Former CBC president dies at 81
Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, B.C., is remembering its former president, Walter (Wally) Unger, who died May 9 at the age of 81 in hospice care in Abbotsford. Unger was born in Saskatchewan as the youngest of seven children. He grew up in St. Catharines, Ont., where he married his wife, Laura Redekopp, and began…
CPTer receives peace activism award
Esther Kern, a former Canada coordinator of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), received the Muriel Duckworth Award for Peace Activism at the Voice of Women for Peace International Women’s Day dinner held at Friend’s (Quaker) House in Toronto on March 8, 2018. In her remarks upon receiving her award, Kern, a member of Valleyview Mennonite Church…
Evangelical social justice
I find the Catholic process of declaring saints un-Anabaptist and weird—especially the part about verifying miracles–but the Vatican’s latest candidate for sainthood is someone who has shaped my Mennonite faith. In February 1977, the established powers in El Salvador, a nation of death squads and deep church-state-oligarchy ties, settled on Oscar Romero as a safe…
‘The Lord has been my guide through life’
Esther Patkau would likely not have considered herself a remarkable woman, yet she lived a remarkable life. Born on Aug. 23, 1927, near Hanley, Sask., she knew at the tender age of four that she wanted to be a missionary. She never wavered from that goal. After elementary school, she took high school courses by…
Filmmaker dedicated to telling the Mennonite story
Using pre-digital equipment, Otto Klassen works on one of his more than 50 films that document the lives of Mennonites. (Photo courtesy of Ken Reddig) Otto Klassen dedicated many years of his life to making documentaries that tell Mennonite stories. A self-taught filmmaker, he produced a total of 84 films in his lifetime, most of…
‘I do believe in prayer because I believe in poetry’
Sarah Ens’s writing career started at the age of six with a story suspiciously similar to the children’s book, Julie and the Wolves. But since those early days, she has grown into an award-winning poet. Earlier this month, she won an honourable mention and $150 in a competition for the Young Buck Poetry Prize, a…
The quiet labours of a Low German translator
Ed Zacharias started with Exodus, translating word by word into Low German (Plautdietsch). For a decade he worked at it, sometimes with institutional backing, sometimes as a volunteer hunkered in his home office, relying on help from interested Wycliffe personnel and a loose network of Low German promoters. He was motivated by a love of…
Door-to-door on the colonies
While some might see Low German as the arcane language of people stuck in the past, Jehovah’s Witnesses have embraced it. For years, they have dedicated considerable energy to learning the language, translating materials and reaching out to Low German-speaking peoples. They have a centre in Blumenau, a Mennonite community in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, and…
A leader of leaders
Born into a Western Ontario Mennonite Conference (WOM)—formerly the Amish Mennonite Conference of Ontario—family, Ralph Lebold grew up with strong leaders in a congregational polity. Each congregation had a bishop, minister and deacon working together, although with separate roles. While ordained, these leaders were unpaid and often untrained, although many Amish Mennonites attended the Ontario…
‘Participation, not performance’
Like most musicians and artists, Brandon Leis uses his gifts in many places and in many ways to make a living. Most recently, he was appointed as the new music director of the Menno Singers, a Waterloo Region choir founded in 1955 by Abner Martin. Besides that, since 2003 he has been the music director…
