Helping each other follow Jesus
How can we help each other to follow Jesus? I’m sure I’m not alone when I relate that my own journey of discipleship has sometimes felt more like a solo expedition than a corporate adventure. I have longed for more camaraderie on the road, to share with fellow disciples the questions, doubts, struggles, joys and…
Called to hear
I have a selective hearing problem. When I’m at home on a Thursday night, weary from a day’s worth of important religious listening, the certain pleas of a younger family member of mine to discuss the latest plot twist in an all-too-predictable cartoon become easy to ignore. When I’m at work on a Friday afternoon and…
‘Rooted in Christ, reaching out in love’
COVID-19 has forced most of us to embrace that most rousing of Anabaptist virtues: simplicity. Our lives have been simplified, stripped down to the essentials. We have gone out only when needed, we have bought only what we must, we have travelled only when there was no other choice. Hopefully we learn lessons from this…
Beginning the journey in prayer
As the people of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, we’re going on a journey of courageous imagination. Over the course of the next year we will dream, imagine and listen to each other’s stories of faith as we seek to hear God’s voice and discern together where God is calling us in the years ahead. The…
Raising reconciliation from the dead
“Reconciliation is dead.” I saw that stark message on a sign at the Landback Camp in Victoria Park in Kitchener, Ont., in June 2020. Local Indigenous people established the camp as part of a larger effort to assert their presence and reclaim their space on the Haldimand Tract in Ontario. As chair of the Truth…
Transition in leadership
My first season of a church in an intentional pastoral transition process was as an associate pastor with my home church in Surrey, B.C. I joined the church when it was first planted and was called to be the youth pastor in its 12th year of existence. The church’s planting pastor heard God’s call to…
The crowd
Many of us are taking crowds very seriously these days and avoiding them as much as possible. For the sake of public health, I cannot encourage this enough. But there’s a crowd we have been avoiding since long before the pandemic started. That crowd is a constant reality throughout the gospel stories, following Jesus wherever…
Refined, pared back, purified
In his book Transforming Mission, missiologist David J. Bosch famously pictured the church’s mission as “a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of Epiphany” with our life together, our prayers, our programs always “pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world.” We gather before the starlit cradle, where Zion’s light casts…
Church needs to be like a choir
Happy New Year. In reflecting on the church for 2021, I’ve been impacted by my experience creating virtual choirs—those videos where choristers sing at home, into their phone, and the video and audio from that phone recording get put together into one cohesive choir. I have had a lot of interaction with choristers on how…
Growing with our global faith family
In the early 2000s, I sat in the church office of Pastor Wang in southern China. He was lamenting the fact that 300 people from his congregation had signed up to take baptismal classes during services over the Christmas weekend. I tried to encourage him by saying that that number was beyond a Canadian congregation’s…
