Thousands come to Kitchener for Jehovah's Witness Regional Convention

Over 4,000 people are congregating at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium throughout the weekend for the Jehovah's Witness Regional Convention.

The convention spans six weeks and will bring over 28,000 members of The Watch Tower Group to Kitchener.

“We’re now in our third week,” said David Spalding, a spokesperson for Jehovah Witnesses in Ontario. “We’ve got two more weeks of English and then we have a week of Spanish. What we’ll do is, we’ll take different areas of the southern Ontario area and we’ll assign different areas to even out hotel usage, travel patterns, things like that. So this week for instance, some are close by. Guelph is here but there’s also people here from all the way out in Scarborough.”

Following a virtual three years, this year marks the first in-person event of its kind since the pandemic began.

Organizers say the location of the yearly convention is carefully selected by the committee.

"They'll go to different cities, they'll visit them, they'll look at different things like the venues, the hotels, restaurants, facilities. It's a number of things that all go into making that choice and here in Kitchener some of the stakeholders really came to the table,” said Spalding.

The first time the convention was held in Kitchener at The Aud was in 1965.

“Kitchener was a lot smaller city at that time,” recalled Hans Pintar, an elder in his congregation. “Life was less complicated and we had conventions at larger venues in Toronto but this was the first one in quite some time outside of Toronto.”

Pintar added that this year’s convention was something really special.

“This is really really enjoyable,” he said. “The last three years, we missed our convention. We look forward to, not only the spiritual things we learn but also renewing friendships and not being able to do that for three years was a challenge. So, it was especially gratifying to be together again.”

The CEO of Explore Waterloo Region estimates that the conventions will inject $16 million into the economy.