Readers write
Healing and rebuilding happening under Isaaks’ leadership Re: “From a closed community to an open heart,” March 7, page 4. First Mennonite Church, Burns Lake, is fortunate to have the leadership of Eve Isaak and her husband Helmut, an Anabaptist-Mennonite history professor, to take our core group of believers to new levels of spiritual growth…
For discussion
1. How was your spirituality formed as you grew up? In what ways has Mennonite spirituality been changing? 2. Do you feel that you encounter God through your current spiritual practice? How important is it for our congregations to work at renewing spirituality? Is this best done individually or as communities? How can we best…
We don’t need to be more Anabaptist
Over thirty pastors and lay people gathered earlier this year to hear Arnold Snyder, retiring Conrad Grebel University College professor of history, give two two-hour long lectures on Anabaptist-Mennonite spiritual formation in a historical perspective. He drew attention to the spirit-filled beginnings of Anabaptism in the 1530s, which were part of a movement through the…
Spiritual formation resources
Books A Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster A Mennonite Woman by Dawn Ruth NelsonDiscover Your Spiritual Type by Corinne Ware Dissident Discipleship by David Augsburger Experiencing God by Henry and Richard Blackaby Jesus, Our Spiritual Director: A Pilgrimage Through the Gospels by Wendy Miller Praying the Psalms by Nan C. Merrill Prayers For People…
A way of life
However difficult this book is to read, Dawn Ruth Nelson has done the church a significant service in her study. Her effort to both diagnose the malaise in North American Mennonite spirituality and propose remedial measures suffers from a poor choice of title and could have benefited from tighter editing. The Mennonite woman of the…
My journey into prayer
Growing up in a family with an Evangelical Mennonite bent meant that I early on learned about going to church. While we had prayers at meals, bedtime and on special occasions—like going on a trip or during sickness—we did not have a regular devotional life at home. In Sunday school, youth group and a charismatic…
Encountering the living God
God is a living God who encounters us in our daily lives.” So said Arnold Snyder, professor of history at Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ont., during a Reformation Sunday sermon last fall at Wilmot Mennonite Church, New Hamburg. Then in his lunch-hour lectures at Grebel earlier this year, he acknowledged that he was going…
My vision for Canadian Mennonite
“I have never heard the editor’s vision for the magazine,” said a reader when asked what she thought of Canadian Mennonite. The observation caught me up short. Assuming my vision was implicit in the biweekly conversation I engender, being explicit with my goals and aspirations didn’t seem necessary. To do so might even be redundant,…
