Unfiltered Falk
For most comedians, delivering unfiltered material means cursing a blue streak. For Matt Falk, it means something else entirely. “Stop looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror trying to find the thing that makes you beautiful, ’cause you’re not gonna find it, okay?” the rotund comic tells the audience during a bit about body image…
Wildwood Mennonite unplugged
In this age of hectic schedules, electronic device dependency and human isolation, how can a church provide meaning, purpose and belonging? Saskatoon’s Wildwood Mennonite Church may have found an answer to this perplexing question. Wildwood Unplugged offered congregants three weekends of activities similar to a church retreat, but without the necessity or expense of leaving…
Family celebrates permanent residency
The Warkentins are ringing in 2018 as official Canadians, but the journey to reach permanent-resident status was anything but easy. Jon and Karissa Warkentin and their five children, who attend Nordheim Mennonite Church in Winnipegosis, Man., received the announcement they could stay in Canada on Dec. 5, 2017. It came after a long struggle with…
‘I do believe in prayer because I believe in poetry’
Sarah Ens’s writing career started at the age of six with a story suspiciously similar to the children’s book, Julie and the Wolves. But since those early days, she has grown into an award-winning poet. Earlier this month, she won an honourable mention and $150 in a competition for the Young Buck Poetry Prize, a…
On the court and in the classroom
Growing up just south of Winnipeg in Morris, Man., I was involved in sports starting in elementary school. I participated in many school sports but invested most of my time in basketball, playing competitively from Grade 5 until Grade 11. In Grade 10, I began playing club volleyball, and continued into my graduating year. It…
Caught in the tension between belief and fear
Time is a significantly gracious yet controlling dynamic. It’s a dimension from which we cannot escape, but our experience of it varies depending on our context. We move from day to day, month to month, year to year, growing older and hopefully wiser, sometimes caught off guard by the realization that time doesn’t wait for…
Creating a mission partnership web
What does mission look like in a country where the church is well established? From Jeanette Hanson’s point of view it’s a web of interconnected relationships. Hanson is a Mennonite Church Canada Witness worker and the associate director for Mennonite Partners in China (MPC). For 10 years, Hanson and her husband Todd taught English under…
‘We need the peace theology’
Chinda Kommala is a serious Mennonite Church Eastern Canada booster. From the beginning of the Lao Canadian Evangelical Mennonite Church’s life, he has been relating to the regional church and encouraging others to do the same. “We need the emphasis on peace theology,” he says, remembering the years of war back in Laos between various…
Ten years of being good news
A decade ago, Zurich (Ont.) Mennonite Church, which was formed in 1908 by those who did not want to keep the restrictive dress code of the nearby Blake Amish Mennonite congregation, renamed itself Kingsfield-Zurich. Around the same time, it “multiplied” itself by spawning the nearby Kingsfield-Clinton congregation. Both congregations are in Huron County along Lake Huron.…
Farmers, thinkers, eaters
Agriculture is changing. Perhaps it always has been. Markets realign. Tastes shift. Ideas evolve. Climatic conditions rearrange. Mennonites are part of the change—as farmers, thinkers and eaters. Joanne Thiessen Martens notes another change. She grew up on a farm near Austin, Man. Then she studied agro-ecology out of an interest to work overseas, which she…
