Canadian Mennonite
Volume 13, No. 19
Oct. 5, 2009
Rooted, growing and stretching into the future
Breslau Mennonite Church celebrates milestone with “year of the vine”
Breslau, Ont.
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The first Mennonites to settle in what is now Waterloo Region in southern Ontario came in the early 1800s, having supported the British Crown in the American Revolution for theological, biblical and traditional reasons. Following the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the number of settlers increased. Worship was organized in various places, including in 1826 in what is now Breslau.
By 1834, the Eby congregation in Berlin, now First Mennonite Church in Kitchener, had outgrown its log building. It was sold, dismantled and moved across the Grand River to land owned by the John Cressman family. Land was sold to the congregation for a cemetery, education facility and a church.
Although the first pastor was Christian Snyder, there already was a Schneider congregation at Bloomingdale, a few kilometres away, so the congregation was called Cressman Mennonite until it changed its name to Breslau Mennonite in 1968.
The original log building was eventually moved and is still used as a house in the village. The congregation dates its beginning to the relocation of that first building in 1834, hence its 175th anniversary this year.
A great day of worship and fellowship took place on Sept. 13. The sausage lunch, church and cemetery tours, jazz trio under the tent, banner and face painting for children, as well as ample opportunity for catching up with old friends and former members, made for a rich day. Former pastor Ervin Wiens preached in the morn-ing service and was joined by many other former pastors in the afternoon.
But the day itself was only a small part of the congregation’s celebrations. Darrel Toews, part of the current pastoral team, noted that the preaching for much of the year has been drawn from the more than 90 biblical passages that refer to the vine, in particular the rich text in John 15: “I am the vine, you are the branches.”
“Essentially, we spent the first half of the year preparing the vine, telling its story and then are focussing the second half of the year on reaping its fruit,” Toews said. Preaching in the summer and into the fall is focusing on the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5.
Besides the preaching and goal-setting a memory garden was established. Using grave stones associated with no known graves that were found under a utility shed in the cemetery, vines, stones, a deacon’s bench, cross and pulpit, the area is a place for contemplation on those first settlers’ lives as Anabaptist Christians in an often hostile world.
As Toews moves the church from considering its history to considering its place in today’s world, congregational chair Ted Giesbrecht said, “The on-going challenge is to reflect [God’s] light as brightly as possible from as many sources as we can build and provide, with an emphasis on being relevant and effective from the perspectives of those who reflect the light, those who are seeking the light, and those who have no idea that there is such light.”