A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

to the provincial conference the same year. In the Peace River area of northern Alberta, the La Glace church was organized in 1928, the same year that the church at Lindbrook (now Tofield), forty miles east of Edmonton, was established. The Namaka M. B. Church (now extinct) was organized as an Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church in 1927 under the leadership of A. A. Toews, who had been the leading minister of the Allianz Gemeinde in Lichtfelde, Molotschna, prior to his coming to Canada in 1926. The Namaka congregation, with affiliated groups at Crowfoot, Gem, and Munson, joined the M. B. Conference in 1942. " The Linden M. B. Church, founded in 1930 and also affiliated with the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Conference, joined the Canadian M. B. Conference in 1948. At Vauxhall a congregation was organized in 1933, and at Pincher Creek in 1946. A church at Crowfoot, organized in 1928, was dissolved around 1940, when most settlers moved north to the Tofield area because of repeated crop failures in southeastern Alberta. Mennonite Brethren Move to Cities The Mennonite Brethren had no city churches in Alberta until 1956, when the first congregation was organized in Calgary under the leadership of city missionary Jacob F. Froese. A few years later, in 1962, an M. B. church was also organized in Edmonton, the provincial capital. MF.NNONITE BRETHREN COME TO CANADA 167 Here also, city-mission work had paved the way for the establishment of the Lendrum M. B. Church. In 1965 the Lakeview M. B. Church in Lethbridge appeared on the scene, and finally, in 1968, the Crestwood Mission Church of Medicine Hat was accepted into the conference. Thus the Mennonite Brethren of Alberta have established a strong witness in the four major cities of the province in the short period of twelve years. All city congregations report a steady increase in membership. V. Mennonite Brethren Come to British Columbia British Columbia has been called the "California" of Canada. The expansion and growth of Mennonite Brethren churches in Canada's third largest province has been phenomenal. Beginning with one congregation in the Fraser Valley in 1929, the B. C. Conference has grown to a fellowship of forty churches (including mission stations) in 1972, with more than one third of all Mennonite Brethren in Canada now residing in this province. This westward movement in Canada parallels somewhat the movement of Mennonite Brethren in the United States to California several decades earlier. In the Fraser Valley The first Mennonite settlers came to the Fraser Valley in 1928 and built homes in what is now the town of Yarrow, about forty miles inland from Vancouver. They had been attracted to this area by advertisements in the Free Press Prairie Farmer and the Mennonitische Rundschau, which described the fertility of the recently reclaimed land from Sumas Lake in glowing terms. 42 One pioneer of Yarrow gives the following re