Blue Christmas
Walk into any store during this season and the message is clear: it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Sometimes, however, the message to be of good cheer creates its own pain for those who are struggling. That includes the bereaved, those with mental health challenges and the increasing number of people struggling to make ends meet. It’s also the time of year with the least amount of daylight and long, cold…
Binding and loosing in an age of division
For the past three years, the United States has been my home, and in the U.S., division is impossible to ignore. Liberals on the left, conservatives on the right. Of course, Canada is not immune to these divisions, and neither is the church. In this context, what hope does the church have of discerning the…
Can’t we all just get along?
Are you losing hope in the possibility of everyone getting along? Division in the church is nothing new for me. I grew up in a harsh, conservative fundamentalist church that judged everybody. Especially liberal Christians. In my early 20s, I became agnostic and relentlessly judgmental toward conservative Christians. I returned to Christian faith and church…
Big tent, small centre
Here in British Columbia—the West of the West, where West and true East meet in North America—we sometimes tend to look more toward the traditionalist faith of the church in Asia than to the progressive, whiter, older Mennonite lands of eastern Canada. We also continue to be influenced by the neo-reformed fundamentalism of our dear, and…
Third way community
If Joe Heikman had to choose a single distinctive Anabaptist value, it would be community. “That’s how I met Jesus,” he says, in community, growing up as part of a Brethren in Christ church in Pennsylvania. He did not arrive where he is at on his own. When I spoke with Heikman, he was preparing a series of sermons on the basics of Anabaptism for Wildwood Mennonite Church, the Saskatoon congregation he serves as pastor. The series will cover some history— Heikman loves history—and then shift to material…
Gathering matters more than you think
I am a huge advocate for the local church. It is the gathering of people around the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus that frees our imaginations and forms our hearts to be a different kind of nation on the earth. Yet, it seems we often are pulled into the sexy idolatry of the…
Backyard bakery creates community
One might be able to live on bread alone, at least according to Jacquie Loewen. The resident of Winnipeg’s West End neighbourhood has spent the past year building a stone oven, learning to bake bread in it, and sharing this bread with her neighbours—all from the comfort of her own backyard. “I have a really…
Watch: Rockway sparks community with new music video
What better way to bring a community together than 350 red umbrellas? Starting at the beginning of COVID-19, Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Kitchener, Ont ., has been working on creating a music video for “Someone to You” by the Banners. The result was uploaded to the school’s YouTube channel last month. “I’m kinda the crazy one…
On being a musician during COVID-19
For some musicians during COVID-19, the landscape of music making, performance and choir conducting transformed into environments for community resilience. As a recent graduate from Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto, with a master of sacred music degree, Matthew Boutda reveals the ways musicians are conductors of human connectedness. He says that “online communities…
The Gourmet Girls
Imagine if you could eat at a five-star restaurant every Saturday night, even during COVID-19. That’s what has been happening in one neighbourhood in Calgary since May 2020. A recent menu included flavourful prosciutto-wrapped asparagus sprinkled with fresh parmesan and lemon by Charlene Delcourt; juicy garlic-rosemary turkey glazed with Dijon and honey mustards and accompanied…
