Solitude and community
A peculiar thing happened to me last Sunday while I was on holidays. I felt a strong desire to attend a church service. Curious, to say the least. You see, by the time summer arrives, I’m usually churched out. As a pastor, church is not only my work life but a significant part of my…
Food creates community
Cooking for one or two people can be a challenge, but Betty Ann Martin found that taking Food Fit courses at the Local Community Food Centre in Stratford, Ont., expanded her food repertoire. She learned that roasted vegetables are delicious and that sweet potatoes are very versatile—and they don’t need added sugar. “To make sweet…
Breakfast spinach frittata
Breakfast should be interesting, not boring! Betty Ann Martin expanded her food repertoire and gained new ideas for breakfast menus through her involvement with the Local Community Food Centre in Stratford, Ont. See more of her story here. This egg-and-vegetable dish gets you eating healthy vegetables for breakfast. 2 tsp. oil (preferably olive oil) 4…
Living into all our relations
In these recent years of walking with our Indigenous neighbours, I have been both blessed and intrigued by the words of encouragement often expressed at the end of a talk: “All my relations.” My understandings of this saying come mostly from the reflections of Richard Wagamese, the Ojibway author of the book Indian Horse,…
Forming intentional community with young adults
When Thomas and Terri Lynn Friesen met, Terri Lynn was a guest at the Burrow, an intentional community Thomas was living in with eight other young adults. This coming September, a few weeks before the couple’s second wedding anniversary, they will embark on a new adventure together: opening their Saskatoon home to form an intentional…
From church to yoga studio
For many years the church provided me with a place where I felt like I belonged. I was 14 years old when I “decided” to get baptized. Coming from a Mennonite/Anabaptist background, I always respected the time in people’s lives when they would announce their dedication to the Christian faith and get aligned into a…
Butternut bisque recipe
Last fall when Erin Froese and her household received the gift of many large squash they had trouble using it all up. They made a couple large pots of Butternut bisque and invited their neighbours to join them for a winter soup night. See the story by Erin Froese at canadianmennonite.org/stories/squash-main-course-fellowship Recipe is from Simply…
Wildwood Mennonite unplugged
In this age of hectic schedules, electronic device dependency and human isolation, how can a church provide meaning, purpose and belonging? Saskatoon’s Wildwood Mennonite Church may have found an answer to this perplexing question. Wildwood Unplugged offered congregants three weekends of activities similar to a church retreat, but without the necessity or expense of leaving…
A community with a sense of ‘we’
I was humbled and challenged when I spent the day with some of my Old Order Mennonite relations recently. My cousin Sarah invited me to a quilting at her home near Mount Forest, Ont., saying that she was inviting all her female Frey cousins. The Frey family is large and the number of female cousins…
Future Directions
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the wider Mennonite church these past few weeks, as there have been discussions about the future of Mennonite Church Canada at the gatherings of each of the regional churches. In some ways, I find these discussions draining and disappointing: the bureaucratic way we speak about the church…
