God at work in Us

From pew to pulpit to pew

Jake Neufeld continues to volunteer much of his time with maintenance work at Camp Koinonia.

Jake Neufeld, lay minister for 46 years, was released from his ordination to ministry last October in Whitewater Mennonite Church in Boissevain. Neufeld leaves ordination behind with a grateful heart for the life-changing course it set him on.

An unlikely friendship

Through the safe spaces provided for connection and discussion by the Anabaptist Network in South Africa (ANiSA) Dialogues, Mzwandile Nkutha, left, and Cobus van Wyngaard are building an unlikely friendship across a history of racial divide.

An unlikely but emerging friendship between Mzwandile Nkutha and Cobus van Wyngaard through the Anabaptist Network in South Africa (ANiSA) demonstrates in a small way what it looks like to overcome deeply rooted racial prejudices in South Africa.

It is an unlikely friendship because Nkutha is a black Zulu and van Wyngaard is a white Afrikaner.

MCC B.C. mourns loss of long-time volunteer

Clyde Dougans is pictured in action on the auction floor at last year’s MCC Festival for World Relief, Abbotsford, B.C. The popular auctioneer passed away on March 7.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) staff and volunteers are mourning the loss of their friend and long-term volunteer, Clyde Dougans. Dougans was a fixture at the annual MCC Festival for World Relief in Abbotsford, where he entertained crowds as an auctioneer, helping MCC to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars over the span of his career.

From computers to cash

Nolan Andres, left, puts on a Conrad Grebel University College tie given him by Paul Penner, Grebel’s director of operations, at the Feb. 20 fête honouring Andres as he leaves PeaceWorks Technology Solutions, which he founded 17 years ago.

In his first year working in information technology (IT) in 1996, Nolan Andres was living at Conrad Grebel University College and his roommate was Tim Miller Dyck, later to become editor of Canadian Mennonite and now an owner-employee at PeaceWorks Technology Solutions of Waterloo, Ont., that Andres founded.

A servant leader

Neufeld

Joseph S. Neufeld was born into a large Mennonite family and community in rural Alberta. Having many sisters and brothers, and growing up in the Dirty Thirties, he quickly developed an ability to accommodate others, and be resourceful and generous. He saw Christian faith-in-action modelled, a lesson he took as his own.

Housing project visualizes new model of care

Those who live at the St. Clair O’Connor Community enjoy good fellowship.

Over the last number of years the St. Clair O’Connor Community (SCOC) Board has reviewed and renewed its mission statement and constitution. Through these evaluations many questions were raised about this multi-generational housing project that currently has residents from young children to those over 100 years old.

Elsie Cressman, pioneer missionary and midwife, dies

Elsie Cressman, (foreground) the subject of a documentary, Return to Africa: The Story of Elsie Cressman, is pictured with filmmakers Paul Francescutti, and Paula and Paul Campsall, at a screening in Waterloo in 2010.

Funeral services were held Sept. 23, for Elsie Cressman, a former Eastern Mennonite Missions worker in East Africa, who died Sept. 11. Cressman was known for her work among leprosy patients and her work as a midwife both in East Africa and in Canada.

Recognizing God at work

Muriel Bechtel, retiring this summer after 12 years as Mennonite Church Eastern Canada conference minister, is pictured in her office, familiar to many pastors through the years.

After 12 years as Mennonite Church Eastern Canada’s conference minister, Muriel Bechtel will be moving into retirement this summer. On June 24 she also celebrated 20 years since her ordination, when she was pastor of Warden Woods Mennonite Church, Toronto.

Sunday school teacher, 103, had lasting influence

Eliesabeth Klassen celebrated her 103rd birthday on March 3. A few weeks later, six of her students from 60 years ago went to visit her at Blenheim Lodge. Pictured from left to right, front row: Lucy Meyer, Eliesabeth Klassen, Marie Penner and Margie Ewert; and back row: Elfrieda Klassen, Margaret Ewert, Helga Stobbe and Elvira Guenther.

Eliesabeth Klassen says she’s three. “Forget the other hundred years,” she says with a laugh, using a magnifying glass to scan familiar faces in old directories from Vancouver’s First United Mennonite Church, a congregation she attended from its humble beginnings in 1937.

Facing the mental health frontier

Chris Summerville in his executive director office at the Manitoba Schizophrenia Society.

All the fear, stigma and social prejudice that surrounds mental illness recently surfaced again in the media when a review board granted Vince Li temporary passes to take supervised walks in Selkirk, Man., where he is hospitalized. Li made headlines about four years ago with the horrific psychosis-induced beheading of a fellow bus passenger.

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