Edwin and Irene Weaver served the Mennonite Church as long-time missionaries in India, 1935-56, and Nigeria, 1959-67, and Ghana, 1969-71. Most of the records in this personal collection deal with West Africa, although there are some friendship letters to those Edwin and Irene Weaver were with in India. They retired to Hesston, Kansas, in 1989. Box 8 contains memoirs written by Irene Weaver, primarily about her childhood in India, and her time working aboard for Mennonite Board of Missions. Additionally, some of the memoirs deal with her time at Goshen College.
This file contains a sampling of the glass slides collected and used at Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church in the 1940s. Some of the slides were created from photographs of church activities or supplied to the church by mission organizations. Others, mostly texts of hymns, were ordered from the United Church Publishing House in Toronto and used in informal worship services. All slides in this file bear the United Church Publishing House label (not visible in scans), which would indicate that this publishing house did the work of transforming all of these photographs into slides.
Several mission and service activities supported by the congregation are highlighted. They include: 1) The Stirling Crusaders program whereby children and youth grew produce, raised livestock, collected recycling and did odd jobs to raise funds for war relief and missions projects; 2) the activities of missionaries Lillian and Cyril Forth of the Sudan Interior Mission (a non-Mennonite mission in Nigeria supported by the congregation); 3) the House of Friendship in Kitchener. These slides were used by the congregation in meetings and informal services to highlight these mission and relief activities.
Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church (Kitchener, Ontario)
