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Reading, watching, listening: A buffet
When the conversation is lagging in social situations, one of my favourite questions to ask is, “What are you reading?” This inquiry often leads to an interesting interchange of ideas and suggestions. Today, I’ll turn the table and tell you about some things that I’ve been reading. And watching. And listening to. Here are a…
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Embracing disequilibrium
“We have to embrace the disequilibrium we feel right now and let it teach us what it needs to teach us,” said Claire Ewert Fisher, interim pastor of Rosthern Mennonite Church, speaking at Mennonite Church Saskatchewan’s virtual town hall event, “Dreaming church beyond pandemic.” The gathering, held via Zoom on June 16, involved pastors and…
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Coins count, and so do bottles
Every Saturday in May, Rosthern Mennonite Church members drove the streets of Rosthern, picking up bottles and other refundable beverage containers. The church’s Christian education committee normally collects $700 to $800 in loose change each May for Mennonite Central Committee’s My Coins Count project. Since the church wasn’t able to collect coins at church on Sunday…
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I am my brother’s keeper
Many years ago now—I’m getting a bit long in the tooth—I took what I thought would be a bird course in my second year at what was then known as Waterloo College. It turned out to be anything but, and I remember more from that course than from any other in my seven years of…
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Why I’m not in a hurry to reopen church doors
Not long ago a group of churches and church leaders across the province signed a letter asking Ontario premier Doug Ford to allow churches to reopen at the beginning of the month of June. I did not sign the letter. Despite the way some church leaders have tried to frame this issue, the restrictions we’ve…
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Life together online
Since the middle of March, when church buildings closed due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, I’ve been visiting many churches. Not in person, of course, but on the internet. Each week I click on the link to a worship service that a Mennonite congregation, or group of congregations, has prepared to share with members of…
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Fall plans for Mennonite post-secondary schools
Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ont. The COVID-19 pandemic has created many changes and challenges for Grebel. While construction on the kitchen and dining room expansion continues, many other activities have been curtailed or adjusted. The spring term that runs from May to August at the University of Waterloo is being taught entirely online in…
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Legacy of the last great epidemic
Dave Penner recalls playing in the ditch with his brother in the summer of 1952. He was 5, his brother Henry was three years older. The freshly dug ditch on the expanded Highway 3 next to their yard near Morden, Man., had filled after a rain storm and Dave remembers having a grand time in…
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‘Being the church together’
Mennonite Church Canada is donating $50,000 to the Global Sharing Fund operated by Mennonite World (MWC) to help MWC-member churches struggling because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Sister churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which make up 81 per cent of MWC members, are requesting aid from MWC because they do not have enough…
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What is nature to you?
If you’ve ever invited me to go camping with you, you’ll know I’m not exactly what you would call “outdoorsy.” I enjoy nature, but I don’t really see the need to sleep in it, much less in a stuffy tent with sticks and rocks poking into my back. I feel the same about hiking—I’m just…
