Volume 23, Number 13
Interim International Witness director to begin on Aug. 1
Jeanette Hanson, associate director for Mennonite Partners in China, will begin as interim director of Mennonite Church Canada’s International Witness program on Aug. 1.
Learning as we go
Gathering 2019 starts next week. From June 28 to July 1, several hundred attendees from across Canada will meet in Abbotsford, B.C., for the first major event since the re-structuring of the Mennonite Church Canada. Thank you, MC British Columbia, for hosting this gang!
Four decades of welcome
![](https://canadianmennonite.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_thumbnail/public/article_photos/13-01A-pic%203-2019_0.jpg?itok=hKodHTEi)
Group photo from a picnic held at Willowgrove Camp in August 1979. Harriet Dick is pictured front left. (Photo courtesy of Harriet Dick)
![](https://canadianmennonite.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_thumbnail/public/article_photos/13-01A-pic%201-2019_0.jpg?itok=eGcFDNhU)
Harriet Dick, back right, and son Alan, back left, host a refugee family in the Dicks’ backyard in Toronto. (Photo courtesy of Harriet Dick)
Toronto United Mennonite Church was the first church in Canada to receive privately sponsored “boat people” who were fleeing Vietnam and Laos during the chaos of the Vietnam War.
Readers write: June 24, 2019 issue
Where is the ‘just and redemptive path forward’ for Dalton Jantzi?
Re: “MC Eastern Canada apologizes for causing pain to abuse survivors,” May 13, page 16.
Building resource connections
CommonWord is just over four years old. In that short time we have doubled our sales (reaching more than 10,000 retail customers last year), more than doubled the number of website users, and have continued to circulate half of our loan materials outside Manitoba—and increasingly to people outside our immediate Mennonite Church Canada and Canadian Mennonite University communities.
Cayuga church
From halfway across the world, a loyal MAID watcher noticed an error. This was not the Rainham church in 1965, as originally labelled by the photographer, but South Cayuga Mennonite Church, Dunnville, Ont. Comparing it to another photo of South Cayuga, he urged us to “look at the west end of this meetinghouse.
Passionate about front-yard living
My pastor husband co-preached about living a front-yard life at a large joint worship service at the park last weekend. With three churches gathered together and probably half of our town at the park, the message of interacting with our neighbours in the front yard, instead of keeping isolated in a fenced-off backyard, rippled through our town this week.
202 columns later
Some years ago, I screwed up my courage and sent off an email to the editor of Canadian Mennonite. I offered to write a column on family relationships.
Reaching out requires letting in
A recent CBC news article projected that 9,000 Canadian churches will close over the next 10 years. That’s approximately one-third of Canadian churches gone in a decade. It’s not news that the church in Canada is dying, but it is shocking how fast it’s happening.
Confronting the fear of our history
“Yet we Christians have also been called to take a good hard look at ourselves. To reflect on our Christian beliefs, to scrutinize our missional practices. And to decolonize. It’s not that Christianity is inherently colonial, but for generations the church and its faith have been used —wittingly, unwittingly, and far too often—as instruments of dispossession in the settler colonial arsenal.
Catholic-Mennonite gathering planned for Winnipeg
Building unity in the body of Christ
There are hundreds of denominations within Christianity, and it can be easy to focus on the differences between them all. But a group of Mennonites and Anglicans is breaking through those walls.
Walking and talking along the trail
![](https://canadianmennonite.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_thumbnail/public/article_photos/13-33-pic%202-2019.jpg?itok=TGfso3R0)
A group walks from the Fort Langley United Church to the Kwantlen Nation Longhouse to begin B.C.’s fourth annual Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation. (Photo by Ian Funk)
In solidarity with their First Nations neighbours, Mennonites in the Fraser Valley joined others in a Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation from May 31 to June 2.
The event was a partnership between Mennonite Central Committee B.C., Mennonite Church Canada, and several other denominations, including Anglican, the United Church and Christian Reformed Church.
The women of Alberta rediscover Mary
“We grew up never talking about Mary. It was like the Catholics got Mary in the divorce settlement and Mennonites got a 30-minute sermon,” said Irma Fast Dueck in her opening talk at the annual Mennonite Church Alberta women’s retreat held from June 7 to 9 at the Sunnyside Retreat Centre in Sylvan Lake.
‘My place is right here’
It was all about working together for the good of the local Cambridge community when Preston and Wanner Mennonite churches partnered with a local theatre group to support the work of the Cambridge Self-Help Food Bank.
Breathing new life into a centuries-old folk art tradition
An Ontario artist is enlivening a Mennonite folk-art tradition that hasn’t been widely practised for more than 150 years.
Offering the gift of non-judgmental listening
Elaine Presnell has presided at around 600 funerals. That’s a number most pastors won’t achieve in a lifetime. But Presnell isn’t an ordinary pastor. For more than 10 years, she has worked for Mourning Glory Funeral Services in Saskatoon as a funeral officiant.
Previously, she spent 16 years as a psychiatric nurse at Saskatoon’s Regional Psychiatric Centre.
Making art ‘like breathing’ for B.C. illustrator
For Dona Park, making art is the equivalent of eating, sleeping and breathing. She does it every day because she needs to.
The 24-year-old attended Goshen (Ind.) College, from which she graduated with a double major in fine arts and history in 2017. She is now a freelance artist based in Abbotsford, B.C., where she attends Emmanuel Mennonite Church.
![Subscribe to RSS - Volume 23 Issue 13](https://canadianmennonite.org/misc/feed.png)