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Am I Mennonite?
Although I’ve been a Mennonite pastor for over 25 years, I’m reluctant to call myself Mennonite. For several reasons. First, there’s an ethno-cultural component to the Mennonite identity that I lack. One does not simply become Mennonite, one is born Mennonite. Plenty of Mennonites would disagree with my assessment, and there seems to be a movement to change this perception, but I don’t think this is a negative thing that…
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Indigenous relations are not science fiction
It has been more than eight years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report, including 94 Calls to Action that various levels of government and religious communities committed themselves to implementing. Indigenouswatchdog.org is one of the sources I turn to for a thorough and current assessment of the implementation of the Calls.…
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Gathering matters more than you think
I am a huge advocate for the local church. It is the gathering of people around the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus that frees our imaginations and forms our hearts to be a different kind of nation on the earth. Yet, it seems we often are pulled into the sexy idolatry of the…
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Longing for transformation
I recently attended the Mennonite Church Manitoba annual general meeting (AGM) in Winkler. I find those events both energizing and demoralizing, which is why I have attended only a few in my life. You visit with good people, listen to inspiring words, weather the budget anxiety, then leave with the hollow feeling that key realities…
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The maize of peace
By avocation, I am an historian with a strong interest in global geopolitics, so it feels odd to be a subsistence farmer. I spend much of my time just meeting my daily needs, while hearing about wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere. Does my life ignore others’ pain? Could I do more? I constantly seek…
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One more on unity and diversity
I’ve been writing this column for four-and-a-half years, and I’m sure I’ve used the same ideas more than once. In this, my last column, I return to the two core ideas that I get passionate about the most often. There is plenty of danger in a single story, and yet my story is not dissimilar…
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Do I see a hand?
I was sitting on Dave Scott’s porch on the Swan Lake First Nation a few years back when he started talking about a handshake treaty between his Ojibwe ancestors and Mennonites. I had never heard of this. Later, I discovered no Mennonite historians had either. Last year, a group of southern Manitoba Mennonites went to…
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Lessons from the medicine wheel
Each year, A Common Word Alberta brings Muslims and Christians together in Edmonton to plan an annual interfaith dialogue. As the facilitator of Mennonite Church Alberta’s Bridge Building network (a re-imagined role that continues the good work of Donna Entz, who retired in 2022), I have played a significant part in planning the last two…
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Nothing new under the sun
In Ndebele, my language, we have a proverb that says, Inala kayihambi, kuhamba indlala. It says that times of abundant harvest are not reported, but times of hunger and famine make good news. Too true. All news worth reporting, in worldly standards, is that of horrendous happenings, such as wars and all forms of affliction…
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Circling back to simplicity
I’ve been thinking about simplicity. Are today’s Canadian Mennonites committed to faith-motivated simple living? Am I? I first encountered the spiritual discipline of simplicity 20 years ago when I read Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. I had grown up in fundamentalist Baptist churches that were legalistic about what our minds needed to believe and what…
