Viewpoints
Love the one you’re with
On a Friday afternoon in summer, chances are good you’ll find me with a few friends outside an ice cream stand, soaking in the pleasures of summer. Probably I’ll be licking a cone—something with chocolate and peanut butter if I’m lucky. The conversation will be easy: trips we’re planning or returning from; books we’re reading; light chatter about work, family and church.
The church we were meant to be
Farewell messages never feel adequate, with so many more challenges to identify, concerns to articulate, gratitude to express, and hopes to inspire.
Comfortable being rural
On a cold, wet Sunday morning, May 5, 1935, Arthur Roth, his wife Melinda, and his mother, Mary Schrog Roth, made their way to church in East Zorra Township in southern Ontario. At the end of the lane they made an unaccustomed turn to the left, heading to the new congregation at Cassel, instead of their familiar congregation on the 16th Line: East Zorra Amish Mennonite Church.
From ‘Imagine’ to ‘Material Girl’
As a fledgling whipper-snapper the great inherent threat to my young soul was said to be the subliminal messages being “backmasked” into music that would hoodwink me into becoming morally reprobate, or, worse, a Montreal Canadiens fan. Determined, and thoroughly misguided, religious groups fought to have backmasking on vinyl records banned forever.
Asking the right questions
I spend a lot of time pondering leadership these days. I see the word everywhere. I suspect I could take a course on leadership every weekend of the year in our city. Despite all this energy on building leaders, I hear more negatives than positives summed up by this recurring phrase, “We just need leadership,” as if this will solve all that’s ailing the church and the world.
Getting a perspective with numbers
No more cheap church
A five-year retrospective
Discerning alone and together
Retirement: Eat, drink and be merry?
Tending the boundaries
Financial trends and church health
The dangerous question
Rebutting ‘a pernicious message’
My growing faith in Jesus has led me to see annual assemblies as increasingly blah. This feels inappropriate to say, yet necessary.
By my actions, I declare my commitment to the Mennonite church, its periodicals, congregations and schools. But in my heart I am succumbing to the lure of a difficult dimension of the gospel that causes those in power to grumble.
Reflections on leadership
Take good care of your children
Specializing in a Google world
In a Google world where millions of written works are at your fingertips, it’s tough for the average user to discern appropriate resources for Christian formation, leadership, peace and mission. And it’s an even greater challenge to keep Anabaptist and related resources as visible and accessible as we’ve come to expect them to be.
They call it ‘couple-love’
The gospel in three parts . . . times three
Seated among the unsettled
Counting the cost of retirement
Putting the cat to sleep
Recently I took my sick cat to the vet, who diagnosed him as having a significant tumour lodged in his intestines. That explained the odd behaviour we’d observed, like him using the breadbox for a bed and the bathtub for a toilet. There were other signs of distress, including loss of weight and difficulties walking.