Welcome to this website about the history of a Canadian denomination called (since 1993) the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada. The EMCC is not a standalone group of congregations; it has a sister denomination in the United States of America called the Missionary Church, Inc. There are also about 20 other denominations around the world either initiated by the missionary activity of the North American churches, or groups more recently affiliated sharing the Missionary Church pattern of doctrine and piety under the name World Partners International. I may write about them later.

First board of the Missionary Church of Canada in 1977.

Left to right: Edward Oke, Carl Reesor, Alfred Rees, Vergil Stauffer, Norman Reimer, Grant Sloss, Thomas Dow, Willard Swalm, Raymond Young, Ellis Lageer,
in Didsbury, AB.
Courtesy Missionary Church Historical Trust

Archives East Curator – Clare Fuller

       These blogs are informal and personal views, and do not officially represent the EMCC denomination, though I hope they reflect a warm love for the EMCC, of which I have been a member since I was 11 years old. I am also a trustee and curator of the Missionary Church Historical Trust, housed in Elmira, Region of Waterloo, Ontario, so I have access to all its archives and historical collection,1 but I do not write as an official representative of the MCHT either. I am grateful for permission of the Trust to make use of its material, which has operated as a registered charity since 2005 and is a public trust for the benefit of all, not just the EMCC.
       In this article I am going to lay down a foundation of the Christian groups that formed and merged leading to the current EMCC. This information is basic to all later articles, and I will refer to this one for the stages of the organization of the EMCC, or for any further entities that may result from future mergers or realignments of this Canadian Christian Church.2

EMCC Time Line

       There are a number of well-designed charts which illustrate what I am trying to do. A recently published one is by Elaine S Brown, Anne Kuykendall and Kimberly Brander (2003), “Connecting Through History: A Visual Timeline from Common Bonds.” This chart was included in Eileen Lageer (2004), Common Bonds: Story of the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada.3
       Where do you begin a church history timeline? Many churches say they start with Jesus Christ, of course. And then, the Missionary Churches are part of the Western European Christianity stream, via the Roman Catholic tradition, the European Reformation of the 16th century, and in particular, the Anabaptist or radical Reformation wing. Yet a part of the EMCC swings through Lutheranism to the Palatinate Brethren Pietists, resulting in the context in which Jacob Albrecht (English: “Albright”) became converted to Christ in Pennsylvania, USA, and who began preaching in 1796. Albright’s supporters organized an evangelistic organization in 1807 called the Evangelische Gemeinde or (in English) the Evangelical Association. A similar German-language group that crossed paths with the EvA and Mennonites was the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (UBiC).
       Meanwhile, various Swiss-South German Anabaptists, eventually adopting the name of an early leader in Holland called Menno Simons, became known as Mennonites. Some of them, settling in English colonies in North America, spread out from Pennsylvania. The Mennonites formed shifting affiliations and new varieties of the tradition. One small variation on the theme was the River Brethren, based originally along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. The main group adopted the name Brethren in Christ. In Canada, members were known as Tunkers (“baptizers”) until 1933.4 Recently the Canadian church changed its name to Be In Christ Church (BiC).

 

19th Century Formations

       Now we come to events in the 19th century when the immediate organizational antecedents of the EMCC formed.
       First, the Evangelical Association sent German-speaking missionaries to Upper Canada in the late 1830s. As a result of a camp meeting in the Lexington area of Waterloo County in 1839, and preaching along the Niagara River and Lake Erie north shore, congregations formed from converts in Waterloo and the Niagara peninsula. Both the EvA and the UBiC churches followed up German settlers in Ontario and formed congregations in Waterloo County, Niagara and even York County. The EvA was especially vigorous and developed congregations spreading west and north of Waterloo, in the upper Ottawa River Valley, and eventually across the prairies.5
       German-speaking Evangelical Association and United Brethren in Christ preachers were the bridge for John Wesley’s Methodist revivalism in its American form to attract some Swiss-South German Mennonite settlers in Ontario. From the 1780s, but much more from the 1840s, shortly after 1850 small groups of revivalistically-minded Mennonites could be found based in Waterloo and York Counties and on the Niagara peninsula. They actually formed their own denomination, called the New Mennonite Church of Canada West and Ohio, about 1851 (not 1869 as the chart in the 1920 history suggested).6
Chart by S Floyd Pannabecker in J A Huffman, History of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church (1920), p 283.
Note that the New Mennonites organized first in 1851, not 1869.

Denominational Formation

       Prepare yourself to be bombarded with many organization names for the next steps, many of them in the USA:
       In 1853, a section in the East Pennsylvania Conference of Mennonites (“Oberholtzer’s”) separated and chose the name Evangelical Mennonite Church (“Gehman’s” or EMC).
       In 1860, a faction of the Brethren in Christ in Ohio formed called informally the Swankites, after a leader, Jacob Swank.
       In 1874, the Mennonite Conferences in Indiana and Ontario, disfellowshipped some ministers and followers (chiefly Daniel Brenneman, Joseph Knapp, Daniel Wismer and Solomon Eby), who formed a Reforming Mennonite Society in Berlin (now Kitchener, Ontario). Quickly recognizing an affinity with the New Mennonite Church, the RM group united with the NMC in a meeting at Bloomingdale, Waterloo County, in March 1875. The new group called itself the United Mennonite Church, (UM) with conferences in the US and Canada.7
       The United Mennonites explored ties with the EMC in Pennsylvania and they successfully united in 1879 at Zionsville, Pennsylvania. This new church chose the name the Evangelical United Mennonite Church (EUM).
       Further exploration and discussions found the Swankite Brethren in Christ interested in union, and some of another group called the Wengerite BiCs. A merger was completed in December 1883 at Engelwood, Ohio, though the Wengerites were not officially involved. The new name chosen was the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church (MBiC).8 Further merger explorations were continued with still other new groups (in Ontario: the Christian Workers Churches, and in the US, the Heavenly Recruits Association of Pennsylvania, for example, in the 1890s), but no new unions were completed until 1969. I will describe some merger attempts in later blogs.
       Name changes were not finished however.
       In 1947, the denomination changed its name to the United Missionary Church, after its missionary agency which it started in 1921, called the United Missionary Society. We’ll talk more about the 1947 name change in a later article as well.
       A long-contemplated and several-times-attempted merger with the Missionary Church Association in the USA finally happened in 1969, producing the Missionary Church. The MCA developed (1898) from former members of the (Amish-origin) Defenseless Mennonite Church (now called the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches).
       Please stay with me for the next round of name and organizational changes!
       On the Evangelical Association side, it also had name-changing events. A severe split in 1891 in the USA strained the Canadian Conference of the EvA but did not result in an organizational division here. Most of the churches reunited in 1922 and brought about a new name: the Evangelical Church.
       Since the EvC was basically a German-language version of the Methodists, when German declined as an important language of the church, merger of Methodists and the Evangelicals seemed useful. First the EvC and the majority part of the United Brethren in Christ merged in 1946, producing the Evangelical United Brethren. A generation later, in the USA, the Methodist Church and the EUBs joined to form the current United Methodist Church. In Canada, the EUB Canada Conference (but not the EUB Northwest Canada Conference) joined the United Church of Canada in 1968.9
       Along with some other sections of the EUB in the US, the Canadian EUBs in western Canada declined to join the UCC and instead took back the former name, the Evangelical Church. For various reasons the Canadian Evangelicals formed a distinct denomination in Canada in 1982 called the Evangelical Church in Canada.10
       Meanwhile, for various reasons as well, the Canadian districts of the Missionary Church began forming a distinctly Canadian denomination. At a committee level in 1975, the Missionary Church of Canada (MCoC)11became a legal corporation in 1979, and in 1988, a full separation of the American districts and the Canadian districts forming the Missionary Church, Incorporated, (US) and the Missionary Church of Canada, was authorized.12
       The last step to reach the situation today, was the merger in 1993 of the Evangelical Church in Canada and the Missionary Church of Canada to produce the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada.13
Still with me?!
Banner photo: Early camp meeting group in Ontario. Left back row: Amos Eby, 3rd from left: John A Sider. Back: Ebenezer Anthony. MCHT
  1.  The MCHT has an unofficial website, https://missionaryhistoricalchurchtrust.weebly.com/. The EMCC has an official website, https://www.emcc.ca/. The Trust collects archives and historical records of the EMCC in Canada east of the Ontario-Manitoba border, but does hold some national records, duplicating to a small extent the western archives currently in Calgary, Alberta.
  2. Mergers that were contemplated but did not occur will be recounted in blogs “Mergers 1” and “Mergers 2.”
  3.  Another useful chart of a portion of the mergers appears in Samuel J Steiner, In Search of Promised Lands: A Religious History of Mennonites in Ontario (Kitchener, ON and Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2015), p 114.
  4.  Not to be confused with “Dunkers,” an informal name for the Church of the Brethren.
  5.  More details of the Evangelicals and the EUB are in EMCC History Blogs, “The EUB Connection” parts 1 and 2.
  6.  Look for EMCC History Blogs under the category the New Mennonite Church.
  7.  A recent helpful analysis of these developments is David A Doherty, “The Emergence of the United Mennonites in Ontario,” McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry Vol 20 (2018-2019) p 45-80. http://mcmasterdivinity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20.MJTM_.45-80-Doherty.pdf
  8.  These mergers were detailed in early MBiC Disciplines and in Jasper Abraham Huffman, ed, History of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church (New Carlisle, OH: Bethel Publishing, 1920) in chapters based on the MA thesis of S Floyd Pannabecker; and Everek R Storms, History of the United Missionary Church (Elkhart, IN: Bethel Publishing, 1958) p 30-59. The best history of the formation of the MBiC in Ontario alone, is in Samuel J Steiner, In Search of Promised Lands p 95-116, 125-135.
  9.  These developments are outlined in, for instance, Theodore E Jesske, Pioneers of Faith: A History of the Evangelical Church in Canada ([Medicine Hat, AB: Evangelical Church in Canada], 1985) p 13-20.
  10.  The many stages are recounted in Jesske, p 108-117, 141-142. See also John M Pike, Preachers of Salvation: The History of the Evangelical Church (Milwaukie, OR: Evangelical Church of North America, 1984).
  11.  To distinguish the Missionary Church of Canada (MCoC) from the MCC (Mennonite Central Committee).
  12.  Eileen Lageer, Common Bonds: The Story of the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada (Calgary, AB: Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, 2004) p 195-198.
  13.  Lageer, p 198-205. The whole story is told succinctly in video form: “Following Jesus Together: An Animated Overview of our Story,” (2018), directed by Gavin Wark, with Jaime Hill, Janice Sinkner, and the voice of “Rachel.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOb1QKEbJ9E
Play Video:  “Following Jesus Together: An Animated Overview of our Story,”