Ethiopian ‘Joseph’ takes risks to serve
I have been the Tigray relief project coordinator for Meserete Kristos Church Development Commission (MKCDC) for the past four years. Because of this work, people gave me a new name. They called me Joseph, after one of the most renowned figures in the Bible, who saved his family and all of Egypt during the famine.…
Rubble and land in Ethiopia
Note: The following is an excerpt from a prayer letter/newsletter distributed by Joanne De Jong , a Mennonite Church Canada Witness worker in Ethiopia, on August 8, 2024. I’ve been so sad. While we had our coffee this morning, under a make-shift tent on the street, we watched five young men help tear down their friend’s…
Never forgotten or forsaken
When I was five years old, two forces shook my world to its core. Before this, I had a loving family, a good school and a beautiful country. But that year, 1960, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded my country of Eritrea. A dark cloud of fear hung over the land and the people. People spoke…
Threads of unity – Diversity in faith and tradition
The tilet is a quintessential feature of Ethiopian traditional attire, deeply rooted in our religious, ethnic and identity symbolism. Crafting the tilet involves intricate weaving techniques, utilizing continuous extra weft threads of varying colours to achieve specific desired designs. This intricate process requires a diverse range of colours, thread types and patterns, demanding significant time and effort to create…
Over 1,000 Mennonites killed in Ethiopia
Let us pray Violence has devastated Meserete Kristos Church (MKC), the Mennonite body in Ethiopia. As of February 12, armed groups had burned 49 MKC churches to the ground, looted and damaged another 81 churches, and killed 1,231 MKC members, including 31 church leaders. Inter-tribal violence in western Oromiya regional state, home to nearly one…
Students dream of new churches in South Sudan
A recent article in Anabaptist World stated there were no known Anabaptist congregations in South Sudan. Praise God that that is no longer the case. Gatjiak (Simon) Tongyik, one of the new students sponsored by Mennonite Church Alberta to attend the Meserete Kristos Seminary in Bishoftu, Ethiopia, says there is now one small Mennonite church in…
Uncommon global access
The fact that Mennonites are spread throughout much of the world provides the global Anabaptist community with rare access to on-the-ground, first-person comment from both hotspots and forgotten corners of the globe. Sometimes we make good use of this access, sometimes we do not. In this issue—the first of three digital-only issues this summer—we hear…
‘We have no safe area under the sky’
For much of my life I associated Ethiopia with famine. I’m just old enough to recall the searing scenes from Ethiopia in the mid-1980s: windswept, dull-beige landscapes; skeletal cattle; distended bellies; flies; people crowding trucks laden with sacks of food; and charitable rock concerts. It was the most famous famine of modern times, made so…
‘Come over and help us so that we can help the needy ones’
Pastor Desalegn Abebe’s message to North American Mennonites is simple. Abebe is the head of Meserete Kristos Church (MKC), the Anabaptist denomination in Ethiopia, where 17 months of civil violence has led to 12 MKC churches being burned, 44 displaced and 163 full-time ministers and their families displaced and without income. Speaking via video link…
Ethiopian Mennonites killed, churches burned
More than 400 Mennonite churches in Ethiopia have been affected by civil strife that started in November 2020. Though information is hard to verify and numbers will likely rise, about eight Mennonite churches have been burned and eight church members have died, including two full-time ministers. This according to Pastor Desalegn Abebe, president of Meserete…
