Readers write: March 5, 2012

Going beyond generalizations
Re: “Yet another outspoken white man,” Nov. 14, 2011, page 10.

Aiden Enns’s conundrum of tending to “favour the words of whites and males” is an intriguing generalization. About whom is Enns referring as being partial to, as he puts it, “many valuable words from many important men”? Our society? Country? Faith community? Or himself, as in the royal “we”?

No matter. Whether Enns was writing about his own preference to seek, listen to, and be moved by the words of white males, or his perception that this is true for Mennonites or Christians or Canadians, I appreciate his invitation to conversation. Here’s a response from a pale-skinned, middle-aged, female Mennonite cancer survivor and parent/advocate for two children with health and “ability” challenges:

• Transformation doesn’t just come from exposure to words. For many of us, it is relationship with transformed people which seeds and renews our own transformation. For many, transformation is also born and renewed in nature, music, visual art and other forms of creative expression.
   
• It’s not just about seeing more Christ-like ways of doing or being. For those of us who have less, are suffering or unwelcome, it is often more about finding hope, worth and belonging: receiving the gospel, which can, I’ve been told, lead to more Christ-like ways of doing or being.
   
• Those who have less, suffer or are less welcome have traditionally received less airtime. How many widows, people with leprosy, sightless folk and children were selected as canonized contributors to the Bible? Partly this is related to the tendencies of the editors and publicists of the day, but could it also be that those who aren’t currently holding power are otherwise occupied? We are busy changing diapers; tending to food, clothing, shelter, and appointments with practitioners; and otherwise caring for ourselves and those around us; as well as teaching the next generation to do the same.

Despite all this, there are many women and others from outside the margins of health, power or welcome whose words express the good news of God’s love for us in such powerful and engaging ways that it seeds new life in countless others. Aiden Enns, I hope you continue to expand your repertoire and perspective.

Maybe you’ll visit a church like ours—we’d love to have you—where there is more often than not a female at the pulpit, or participate in a spiritual retreat for writers and artists like those held each year at King’s Fold Retreat Centre in southern Alberta.

Lise Werner, Cochrane, Alta.

Young people lead by their financial examples
Re: “Lay up treasures . . . or buy an iPhone?”, Jan. 23, page 34.

I read the recent Young Voices article with much interest and great delight. The three young adults profiled exhibit a keen understanding of how Christians should approach stewardship.

At a time when donations to many churches and area churches are declining, the actions and attitudes of these young people inspire hope for future generations. Each of these individuals has developed a strategy for dealing with money issues while still placing a high priority on supporting the church and other organizations. They view supporting their local church as a priority and an opportunity to be involved in the work of the kingdom. “It is our responsibility to give financially [to the church], and sometimes that means cutting back on [spending for ourselves],” says Annika Krause, Sherbrooke Mennonite Church, Vancouver, B.C.

Clearly, there is a lesson here for all of us. These young people have set an example with their understanding that God owns the resources bestowed on us; it is our duty to manage them wisely.

The Mennonite Foundation of Canada has made numerous presentations on faithful stewardship and living generously, but the lesson-by-example from Krause, Leah Reesor-Keller and Joel Wiens is far more moving and powerful. Their actions beg all of us to re-examine our own level of generosity.

Darren Pries-Klassen, St. Catharines, Ont.
Darren Pries-Klassen is executive director of the Mennonite Foundation of Canada.
 

What wasn’t said about Durban, oikus
As a work in progress towards a more wholesome, collectively arrived at, editorial standard as applied to letters to the editor pages (“A reasoned discussion,” Oct. 31, 2011, page 2), might the season now be ripe for a similarly refined editorial standard to be applied to the remainder of the paper? Not as censorship, but exacting a higher qualitative journalistic standard?

Two items in the Jan. 23 issue jump immediately to mind.

In a letter from Canadian Foodgrains Bank on page 12, the writer makes a bid for “What really happened in Durban,” but then never comes close to disclosing that not only did the Harper government refuse the age-old democratic practice of funding opposition MPs’ attendance, but filled with chicanery afterwards, denigrated them for not attending! As well, the letter is willfully stone deaf to the larger fact that Canada made a complete U-turn and reneged 100 percent on its remaining Kyoto commitments!

It is the height of a double standard for the writer to then be able to advance the spin that, “As for the Foodgrains Bank, we celebrate any movement in the direction of addressing climate change, however incremental,” bending over backwards to go along to get along with a unilateral Harper pronouncement, a pronouncement even the letter itself sees well short of any independently verifiable standard measures of implementation!

And in the “Salvation comes to a rich house” feature on page 4, Bruno Dyck advances a new and novel understanding of Luke’s use of oikus by casting it in today’s terms as a “goods-and-services-producing organization,” or perhaps as “company,” but then forgets, even in fine-print, to add the all-important “buyer beware” company “limited” qualifier.

I found this article to be of much interest, but once again beware of the devil in the detail, even when omitted. Having reframed oikus to include, but not name, corporations as having unlimited legal irresponsibility, the writer carefully and adroitly posits the questions: Is it not the case that “salvation is something that happens in community? . . . Perhaps salvation is something that happens when managers enact organizational structures and systems that decrease the gap between rich and poor, and that foster social justice.”

I have zero argument with the questions asked! However, Dyck, as a 21st-century “business professor,” could hardly be unaware that the legal structure of corporations is guided wherever possible by the principle of one dollar/one vote, the equivalent of might makes right. But if the gap between the rich and the poor is to have any biblically based redress to it, the democratic socially just egalitarian standard of one person one vote is the minimum systemic standard by which to move forward. 

Yet Dyck neither addresses—nor even names—this structural systemic inequity yoked across our backs as made even more plainly visible by the Occupy Wall Street movement, revealing rather sagely, “I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.”

Eduard Hiebert, St. Francois Xavier, Man.