Tag: COVID-19

  • Take care

    Take care

    Recently the worldwide number of souls lost to the COVID-19 virus surpassed 1 million. Visualizing that large number of lives cut short touches one’s own soul. We, the living, mourn and seek to understand.  As members of the world community and participants in our own neighbourhoods and congregations, you and I are witnessing the many…

  • Communion and community during COVID-19

    Communion and community during COVID-19

    For many congregants, the invitation to receive communion at Edmonton’s First Mennonite Church on Sunday, Sept. 27 would mark the first time they had physically set foot in the building for six months. For Maggie Martens it was “an invitation I wasn’t going to pass up.” Martens lives alone and finds that Zoom communion via…

  • Niagara churches reopening

    Niagara churches reopening

    Vineland (Ont.) United Mennonite Church plans to continue meeting virtually for worship through September, using YouTube video. According to pastor Louise Wideman, the church is planning a cautious tiered approach to reopening. The first step will be to install equipment for livestreaming the service. The next stage will include inviting small groups to join for…

  • Navigating reopening

    Navigating reopening

    Across the nationwide church, there are likely as many approaches to reopening as there are congregations. Mennonite Church Saskatchewan recently hosted an online conversation about how congregations are meeting the challenges of reopening. Josh Wallace, the regional church’s interim church engagement minister, hosted the Sept. 3 event, dubbed “Navigating reopening.” Pastors and lay leaders from…

  • COVID-19 global response fund helps more Global South churches

    COVID-19 global response fund helps more Global South churches

    “I have seen entire families in the garbage dumps looking to quench their hunger. I have also watched with sadness as they return the elderly from the hospitals because there are no possibilities to attend them, nor medicines to supply them,” said Erwin Francisco Mirabal González, a Mennonite pastor in Venezuela. “We pray to the…

  • MDS Canada issues second call for Spirit of MDS Fund applications

    The Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) Canada Spirit of MDS Fund is issuing a second call for applications from churches in Canada. The goal of the Spirit of MDS Fund is to provide financial support to Canadian Anabaptist-Mennonite congregations that are assisting people in their communities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of $100,000 has…

  • Low German community in southwestern Ontario experiences persecution

    Members of Low German-speaking Mennonite communities in southwestern Ontario have experienced public discrimination recently because of a surge in COVID-19 cases in their population. Incidents include negative online comments, cancelled playdates with children in the Low German community, and aggressive verbal attacks at the grocery store.  The Windsor-Essex region of the province has been a…

  • Antifragile church

    Antifragile church

    The past few months have awakened us to our fragility as individuals, communities and nation states. We’ve observed the fragility of our health-care system, food-supply chain, economies, global trade, international relations, institutional accountability. It seems that everything in our world is fragile, including ourselves.  We’re also becoming acutely aware of the fragility of the Canadian…

  • Marking end-of-life rituals during the pandemic

    Marking end-of-life rituals during the pandemic

    Amid the restrictions of COVID-19, pastors and families are still finding creative and meaningful ways to mark, grieve and ritualize the deaths of loved ones. But no two funerals are the same, and there are added stressors, frustrations and disappointments.  Mark Diller Harder, pastor of St. Jacobs (Ont.) Mennonite Church, where there have been four…