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What is the Spirit saying to our churches today?
“Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Revelation 3:22). These words of John from the Island of Patmos are as relevant for us today as they were to the seven churches in the province of Asia who were struggling to adapt to the ever-changing realities of…
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A community with a sense of ‘we’
I was humbled and challenged when I spent the day with some of my Old Order Mennonite relations recently. My cousin Sarah invited me to a quilting at her home near Mount Forest, Ont., saying that she was inviting all her female Frey cousins. The Frey family is large and the number of female cousins…
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Going further together, Part 2
‘I thought this type of support was normal’ Jeanette and Todd Hanson By Donna Schulz, Saskatchewan Correspondent, Rosthern, Sask. Although they have had other mission partnerships over the years, Jeanette Hanson marvels at the support she and her husband Todd have received from their two home congregations. The couple served as long-term workers to China,…
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Going further together
To put names and faces to these partnerships, Canadian Mennonite’s correspondents across the country have profiled Witness workers and the churches that support them. Following are stories from B.C. and Alberta. You can read stories from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Eastern Canada here. By Tim Froese, Mennonite Church Canada Partnerships among congregations have been the basis of…
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The view through a prison keyhole
Tony Deik experienced a dramatic return to faith when he was studying at Birzeit University in the Israeli-occupied territory of the West Bank. Raised Roman Catholic in Bethlehem, he had mostly abandoned that faith as he experimented with secular and New Age ideas instead. Still restless though, he decided to read the Gospel of John.…
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A big fan of Jesus . . . the church not so much
A lot has been said and written about millennials: What’s wrong with them? What’s influenced them? What does their future hold? Google “millennials and the church” and dozens of articles pop up: “5 things millennials wish the church would be,” “12 reasons why millennials are over church,” or “Is Christianity dark enough for millennials?” So…
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On becoming a better person
Although I had biked 21 kilometres to work and spent the hot day bent over in a vegetable patch just south of Winnipeg, I was still pushing hard on my ride home. I loved passing the hot-shot cyclists who frequented the same route. On that day of particular exertion and clarity, my sense of drive…
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Land is the heart of the matter
In the opening half of Steven Ratzlaff’s play Reservations, first staged in Winnipeg in 2016, an Alberta Mennonite farmer informs his two children that he plans to give a section of land—most of what he owns—to the Siksika First Nation. The farmer has heart troubles and he’s already renting the land out. His daughter, visiting…
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‘They’re destroying our home’
When the water goes up behind the $8.7-billion Keeyask Dam in northern Manitoba, one family will lose more than any other. At a church-sponsored event in Winnipeg on March 18, 2017, they told their story. The seven Kitchekeesik sisters from Tataskweyak Cree Nation made the 900-kilometre trip south to speak at the premiere of a…
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Ceremonies of belief
Several years ago, my Russian Mennonite grandmother told me a story about her childhood that I think about often. When she was just a young girl living somewhere southeast of Winnipeg, her parents unexpectedly lost their farmland. With no land, no money and no prospects, they packed their few belongings onto the first train out…
