Tag: worship

  • On harmony

    On harmony

    I’ll be honest right from the beginning: when it comes to music in worship, I’m a hymn-person. Always have been. Especially as a youth, when everyone assumed that because of my age I must be a fan of praise-and-worship music! It’s one of the things that I love about worshipping in a Mennonite congregation: the…

  • Singing with the Spirit

    Singing with the Spirit

    “I will sing with the Spirit, but I will sing with understanding.” These words, from I Corinthians 14:15, formed the basis of Marilyn Houser Hamm’s recent music workshop at Nutana Park Mennonite Church in Saskatoon. Houser Hamm, who hails from Manitoba, is well known within Mennonite Church Canada as a musician, music educator, composer and…

  • Mennonites to compile new hymnal and more

    Mennonites to compile new hymnal and more

    Meeting the week of April 13 in Minneapolis, representatives from MennoMedia, Mennonite Church Canada, and Mennonite Church USA laid the foundation for a new Mennonite song collection that is anticipated to be released in 2020. The new song collection will be more than a printed hymnal, and will certainly include an electronic version as well…

  • Unforgettable days in Chile and Uruguay

    Unforgettable days in Chile and Uruguay

    A lot has happened since I last wrote. The ten days in Chile were especially unforgettable! Chile, with seven climate sub-types, is 4,300 km (2,670 miles) long and 350 km (220 miles) wide.  I was almost down to Antarctica! Chile leads Latin American nations in rankings of human development, income per capita, globalization, transparency, and state…

  • “You lost me”? Young adults in/and/of the church

    “You lost me”? Young adults in/and/of the church

    Earlier this month, I was one of many who gathered in the new Marpeck Commons building at Canadian Mennonite University to hear from a panel of “young adults” on their age group and the church. [1] Judging by the size of the audience (they had to go get extra chairs!), and a feature article on…

  • Patterns of Empire

    While living in the United States, I thought a lot about J. Nelson Kraybill’s “Apocalypse and Allegiance: Worship, Politics, and Devotion in the Book of Revelation” and I’ve referred to it here and here on this blog already. I read it shortly after it came out while I was on a personal retreat in Pennsylvania.…

  • Changing the language of worship a test of love

    Changing the language of worship a test of love

    Faith Mennonite Church, Leamington, Ont., is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but its memories are tinged with sorrow as the new congregation grew out of a painful church split. In the late 1950s, Leamington United Mennonite Church, like many other Mennonite congregations, was experiencing deep division about whether the language of worship should continue…

  • End-of-Summer Worship

    After the sum­mer of peo­ple com­ing and going, hol­i­days, and uncer­tain sched­ules, we finally returned to wor­ship. Although it felt strange com­ing back up the hill after so many weeks away, enter­ing the space of wor­ship and excit­ing greet­ings of old friends and a few new faces, I sensed famil­iar­ity, warmth, and rejoic­ing in community.…