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Historical Society quietly contributes to national identity
Historian Laureen Harder-Gissing does not want to be heard saying, “You should know your history,” the way someone might say, “You should eat your vegetables.” She does not want people to feel badly if they do not know their history; she just wants it to be available at those “points in our lives when the…
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World Fellowship Sunday: A communion of 500 years
Every year on the Sunday closest to January 21, Mennonite World Conference (MWC) invites its 107 member churches to join in a celebration of World Fellowship Sunday. (See the 2019 worship resources here.) The worship themes vary from year to year, but the rationale for the timing of the event has remained constant: on January…
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Experiencing Christmas by lamplight
Old-fashioned oil lamps graced each windowsill in the tiny sanctuary, their steady flames bathing the room in warm light as people filed into the pews. The people came to experience “Christmas by lamplight.” The Mennonite Heritage Museum and Interpretive Centre in Rosthern hosted the event in the church that stands next to the museum on…
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Women in church vocations
To encourage women to enter church-related work, the General Conference Mennonite Church began the “Women in Church Vocations” program in 1957. Pictured, Elmer Ediger discusses the new program with interested young women at Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg. Women recruited to the program would pursue a college education and be mentored into such positions…
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Identity, boundaries and new ways of thinking
Mennonites in Canada today are a diverse group, and the old stereotype of Mennonites as German-speaking agrarian people fits only a small part of the picture. The history conference, “A people of diversity: Mennonites in Canada since 1970,” held at the University of Winnipeg from Nov. 15 to 17, 2018, provided an opportunity to…
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‘Bring us beyond our own stories’
Among the voluminous lists of those disappeared during the dark times in what is now Ukraine, researchers have found roughly 400 pages of Mennonite names, with five or six names per page. That is just for Zaporizhzhia province. The lists for all Ukrainian provinces are available online, though printed in Cyrillic script. Each name a…
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Biography turns into Old Colony history
Although Bruce Guenther set out to write a biography of his grandfather, Herman D.W. Friesen, it turned out to be more of a history of the Old Colony Mennonites in the Hague-Osler area of Saskatchewan. Guenther had no diaries or personal letters to work with, and some of the relatives were reticent to talk about…
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Bicycle trip
Did your summer include a bicycle trip? In 1891, 19-year-old Fred Coffman, far left, his brother William, and their friends Abram and Aaron Kolb biked more than 700 kilometres from Elkhart, Ind., to Niagara Falls, Ont. Fred would become Bishop S.F. Coffman, an influential Ontario Mennonite leader. Abram would become a publisher of Mennonite periodicals,…
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Family tradition goes back 500 years
“Pfeffernusse,” Dora repeated after me in amazement! She couldn’t believe that my Christmas treats were the same as hers. It was Nov. 7, 2002, and we were sitting around the pool at Toddy’s Backpacker Hostel in Alice Springs, Australia. Nostalgia crept among us; we had wandered far and wouldn’t be home for Christmas. At the…
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Johnny Kehler
Johnny Kehler, left, with his plane and George Groening, at Matheson Island, Man. Groening grew up near Lowe Farm, Man., and served the Mennonite church community for decades. As a long-serving leader, he not only witnessed change but instituted changes as well. He started his preaching at Lowe Farm Bergthaler Mennonite Church, was the pastor…
