New Beginnings -A History of the Old Order Mennonites of Ontario

Our Mennonite forefathers came to America in the early 1700’s and to Canada in the early 1800’s. The church multiplied in the 1800’s and spread over a lot of southwestern Ontario. A major split in 1889 led to the beginning of the Old Order Mennonite Church. Growth in the first half of the 1900’s was so slow that no new meetinghouses were needed between 1901 and 1955. But the last half of the 1900’s saw rapid growth, creating a need to spread to new areas. At first the church struggled with the concept of supporting these new communities, but by the dawn of the twenty-first of the twenty-first century, the Old Order Mennonite Church was almost enthusiastically supportive of new communities.