A small regional church with big impact
You are easily forgiven for not knowing that Edmonton is a beach city. In spite of its northern location and prairie landscape, sandcastles and sunbathers began appearing along a bank of the North Saskatchewan river in 2017. This so-called Accidental Beach emerged when upstream construction subtly changed the waterflow, exposing and enlarging a beautiful sand…
Called to deep hope
Mary Magdalene couldn’t have known the end of the story—how things would turn out. How could she? She, and the rest of the disciples, were no different from the rest of us. The future is cloudy at best. We don’t know what the next day will hold. Back then, no one saw the resurrection coming.…
Worship through visual art
One of the striking things about Voices Together, the new Mennonite song collection, is that it includes 12 pieces of visual art. Images reach into our lives in a different way than written text or even music. I remember sitting in church services as a little kid, paging through my Bible and looking for pictures.…
‘Who are we as the church now?’
Justin Sun has never known pastoring other than during a pandemic. A year-and-a-half into his first pastorate, he says, “It’s been rough. How do I even do this job? I didn’t even attend a real in-person service until June.” That was nine months after he started in is job as a youth pastor in Richmond,…
‘God didn’t create you wrong’
Although some Mennonite churches in Canada have wrestled with whether to accept LGBTQ+ people in their congregations, the conversation around queer issues is rapidly expanding in the public sphere. Gender identity is one topic that has been gaining popularity in the last several years, yet the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse Mennonites remain relatively unexplored…
Biblical companions on my cancer journey
My family does cancer in a big way. In my immediate family of five members, there have been 10 occasions when a doctor told one of us that we have cancer, or that, despite the treatments, the cancer has returned. My wife Esther has had two rounds of breast cancer. Our son Tim, who was…
Simple wonder, peculiar generosity
Annie Janzen earned no degrees and was never elected chair of a church council. She did not start a church, write a best-seller or perform for large audiences. She did cook at Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg for 27 years, travel the globe and make an unlikely diversity of friends. She lived a good,…
Let’s talk about power
Did you know, there are over 650 occurrences of the word “power” in the Bible? Dunamis, a Greek word for power, occurs 120 times in the New Testament and means “strength” or “ability.” It is used to describe, for example, the power of God (Matthew 22:29), the power of Elijah (Luke 1:17), and the power…
What if we stayed together?
What do we do when we disagree with people in our church? There are lots of reasons to disagree. We can disagree about how we talk about salvation, about who we should include or not include, about political views, or even about vaccination. Across North America, we see issues dividing congregations and conferences. When people…
Mary’s story: Our inheritance
Mary’s story comes to us this year, maybe in a new way, at a time when we welcome some really good news. We could use an encouraging, empowering and heart-warming story right now. Year after year in pageant, poetry and hymnody we rehearse Mary’s good news story and the angel’s message: “Fear not!” I confess…
