The congregation of Knox Presbyterian Church acknowledged its 75th birthday Oct. 14 along with the birthdays of all its members.
There was a table with a birthday cake for each month of the year in the Fellowship Hall following the service, with members gathering for cake around the table of their birth month. This has become an annual event in October as a way to recognize that it was in October of 1937 that the second Presbyterian congregation in Vernon began.
Knox Presbyterian was formed to replace St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church which had become part of the United Church in 1925.
The small congregation of 15 to 20 people met each Sunday in what is now the Elks’ Hall. Minister was the Reverend G. Sidney Barber, who also was minister to the Presbyterian congregations in Armstrong and Salmon Arm. Barber, who lived in Armstrong, held a worship service there on Sunday morning, drove to Salmon Arm to hold a service at 3 p.m., drove to Vernon for a 7 p.m. service and then returned home to Armstrong. He remained minister of the Knox congregation until 1943, the year the congregation built its first church on 28th Street.
The congregation remained in its building on 28th Street until it was bought out by the provincial government and the site turned into Justice Park. A new church was built on Alexis Park Drive and dedicated in May 1971. But the congregation outgrew that building and built the present larger church beside it facing 32nd Avenue in 1989. The Fellowship Hall was added in 2002.
An additional event at this year’s Birthday Sunday was the symbolic burning of the last mortgage that had been taken out to finance the construction of the Fellowship Hall. The last payment on the $200,000 mortgage was made in September.
The symbolic burning was carried out at the front of the hall by church treasurer Alex Harrower, assisted by church trustees Ron Duncan and Don Morphet, and done under the watchful eye of the congregation’s minister, the Rev. Dr. Teresa A. Charlton.
