In 1829, a Methodist minister named Egerton Ryerson started a weekly paper in Upper Canada called The Christian Guardian. Ninety six years later, when the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches of Canada merged into a single United Church, the Guardian merged too, folding into a new title, The New Outlook, born the same year and for the same reason as the church itself.
The magazine kept changing its name as the decades passed, absorbing two more church publications in 1938 to become The United Church Observer, a name it carried for almost eighty years as the denomination's central publication, covering church news, ministry and the controversies of the day, including a 1972 editorial dispute over its Middle East coverage that strained relations with the Canadian Jewish community. Along the way the magazine took a step most denominational publications never do: in 1986 it incorporated independently, under its own board, answerable to the church for only a small share of its funding, today under six percent, rather than to the General Council directly.
In 2019 it renamed itself once more, to Broadview, closing a chapter that had run since 1939 and opening one aimed at readers well beyond the church's own pews, spirituality, justice and ethical living, while still devoting a real portion of its pages to United Church of Canada life. Across four names and nearly two centuries, it remains, by its own account and by Wikipedia's, the oldest continuously published magazine in North America, a lineage the union that created the United Church of Canada is written into at its very center.