Last service for 119-year-old Elgin United Church

A 119-year-old church in Grassland held its last service on Sunday and is the latest of three church closures in the municipality.

Rev. Don McIntyre and about 75 members of the congregation gathered at Elgin United Church for an evening candlelight service to reminisce, sing and enjoy fellowship.

“I really felt supported by the folks there,” said McIntyre, who was a minister at the church between 1981 and 1989. A member of the congregation asked him to prepare a sermon months before the final hour-long service this month.

“At least three people got up to share memories of their children in Sunday school, or some of them were married there, and obviously there was some funerals that they attended,” he said.

Elgin United Church cut down the number of services it offers from every Sunday to four times per year after it was decided the cost to maintain the building was too high to keep it open regularly, McIntyre said.

According to the Manitoba Historical Society, the brick building was built in 1906 as the Grace Methodist Church and was renamed Elgin United Church following the unification of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist faiths in Canada in 1925.

Congregations are getting smaller as not enough people from younger generations are getting involved with churches, said Municipality of Grassland Reeve Claude Martin.

“Most churches are, you know, getting four or five people come to the church, and you can’t keep it going or turn the heat on for that,” he said.

Elgin’s church will likely go up for sale in the new year, following the same fate as the Hartney and Lauder United churches, which closed earlier this year, Martin said.

“It’s disappointing, that’s for sure,” he said. “Where do people go?”

McIntyre said some congregation members attend services at St. Paul’s United Church in Souris because it’s only about 20 kilometres north of Elgin.

The main message of his Sunday sermon described what it means to begin again, so that even in times of sorrow and change, people can learn and use those experiences to help shape their future.

“Times change, cultures change and that’s another thing I want them to understand that, you know, we’ve been opening and closing churches for years, and it’s just part of the change of life,” he said.

Though he’s saddened by the building’s closure, McIntyre said it’s the people he’s going to miss most.

“I really appreciated the people who did show up, and they reminded me that, hey, after eight years, you know, there was some fruit in that ministry, in the work that I was doing,” he said.

After McIntyre left Elgin United Church in 1989, he worked as a minister near Portage la Prairie and at various churches in Winnipeg before retiring in the early 2000s. Now he casually fills in as minister at the Westminster United Church in Winnipeg.

Spruce Woods Progressive Conservative MLA Colleen Robbins also attended the service in Elgin on Sunday with her family. She remembers going to funerals and annual Christmas candlelight services there.

“Some people might look at it as just a building, but it’s more than just the building. There was so much shared in this building,” Robbins said.

“It was just a very, very emotional, beautiful, beautiful service.”

At one point during the service, someone asked people in the congregation to raise their hand if they were married in the church and she looked around to see that many had been.

Many people were emotional at the service, especially when everyone joined to sing “Silent Night” as the candles were lit.

“I could hardly sing at first because I got all choked up,” Robbins said.

She said when they had dainties in the basement afterwards, everyone was able to take home a coffee cup and a book of hymns as a keepsake, which was very special.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com