View source for Carlos Casares Mennonite Church (Carlos Casares, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

The Carlos Casares Mennonite Church is a congregation in the city of Carlos Casares, on the Buenos Aires-Santa Rosa branch of the Ferro Carril Oeste (western railroad), county seat of Carlos Casares County in the province of Buenos Aires, [[Argentina|Argentina]]. The work here was begun in October 1922 by W. G. Lauver and wife under the [[Mennonite Board of Missions (Mennonite Church)|Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities]] and formally organized in March 1923. The 1952 membership was 55, most of Spanish, Italian, and Indo-Argentine descent. The following pastors had served the congregation to 1953: W. G. Lauver, 1922-1927, 1929-1937; [[Shank, Josephus Wenger (1881-1970)|J. W. Shank]], 1928; [[Snyder, Elvin Valores (1900-1985)|Elvin V. Snyder]], 1937-1947; B. Frank Byler, 1947-49; and John Koppenhaver, 1949-.

The city of Carlos Casares, population 12,000 in 1950 (21,000 in 2001), had a proportion in 1950 of about 50 per cent Jews, who were brought from [[Russia|Russia]] and [[Poland|Poland]] in the early part of the 20th century by Baron Mauricio Hirsch, and settled on farms of 50-200 acres in Casares County, where a few were still on their land in the 1950s, although the majority of them had set up some business in the city. There were, therefore, three synagogues in this city, besides a new Roman Catholic church built in 1945 and the Mennonite church built in 1937. Very few of the Jews had accepted Christianity. Most of the evangelical Christians were of Spanish descent, and a few were Italian.

A rural colportage experiment was begun in 1941, which resulted in a remarkable witness for the Gospel. Federico Prottor, a Polish Christian and a member of the Carlos Casares Mennonite Church, hired for this work, distributed over 600 Bibles, 4,000 Testaments, and thousands of Scripture portions and tracts during his six years of work.


= Bibliography =
Shank, J. W. et al.<em class="gameo_bibliography"> The gospel under the southern cross: a history of the Argentine Mennonite Mission of South America, celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, 1917-1942. </em>Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1943.


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