Broken to serve
Categories: Feature ArticlesIn my mid-30s, two decades after the last time my father beat me, and two years after he died, I broke glass twice in one week. Once, for the first…
In the current of wavering defiance
Categories: Feature ArticlesI want to know how to pray. It’s December 2021. Advent. A season of waiting. Everything is waiting. Waiting for the pandemic to be over. Waiting for our leaders to…
In the current of wavering defiance
Categories: Feature ArticlesI want to know how to pray. It’s December 2021. Advent. A season of waiting. Everything is waiting. Waiting for the pandemic to be over. Waiting for our leaders to…
Commerce, church and belonging
Categories: Feature ArticlesI was delivering a sermon on the story of Zacchaeus last October when I realized that when I talked about Zacchaeus, I was actually thinking about, and picturing, my father.…
Dispatches from the front lines
Categories: Feature ArticlesI’m basing the form of this final missive on the last book I read, Dispatches—a harrowing and sometimes hilarious memoir by Michael Herr, who covered the insanity of the Vietnam…
An assumption of grace
Categories: Feature ArticlesAfter the Vatican’s recent repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, I spent two hours speaking with three Indigenous people about the 500-year-old church doctrine that is as much the bedrock…
Crossing guard of hope
Categories: Feature ArticlesWhen I was first called to church planting work in 2004, I prayed and sought God’s will. I also read Ray Bakke’s book, Hope for the City. It invited me…
The spiritual resurrection
Categories: Feature ArticlesReading words written nearly 500 years ago and translated nearly 70 years ago takes some effort, especially when the message is that death precedes resurrection. We trust the Spirit will…
Easter reflections
Categories: Feature ArticlesWe asked 10 people for their most meaningful Easter memory, or an image that best captures the essence of Easter, or what Easter makes them wonder. Holy Week turtle soup…
The piano ban
Categories: Feature ArticlesOctober 22 was a normal Sunday. I had just arrived at Rockway Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ont., when Conrad Brunk approached me. He is a fellow Rockway member, a former…
Film review: sorrow, joy, anger and faith
Categories: Feature ArticlesWhat do we do when we are wronged: Nothing? Stay and fight? Or do we leave? These questions form the backbone of Women Talking, a 2022 film directed by Sarah…
What about the women of Manitoba Colony?
Categories: Feature ArticlesAfter opening in select movie theatres before Christmas, Women Talking received a wide release last month. For Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, it marked 10 years since she interviewed some of the women…
Barns and kerchiefs
Categories: Feature ArticlesNot many farmers walk out of a movie theatre and say, “It’s a lot of fun seeing our farm on the big screen.” But that’s what Chris Burkholder thought after…
Witness
Categories: Feature ArticlesI stand on the very spot where it all began, in a former Catholic church in the village of Pingjum, Netherlands. Here, the priest Menno Simons was called to account…
Guardians of the past
Categories: Feature ArticlesThrough an easily overlooked side door and down two flights of stairs at Bethany Manor Senior Living Complex in Saskatoon one will find the archival rooms of the Mennonite Historical…
One-anotherness in Christ
Categories: Feature ArticlesBased on my first-hand experience with the Mennonite church in Canada and the U.S. over the past 18 years, I suspect that far less than 10 percent of primarily white…
Challenging Holy Land stereotypes
Categories: Feature ArticlesMunther Isaac recently published a book that confronts a longstanding problem in Christian attitudes toward the Holy Land—ignorance, indifference and even hostility to the Palestinian church. Isaac is an Oxford-educated,…
Women who prepared the way for Jesus
Categories: Feature ArticlesRahab acts by faith Joshua 2:1-21; 6:22-25; Matthew 1:5; Hebrews 11:29-31; James 2:23-26. Beyond the narrative in Joshua and Jesus’ genealogy, Rahab is mentioned two other times in Scripture. Both…
Listening to the Spirit, with John
Categories: Feature ArticlesAt an Anglican church I know, the congregational response after the reading of Scripture is: “Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the church.” This response captures the dynamic…
Five pastoral callings
Categories: Feature ArticlesA quiet, years-long journey. A voice speaking in a mosh pit full of teenagers. A love for the church. An unexpected second career. These are just some of the ways…
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