Church wants to spread the ‘Living Word’
Church of the Living Word in Ottawa became an emerging church in Mennonite Church Eastern Canada in 2009, although it was founded four years earlier. Church of the Living Word has some members, including Pastor Getachew Woldeyes’s wife, who belonged to Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia, a Mennonite World Conference (MWC) member church. Most of…
Becoming Mennonite
When I reflect on how I became a Mennonite, I find myself agreeing with what a peasant once told an Irish priest. The priest, who approached the peasant praying by the roadside, said, “You must be close to God!” The peasant replied in a way that points to the precedence of God’s love over our…
Blessed in the journey
In 1980, Grantham Mennonite Brethren Church in St. Catharines, Ont., sponsored me to come to Canada. I had been living in a refugee camp in Nongkhai, Thailand, for a year after fleeing Laos due to communism and civil war. When I arrived in Canada, the Mennonite Church warmly welcomed me, although I did not speak…
Seeking asylum for freedom and justice
“A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and can not really know freedom.” (Friedrich Hayek) Sudan achieved independence from British colonialism in January 1956. A protracted civil war followed, raging between successive…
Adopted and given my wings
I was born in Bukavu in Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre). My parents were polygamous so I didn’t have a great family structure. I grew up Roman Catholic and then, at age 17, I was baptized in the Pentecostal church. As a child, life in Congo was extremely difficult. I lived under the dictatorship…
Ministry in Richmond and in the Punjab
I’m not exactly a new Canadian as I arrived in Vancouver back in 1989, leaving behind my hometown of Dadwan, Punjab, India. My grandparents were traditional Hindu and Sikh, but my father joined the British army and so converted to Christianity, though he was a very nominal Christian. My mother had been born into a…
Led to a team of fixers and helpers
I am, and always have been, a “doer,” and my late husband was the same. If people needed help, we found a way to help them. If something was broken, we found a way to fix it. I guess God decided we should meet a large team of fixers and helpers known as the Mennonites.…
The last church I visited
My wife and I arrived in Vancouver in 1994 with our two sons, aged 9 and 12. I had been an air traffic controller, then law enforcement officer in Hong Kong. As a landed immigrant in Canada, I found some odd jobs before going back to school at the B.C. Institute of Technology and beginning…
