Churches across Waterloo

A city on Mennonite land

Waterloo begins with a land purchase. In 1803 a group of twenty-six Mennonites from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania pooled their money as the German Company of Pennsylvania and bought the tract from Richard Beasley, and Pennsylvania German families farmed it from then on. The settlement was incorporated as a village in 1857, became the Town of Waterloo in 1876 and the City of Waterloo in 1948; the 2021 census counted 121,436 residents. It joined the Regional Municipality of Waterloo when that was established in 1973, and its uptown core still sits where King and Erb streets cross.

Two universities shape the north and west of the city. Wilfrid Laurier University began in 1911 as the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and the University of Waterloo was founded in 1957 beside it.

Guelph, about 25 kilometres east, and Elora and Fergus to the north-east have church guides of their own.

Uptown and the old town

The oldest congregations are within a few blocks of the uptown crossroads, and several are older than the city itself:

• Erb Street Mennonite Church, whose congregation began meeting in 1837 and organized in 1851, on the street named for one of the founding families
• Waterloo-Kitchener United Mennonite Church on George Street, organized in 1925 by Mennonites who had reached Waterloo from Soviet Russia the summer before
• Knox Waterloo, the Presbyterian congregation on Erb Street West
• Church of the Holy Saviour, the Anglican parish on Allen Street East, whose eight o’clock Eucharist is the earliest service in the city
• Trillium Lutheran on Willow Street, formed in 2018 when three older Lutheran congregations amalgamated

Across the city

• St. Michael’s, the Catholic parish on University Avenue West, which keeps a Sunday evening Mass for students; Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Agnes are the other two parishes
• All Saints’, the Anglican parish on Northfield Drive West, which uses both prayer books on a Sunday morning
• Mount Zion Lutheran on Westmount Road South
• Parkminster United, formed in 1958 on Erb Street East
• First Baptist Church on Erb Street West, which keeps the older pattern of a morning and an evening service
• WMB Church on Lexington Road, of the Mennonite Brethren
• Waterloo Christian Reformed Church on Bearinger Road, the only congregation in the city belonging to one of the Dutch Reformed federations
• Waterloo Pentecostal Assembly on King Street North
• Kitchener-Waterloo Chinese Alliance Church on Erb Street West, which worships in English, Cantonese and Mandarin
• Creekside Church on Conservation Drive, out by the conservation area at Erbsville

Visiting on a Sunday

Uptown is walkable and the churches around it are minutes apart on foot, with free parking on most side streets on a Sunday morning. Services are spread from eight in the morning, at the said Anglican Eucharist, through the middle of the morning, when most congregations meet, to St. Michael’s seven o’clock student Mass in the evening — useful if you are on campus and your Sunday starts late.

There is no Canadian Reformed congregation in Waterloo. The nearest are Emmanuel and Living Word in Guelph, about twenty-five minutes east.