Ly Vang was 16 and stuck in a refugee camp in Thailand with a pair of shoes and two sets of clothes. She was lonely and sad. She struggled with suicidal thoughts.
“What is the meaning of living like this?” she complained to God. “Being dead would be better.”
Ontario’s Theatre of the Beat has a mandate of staging change and creating conversations around social justice issues, but that’s also happening in communities beyond the Mennonite enclaves the company brings its plays to.
Bob Lebold made his first donation to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) when he was about 10 years old. It was Christmas, sometime in the late 1960s, when he tagged along to the MCC centre in Kitchener with his mom Elaine, who was the material aid supervisor. His task was to help sort and bale clothing to be shipped overseas.
Are you over 18 years old with a love for your regional, nationwide and global Mennonite church?
Mennonite Church Canada is seeking representatives from each of the five regional churches to represent their respective communities at the next Mennonite World Conference (MWC) Global Youth Summit (GYS) in Salatiga, Indonesia, in 2021.
“I’ve had many teachers, most of them children,” says Patricia Erb. “The best ones.”
Growing up, Cedar Klassen loved singing hymns.
Donna Dinsmore never felt she fit into church life.
For three days and two nights in June, six Mennonite Church Eastern Canada pastors journeyed by canoe and camped in the wilderness of Massasauga Provincial Park, near Parry Sound, Ont.
The idea that Hidden Acres Mennonite Camp is a sacred space where God is at work came up over and over again at the farewell event for Campbell and Chris Nisbet, held on July 13 at the camp near Shakespeare, Ont.
Eleanor Funk has been teaching people about the tabernacle for almost 40 years. “The passion has never left,” she says.
This recipe, that probably originates in the southern U.S., came to Ontario via the MCC meat canner and an Amish community in Ohio.
Veg Weber knows how to do old-fashioned hospitality and she enjoys having people sit around her table. A few years ago, this hostess from Hawkesville, Ont., came across a recipe that gives her guests a surprise dining adventure as well as nourishing food.
This year, Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS) is celebrating 75 years of placing young adults in service positions across Canada and the U.S.
So how did a 22-year-old Mennonite from France end up volunteering on the streets of Lethbridge as a bouncer for Jesus? Even he’s not sure, but he’s loving it, and when he returns to France in September, he plans to continue working with street people if he can find an opportunity.
Twenty-five youth and sponsors gathered at Camp Elim, on Lac Pelletier, south of Swift Current, Sask., for Saskatchewan Mennonite Youth Organization’s youth retreat. Held May 24-26 the retreat was filled with fun and games, worship, and dragons!
For many women around the world, accessing pads, tampons or menstrual cups isn’t as easy as making a trip to a drug store, nor is it affordable. Some women and girls resort to making their own menstrual products out of things like mattress foam, newspaper or old clothes, which can cause problems like tetanus and urinary tract infections, or even worse infections.
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.
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.
On May 14, Breslau Mennonite Church hosted an iftar meal after sunset, marking the end of the daily fast for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, a season of fasting, prayer, reflection and charity observed by millions of Muslims around the world.
Every year, Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Kitchener, Ont., facilitates worship services at churches in the area, to build bridges between the school and its constituency.
This year, the senior choir students had a particularly moving experience when they sang and led worship at Kitchener’s Chin Christian Church, a member congregation of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, on April 28.
“We’ve experienced a lot of humbling stories,” says Phyllis Roth of her participation in the Saskatchewan Valley Hospital home-building project, but one story in particular stands out.
Vegan cooking can be as easy or challenging as you want to make it. I’m a “10-minute—five ingredient” kind of gal so here is a crockpot bean recipe that takes minutes to make.
Type the words “Mennonite vegans” into your search engine and you likely won’t come up with much. But being a Mennonite vegan is very doable, whether you are culturally Mennonite or not. And with a birth name of Carrie and a married name of Steven, I am clearly not culturally Mennonite.
Like many of his peers, Nathan Bartel is fielding questions about what he plans to do after graduation. But, unlike some of them, he has a ready answer. He wants to be a firefighter.
Jacqueline Loewen just spent the weekend riding a motorcycle as a stunt double for a science-fiction TV show and will be rolling on the ground with strangers tomorrow, choreographing combat for Shakespeare in the Ruins’ production of Hamlet.
