Kingsfield History & Connections
(for Connections including MCEC, MCC, Anabaptist heritage, click here)
Zurich Mennonite Church celebrated 100 years of ministry in 2008. Click here to go to that page.
Our history
Just as in the Bible there is a heritage of modeling and ‘passing' faith on from generation to generation (although faith in God must always be a personal response), since 1908, when Zurich Mennonite Church (ZMC) was started, our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers have passed faithfulness on to us.
ZMC has consistently demonstrated great courage in following God into difficult decisions of faith. We have learned from these experiences that investing ourselves and our resources in the kingdom of God stretches and tests us. God saves us by faith and invites us to walk together in faith as we follow him.
Kingsfield was born out of a long-developed sense that God wanted Zurich Mennonite Church to plant a church. In fact, since the 1960s, when a mission of ZMC to the nearby town of Exeter became a new church, even though that body now no longer exists, we have seen that church planting bears long-term fruit.
More recently, especially since the 1990s, ZMC's leaders have talked about church planting as a natural extension of who we are. In the past few years, that Holy Spirit impulse has gained a clearer and more compelling presence and voice.
So, since about 2003, various leaders began to pray and talk about what church planting would mean here. And who might God be calling?
One thing we began to see from a new perspective was that God had grown up or brought many disciples of Jesus to ZMC from a broad geographical area who now saw the communities they lived in in a new way. ZMC in Zurich remains dear to us all, and her mission-ministry is essential and vibrant. And now also we see clearly that there are other places to engage and see the gospel transform.
Over the span of about four years now, leaders have invested prayer, research, and conversation in discovering why we would plant churches, who would do that, and what would church planting look like here? One thing has become clear: biblically speaking, to be the church is to be a multiplying organism.
For us, this shift has been key: leaders have emerged who want to see the life and activity of the church they call home to embrace and meaningfully connect to the people where they live, work, play or go to school. Not that the regional, ‘come-to-us’ model can’t work. But around here we have seen a need to multiply as at least partly connected to this need to embrace more people in more places.
So ‘driving to church’, or ‘going to church’ isn’t really the way we see it anymore; Or at least we are being transformed in our view of being the church. We see the church as a multiplying organism whose influence and presence is moving into multiple places in order to be close to and engaged in the lives of people in many different ways. Thus our vision: Kingsfield is a multiplying movement of churches who bring the kingdom of Jesus Christ to relevant reality where we live and everywhere we go.
So what have we done so far?
At the ZMC Annual Meeting in January 2007, the Zurich congregation called Tim Doherty out to lead in following the Spirit of God into multiplying the church. Then, in the Fall of '07, we collectively (the whole congregation) named the multiplying movement that we sensed God was birthing. Kingsfield was chosen, from I Corinthians 3:9 "we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building" (see I Cor. 3:5-11) A movement was born!
Today there are many people in Bluewater and Huron and Lambton Counties who are somehow involved in multiplying the church through Kinsgfield. We are now a part of something wonderful that God is doing. The first church of many more, Kingsfield Clinton, was commissioned and sent from ZMC on October 28th, 2007, to be the church and to discover her unique mission-ministry in Clinton, Ontario.
We are excited to see what the years ahead will mean for what we have now become.
We are, of course, connected most essentially to the Church of Jesus Christ, who is under Jesus the Head, and who is both temporal (it lives today) and eternal (it finds its life and sustenance in God Himself, and will live on forever with Christ). See Who we are - What we believe for more on this. We are connected to the broader church in Canada (see the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada), and to the Mennonite Church around the world (see Mennonite World Conference).
More specifically, Kingsfield's churches are part of a sisterhood of churches called the Mennonite Church of Eastern Canada (MCEC). Click here to get a sense of the over 90 diverse congregations in MCEC.
Further to that, we are also a part of Mennonite Church Canada. Click here to get a sense of the 225 Mennonite Church Canada congregations.
We are also connected to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the global missions arm of the family of Anabaptist churches in North America. MCC seeks to demonstrate God's love by working among people suffering from poverty, conflict, oppression and natural disaster. MCC strives for peace, justice and the dignity of all people by sharing our experiences, resources and faith in Jesus Christ. Click here to connect to MCC.
And we are also connected to our Anabaptist heritage and extended family. We are part of a centuries-long family of various peoples who grew from what we could call 'Anabaptist Seed'. We (Mennonites, Mennonite Brethren, Amish ...) are 'related' to one another by our common convictions about baptism (as a mark of a confessing disciple of Jesus), conversion through the Holy Spirit, discipleship, the authority of Scripture and the Holy Spirit, and peace practice. Click here for more about the Anabaptist origins.