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MC Alberta calls congregants to prayer with Zoom
At 7:30 on Monday mornings, members of Mennonite Church Alberta wake up to pray together on Zoom. Each participant is invited to light a candle, open a print copy of the Anabaptist prayer book, Take our Moments and our Days, or the accompanying digital app, and pull out their Mennonite hymnal for a time of…
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MWC holds online prayer hour on Pentecost
“There is lockdown and physical distancing, but even so, we can meet in prayer,” said Hanna Soren, a member of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) Deacons Commission, who offered a prayer at the close of the organization’s first online prayer meeting on May 31. “From different countries, we can come together and pray together in…
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Regional churches of Mennonite Church Canada call for prayer
As rallies and protests continue across the United States and Canada in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the five regional churches of Mennonite Church Canada released a statement yesterday asking congregations to set a specific time of prayer this coming Sunday, June 7. The statement asks…
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Mennonite encounters with contemplative prayer
Doug Klassen, who now serves as Mennonite Church Canada’s executive minister, confessed to a fellow pastor that he couldn’t pray for more than 10 minutes. “I came to a place where I kept running into myself when I was praying,” Klassen recalls of his early days as a youth pastor. “I’d make my request, then…
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Watch: ‘Peace be with you’ in nine languages
Peace Sunday is coming up on Nov. 10 and Ontario Mennonite Music Camp has created a resource to help churches mark the occasion. In the short video below, OMMC campers and staff demonstrate how to say “Peace be with you” in Amharic, French, German, Lao, Mandarin, Spanish and three other languages. “We would love if…
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Prayer for the List of Coming Disasters
This is a prayer we are reluctant to pray because it is so hard to name what we fear out loud. We go through our days trying to pretend that life as normal will continue forever, but that is harder and harder to sustain. And so we need this prayer where we lay out the…
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Broad prayers in a time of fear
It has become a routine yet still shocking news report: another shooting in a quiet neighbourhood or at a shopping centre, nightclub, school or place of worship. Then come the familiar offers of “thoughts and prayers” for the victims and their loved ones. Sadly, there have been too many opportunities to pray these prayers recently. …
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Pray for the city
Nearly 20 years ago, my husband accepted a job offer in Winnipeg that resulted in our family’s move from Ontario, a place we had called home for 22 years. While I appreciated his opportunity, I was also quite distressed. Like some sensitive flowers, I do not transplant readily, and the move was hard on me.…
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Praying through the decades
A Sunday school assignment in the 1940s to exchange letters with a missionary began a Canadian woman’s lifelong investment in prayer for India. Erla Buehler. (Photo courtesy of MWC) Erla Buehler was a teenager when a Sunday school teacher at Elmira Mennonite Church in Ontario assigned her to write to Lena Graber, a registered nurse…
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The daily phone-call prayer
Over the course of our lives, we likely offer many prayers in a variety of ways. Some are formal, memorized prayers said for specific occasions. A family table grace recited before meals. The comforting words of Psalm 23. The Lord’s Prayer spoken as one body during worship. Author Anne Lamott categorizes “essential” prayers into three…
