Due preparation was made for the first celebration of the New Testament feast by the newly constituted session. On December 13th, 1851, the people met together for a preparatory service--not now with perhaps thousands gathered from parishes far and near, but with the few hundreds dwelling side by side. Tokens of admission to the Lord's table were cautiously distributed, and we learn that the position of the tables was carefully determined, as well as the number of table services and the part each elder should take in the administration. The method seen by the writer twenty years after this date was then introduced. It was to have the table covered with linen and to have it successively occupied by different relays of communicants. The number of communicants, at this first communion after the Presbyterian form on Red River, was 45. The services following the communion were carried out as rigidly as those preceding it. Rev. John Black wrote in his description of this same service: "It was to all of us a solemn day, being the first time in which, according to our simple and scriptural form, that blessed ordinance was ever dispensed here. It was also the first time for the pastor who administered; the first time for the elders who served; and the first time for not a few who sat at the table--among others, two old men--the one 87 and the other 99 years of age; and all this in addition to its own intrinsic solemnity."
To the settlers on Red River the only true ideal was that of the parish church--and it was the parish church of the beginning of this century when in the Highlands dissent was unknown. New settlers elsewhere have been willing to erect such temporary structures as their circumstances permit and to wait for better days. In new countries this plan has some advantages. But to the Highland hearts on Red River old Kildonan parish church must be reproduced in the Kildonan of the New World. But stone and mortar were needed, and there were few stone buildings in the settlement. The site on which the church was to be built had been given by the Hudson's Bay Company along with £150 toward the new church, as an equivalent to the people for their rights in St. John's Church which they relinquished to the Church of England, although they retained an interest in the burying ground in which their dead were lying. The new site at Frog Plain was really more centrally situated than that at St. John's for the Scottish settlers, and it contained glebe land amounting to some three hundred acres. Already their manse and school had been erected upon it. It had formerly been a camping place for the Indians, and of it Mr. Black remarked in one of his letters: "The church is to be erected on a piece of land long desecrated by the idolatrous revels of the Indians, and the Sabbath evening sports of some who bore a better name, but whose works were not so much better than theirs." Ten miles away from Red River on the open plain is an old Silurian outlier of limestone rock, which still furnishes building stone for Winnipeg. Even by the end of December the people had quarried at Stony Mountain nearly all the stone required, and with Red River cart or ox-sled had brought the most of the material to the new site on Frog Plain. The limestone of Stony Mountain produces excellent lime, and a sufficient quantity had already been burnt and placed on the ground ready for work in the spring. It was a time of earnest enthusiasm in Kildonan, and the most real parallel to it which comes to the mind of the writer is where in the days of Ezra after the captivity "the people gathered themselves together as one man to Jerusalem" and "when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord."