75 year anniversary for McDiarmid Church

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This article was published 06/04/2017 (3285 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Many who sit in the pews of McDiarmid Drive Alliance Church don’t know how their spiritual home came to be — which is set to change this weekend, for a new generation.

“We have a lot of people at our church that have just recently been coming and don’t know our story,” said Pastor Darryl McAuley, who started attending the church as a baby. “It’s always helpful to say these are some of the things that God has done in our midst over the past 75 years, things you wouldn’t even realize.”

A focus on youth, on teaching the next generation about their faith in Jesus Christ, has long served the church as they mark 75 years this weekend with a celebration featuring the return of past pastors and a re-telling of the church’s early days.

Their first Sunday service, the afternoon of Jan. 18, 1942, was presided over by pastor Abe Schellenberg, who felt called, along with his wife Alice, to start a new church in Brandon. Only seven people were in attendance that day, at the corner of Rosser Avenue and Sixth Street.

A few years later, their growth precipitated a move to Princess Avenue and 16th Street, where their plans to build a church were hampered by the lumber shortage of the Second World War.

Always resourceful, the believers purchased a church building in Hartney, disassembled it and moved it to Brandon where it was rebuilt. Christian Life Church worships on that site today.

The thriving congregation necessitated another re-location, this time to their current home at 635 McDiarmid Drive. They settled into their building in 1970 and expanded in 1982.

There were trying times, when the number of souls in the pews dropped in the late 1980s, but attendance has climbed since. Now, weekly attendance averages around 470 people, with a recent Sunday attracting 530 believers.

“God’s been faithful to us through the ups and downs,” McAuley said. “To say we’ve only had times that have been to the up and right is completely untrue, but that’s not what faith is all about — faith is real in good and in bad times.”

True to its commitment to children, the church purchased four buses in the 1970s they drove around Brandon to pick up kids from families who wanted their children at Sunday school.

Once, a child rolled a fake hand grenade down the aisle of the bus.

“You can just imagine what that did to the heart of the driver,” McAuley said, laughing.

Forty years ago, Bruce and Debbie Curtis started attending the McDiarmid church because they had programming for children.

They followed their two daughters through Sunday school, youth group and college and career, helping out where they can.

The church has “something for every age,” Debbie said.

Now, the couple takes part in a Life Group, a small cohort of people who gather weekly to talk about life and the Bible, which has “kind of become a family within the family of believers,” she said.

“And that is crucial in a church with 500 people,” Bruce added.

This weekend, the church body will reflect on three quarters of a century. Saturday will include a period of reflection and a banquet at 5:30 p.m. Former pastors, living in such locales as Ontario and British Columbia, will share memories, and a 15-minute skit on the church’s history, written by a parishioner, will be performed. The Sunday church service begins at 10:30 a.m.

So the anniversary celebration will have all of that — and “miracle biscuits.”

The story goes like this: back when Abe and Alice Schellenberg first considered planting a church, money was so tight Alice couldn’t afford baking powder.

The couple asked the Lord to reveal to them whether he wanted them in Brandon by causing their biscuits to rise without baking powder.

“And they were the best biscuits around,” Debbie said, re-telling a story passed down through generations of McDiarmid parishioners.

You can expect a plate or two of those re-created biscuits at the anniversary. It serves as a testament to what church members have long believed, that God has always been good to them.

“I hope at the end of this 75th,” McAuley said, “we celebrate telling our story but really that God’s the one we can be thankful to.”

For more information or tickets, call 204-728-2473. Everyone is welcome.

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Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition Apr. 6, 2017