Resource centre finds temporary home in Winnipeg church
It’s brighter than ever in the basement at First Mennonite Church in Winnipeg. Sunshine House, a community drop-in and resource centre, is operating there temporarily while its headquarters undergoes renovations. The organization, which offers programming focused on harm reduction and social inclusion, moved into the church at the beginning of November. The Sunshine House community…
Pursuing a career in worship music
While pursuing degrees in health studies and music at the University of Waterloo, Mykayla Turner stumbled into a plethora of worship songs that left her wondering why and how she’d never heard them before. Growing up, she attended Zurich Mennonite Church in Ontario. In this rural congregation, music consisted of what Turner describes as contemporary…
B.C. churches mark Christmas and New Year’s
Mennonites in British Columbia celebrated the holidays in a variety of ways last month. With both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve falling on Sundays, churches were presented with the question: How many services should be held, and what kind? Will congregants come to multiple services on a holiday weekend? United Mennonite Church of Black…
Landing out of hot water
One winter day in 2022, our family was discussing the problem of our society’s dependence on fossil fuels. One of our young-adult sons, who perhaps felt we were slipping into finger-pointing, brought the focus back around to our own household by asking: “What about our hot water heater?” It was a loaded question. Though we’d…
Readers write: January 12, 2024
Touched by death and life After reading the November 3 issue of Canadian Mennonite, which focuses on Gaza, where so many people are dying (“Attending to war”), contrasted with people who are dying due to illness (“As he lay dying”), I was deeply moved. Those themes have been preoccupying me deeply and simultaneously recently. First,…
Cat train
In this Mennonite Pioneer Mission photo, a “cat train,” powered by a caterpillar tractor, travels along an ice road, hauling supplies to northern Manitoba communities in the 1950s. Ice roads provide an economical way to transport goods to communities not connected to the all-weather road system. For more historical photos in the Mennonite Archival Image…
The state of community in 2024
Last year was a tough one. Global concerns raged around us, including images of climate crisis and state-led violence that continued to swirl. I watched my church community formally come apart, by vote, in a deeply divisive scenario. Of course, there are many dynamics at play in such situations, but the element I find most…
Linking membership and participation
It will soon be congregational annual meeting season. Do you look forward to these meetings? Are they well attended in your congregation? In my congregation, the number of people who participate in voting meetings is small compared to the number who participate regularly in worship. Participation in voting meetings is limited primarily to older people…
Beyond boxes
Most of you have heard, and likely agree with, this statement: “You can’t put God in a box.” Of course, this means you can’t be put in a box either, for you are made in the image of God. If God doesn’t fit in a box, neither do you. Yet we often put ourselves in…
