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A collaborative leadership approach
We have a lot of pastoral transitions happening at the moment in Mennonite Church British Columbia. It is a time that has given me pause to think about how we do church ministry and what our pastoral ministry positions look like. Our church polity manual, A Shared Understanding of Ministerial Leadership, mentions the importance of…
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Valaqua: A place where people express God’s love
I have worked at Camp Valaqua for a total of six summers, and this summer I am back on staff after being away for a few years. Valaqua is a place where I learned many things. It was my first job. I learned how to work with a large group of people cooperatively. Valaqua is…
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The most important word
“With” may be the most important word in the Christian faith. So argues Sam Wells, an Anglican priest-theologian, in Incarnational Ministry, a book about being with the church. In the chapter “Being with the afflicted,” Wells uses the children’s book, Now One Foot, Now the Other, that tells of Bobby, a toddler who is named…
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Things I noticed at Gathering 2019
I didn’t used to get nervous leading singing. There were times before leading at Mennonite Church Canada’s Gathering 2019 when I was nervous. I was less nervous leading 6,500 youth and sponsors at the St. Louis ’99 Youth Convention than some points before leading a few hundred in Abbotsford, B.C., last month. It’s made me wonder…
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Walking with youth toward a fearless faith
It is difficult to know what the future holds for youth ministry within Mennonite churches in Canada. Change is happening fast for some churches as they experience more immediate declines in the number of youth and children in their congregations. With regular participation now defined as congregants attending one Sunday a month and their diminishing…
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Building resource connections
CommonWord is just over four years old. In that short time we have doubled our sales (reaching more than 10,000 retail customers last year), more than doubled the number of website users, and have continued to circulate half of our loan materials outside Manitoba—and increasingly to people outside our immediate Mennonite Church Canada and Canadian…
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Church relations on so many different levels
You are what you eat, or can it be said you are who you work with? There’s also the phrase, “two peas in a pod,” but this time there’s three of us. On the surface, it could be said that Kevin Barkowsky, Garry Janzen and I are nothing alike, but, as Mennonite Church British Columbia…
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A conversation with a Buddhist
I was recently invited with a handful of other clergypersons to lunch at a local seniors home. Between the main course and dessert, the conversation turned, predictably, to the decline of the church. There was talk of the good old days when churches were full, the culture was Christian and people dressed up on Sundays. There…
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Walking together
This year, Mennonite Church Saskatchewan has been “deepening our walk with one another” as part of a three-year initiative to call us to deeper life with Christ, ourselves and our neighbours. In a report prepared by the regional church’s reference group, there is a quote by Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls you to is…
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Experiencing God’s love affair with the world
So I’m out walking in the beautiful spring sunshine and I pass a church that has a large empty parking lot with a sign that says “No Parking.” As I turn the corner, I see the official church sign that states “Everyone is Welcome.” The incongruity between these beacons to the public makes me chuckle…
