There are two familiar faces back on the streets, in the schools, stores and cafés of Didsbury.
Colin Creighton is back on the staff of the historic Zion Evangelical Missionary Church (ZEMC) as the lead pastor.
His wife Patty, an elementary school education assistant, has rejoined the staff at Ross Ford Elementary School where she has spent 13 years of her career.
Creighton served for 10 years at Zion as youth pastor, then associate pastor, and has been in Calgary for the past four years at Bonavista Evangelical Missionary Church.
He was invited to return to Didsbury and one of Mountain View County’s largest Protestant churches when Mike Morgan retired in the summer.
Creighton was formally installed as lead pastor at a service on Sunday.
He takes on the responsibility of lead pastor with a keen sense of Zion’s history as a church founded by Mennonites when an advance group, led by Joseph Shantz, stepped off the train in 1893 to build an immigration shed and barn, and drill a well for the future town.
They dreamed of a Mennonite enclave in Alberta, like one in Manitoba that Shantz had also helped found.
Shantz returned in 1894 with 34 people – farm families – who constructed a church building pastored by E.B. Detwiler, who was also Didsbury’s first postmaster, letter carrier, grocer and land guide so that the other Mennonite families could start farms.
There is a striking parallel between Zion’s early days and Colin Creighton’s sense of what the church can be and do 125 years later.
The first worship in Didsbury took place without a church building and the Mennonites proclaimed the Good News in the way they lived. Only later did they have the resources to build churches.
“Zion church is not the building, it’s the people of God woven into the community,” Creighton says. "What would Didsbury be without them?”
The Zion church building, prominent at the east entrance to town is a facility with many uses – yoga classes in the mornings, basketball during the week, the annual town Remembrance Day service, the Viva Mexico festival, weddings and funerals.
However, says Creighton, the living church started with the birth of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us.
The place of Christians is, like Jesus, to be in the community and next to the people of Didsbury.
The Good News that Jesus preached was real to the people around him, and Christianity today “has to be real, has to make a difference in everyday life.
“Practical Christianity helps people who have struggles and that’s most of us. The Gospel makes most sense when you are in difficulty,” Creighton says.
“Christ’s people love others in practical ways and bring hope.
“We live in a culture that too often treats people as commodities and one of our roles as Christians is to remind others of their dignity, humanity and value,” he says.
Once Jesus spoke of Jerusalem as a “city set on a hill” and that is often repeated as a metaphor for the Christian church.
Colin Creighton’s church, however, does its best work on the streets of the city.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business author and journalist.
