Logy Bay Road, built by the Muslim Association of Newfoundland and Labrador. The first mosque in the entire province. For years, for decades, it was also the only one. A large share of the congregation were students and faculty at Memorial University, which meant the community was always in motion: arriving, studying, leaving, returning.

And it kept growing. Thousands of Muslims across the province now. Newcomers. Refugee families. International students. Workers. Children born here who have never known anywhere else as home.

One mosque, on the far side of the city, is not enough for that. If you lived downtown, or near the university, or if you worked a shift job and had thirty minutes for Dhuhr, "the mosque is on Logy Bay Road" was not an answer. It was a problem.

So people did what people do. They found rooms.

The Islamic Circle of North America's Newfoundland chapter took on a building: a resource centre at 10 Paton Street. On paper it was a food bank and a community space. Practically, it was more than that. It became a place with five daily prayers. Islamic events. A place where a person could walk in, make wudu, and pray.

The manse became a musallah.

Think about what that means for a moment. A house built so a Christian minister would have somewhere to sleep, in a neighbourhood built for a postwar generation of Newfoundlanders, became a place where the name of Allah was said out loud, five times a day, by people whose grandparents had never seen this island.

Alhamdulillah. Nobody planned that. Nobody could have.

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The Turn

Here is where the story nearly ended.

The community kept growing, and a prayer room in a former manse, however beloved, has limits. You cannot fit a growing Jumu'ah into a living room. In 2023, ICNA Newfoundland put in an offer on a former Gospel Hall at 47 Smith Avenue and launched a fundraising campaign across Canada to raise the half-million dollars it would take. Muslims from across the country gave. The purchase went through. By January 2024, the doors opened for daily prayers, renovations still ongoing, and the building had a name: Masjid Al-Falah.

That was a huge blessing. A real masjid. Room to grow. It was exactly what the community had been praying for.

And it meant 10 Paton Street was going to be handed back.

I don't think people outside the community fully understood why that landed the way it did. On a spreadsheet, it is clean: the lease ends, the property returns to the church, the congregation does what it wants with it. That is entirely their right. Nobody was wronged.

But we had prayed there.

There is something that happens to a room once you have made sujood in it. The floor is the same floor. The walls are the same walls. But you cannot walk into it neutrally anymore. You know where the qiblah is. You know which board creaks in the second row. You remember the Ramadan when the iftar tables didn't fit and people ate standing up in the hallway, laughing about it.

The thought of that room going quiet, of the space where we had put our heads down reverting to something else entirely, was genuinely painful. Not angry. Just heavy. How does a place where we made sujood to Allah stop being that?

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Continuation

It didn't.

The Islamic Center of Newfoundland and Labrador (ICNL), a community organization whose roots go back to 2012, stepped in and took the space on.

The prayers did not stop. That is the whole point of this blog post, and it is worth saying plainly: the prayers did not stop.

Today, 10 Paton Street is ICNL's musallah. Five daily prayers. Jumu'ah. Qur'an classes for the kids. Social gatherings, the kind where the food runs out because too many people came, which is the best possible reason for food to run out.

And in the darkness of the night, the adhan is raised.

Not through a loudspeaker over the rooftops. Just a voice in a room, in a house on a residential street, at an hour when most of the city is asleep. Allah is the Greatest. The Moathen stands up in the dark in a former minister's house on the far edge of the Atlantic and calls people to prayer, calls them towards Salah and Success. That is the sound this building makes now.

Then there is Ramadan, which is when the house is fullest.

Every night of the month, Twenty rak'ah of Taraweeh, the full twenty, not a shortened version, followed by witr. And across those nights, the Imams recite entire Qur'an from beginning to end. This has been a legacy for the past 3 years. A complete Khatam-Ul-Quran, cover to cover, in a converted living room in St. John's.

On the Twenty-Ninth night, when the final verses are reached, the Khatm al-Qur'an du'a is made. If you have never been in a small room for that, it is difficult to describe. The recitation ends. There is a pause. And then everyone raises their hands together: the students, the taxi drivers, the nurses, the kids who have been fidgeting for an hour and a half, the uncles who have been standing on tired legs since Isha. People cry. It gets very quiet and then not quiet at all.

Thirty nights. Twenty rak'ah a night. One complete Qur'an.

The house that was raised for a manse is still a house of worship in 2026. It has just changed languages.

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What This Story Is Actually About

It would be easy to read this as a story about buildings. It isn't.

Buildings are borrowed. Every one of them. St. James built that manse with pledges and personal guarantees and real sacrifice, and they could not hold it forever. ICNA raised half a million dollars and built something beautiful on Smith Avenue, and one day, may Allah preserve it, that too will pass to someone else's hands. Masjid-an-Noor was the only mosque in the province for thirty-five years, and now there are more.

What continues is not the structure. It is the practice. Somebody has to show up. Somebody has to unlock the door before Fajr in a Newfoundland February. Somebody has to sign the lease, pay the heat, sweep the floor, call the iqamah when there are four people present and it feels like it hardly matters.

That is what "continuing the legacy" actually means. It is not a plaque. It is a rota.

The Prophet ﷺ said that whoever builds a mosque seeking Allah's pleasure, Allah builds the like of it for him in Paradise. I think about the people who kept one going too, who inherited a room somebody else built and simply refused to let it fall silent.

10 Paton Street is a small house on an ordinary street with no dome and no minaret.

The adhan is still raised there, in the dark, where nobody is watching.

We request everyone to donate generously to help us pay the rent and carry on the legacy for our future generations.

Jazakallah Khair.