Happy Golden Anniversary, Cambridge Ward!

I thought I would post about an exciting event in our ward. All year people have talked about the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the church in Cambridge and the day finally arrived. Our ward regularly has a munch 'n' mingle after church on the 3rd Sunday of the month, so this time it was a SUPER munch 'n' mingle to celebrate the occassion. There was a big display in the foyer (pronounced the French way, without the 'hard r') with pictures and stories highlighting the events over the past 50 years. We even had Sacrament programs!



After church, there was a music, poem, and video presentation complete with the first British branch president and his wife (still in the ward) cutting the big celebration cake. We usually have about 150 people in the congregation and today we had at least that many because they opened the overflow!



For all of us, the establishment of the church may not seem like that big of a deal because the church has been around much longer than most people can remember in most of the places we've lived and we just take it for granted that the church has always been there in some function or another. But for Cambridge, the establishment of the church is something really remarkable.

It was American servicemen and their families (along with the missionaries) who finally organized the branch with a home Sunday School in 1958. Four years later, our current church building was built and it took another five years for local members to save enough funds (as part of their local contribution) for the building to be dedicated in 1967. The branch leadership had always been American up to this point, but most of the servicemen moved away in 1968, so Cambridge welcomed their first British leader (His son-in-law is our current bishop). The Cambridge branch became a ward in 1976. It has been really neat to learn how many of the 'local' members in our ward remember what the ward was like when it first started out and hear how the ward has slowly grown through the years. You can really tell that people are grateful for the restored gospel in this area.

One last interesting fact, when the church considered revising the scriptures in the 1970s into the current format today (with footnotes, cross-references, etc.), church officials visited Cambridge University Press to learn about its typesetting facilities and to see if they could assist in the production of the scriptures. After further discussions, it was decided that the Press would do the entire typesetting and editorial work. It was said that despite the Press' experience in hundreds of years of religious printing, this provided entirely new challenges and it was the most elaborate single volume setting of the Bible undertaken by the Press. They received several awards for their work. The new Bible was published in 1979 and the Triple Combination in 1981.
Happy Birthday, Cambridge Ward!