Stitched together by God

Tim Miller Dyck

Editor/Publisher

Editorial

In my last editorial, I described worshipping with and meeting my sisters and brothers in Christ at Holyrood Mennonite Church in Edmonton. The congregation has many refugees and recent immigrants from Africa, including George Mutabazi from Rwanda. Over lunch, I asked him about his experiences.

He told me how much he had appreciated the visits and help from Holyrood and Edmonton’s Mennonite Centre for Newcomers when he first came to Canada. “When you are a Christian and get to a Mennonite church, it is a place to feel safe, share with others the Word of God and keep your Christianity, and raise my daughter in a way that is good for her,” he told me. In Africa, he had never heard of Mennonites, but the welcome and practical care that Holyrood showed him when he came brought him into its fellowship.

I also asked him what stood out for him at the church in comparison to his experience in Africa. “In Africa, the worship is very different,” he said. “If someone comes in [there], it can interrupt the timetable and take longer. Here, it is really, really organized.”

As he said this, I was seeing in a new way how uptight our worship life is sometimes!

The experience of blending cultures and backgrounds is especially visible in our churches that have large numbers of newcomers to Canada, but it goes on in many ways across the entire Canadian Mennonite Church.

I remember a story from the last Mennonite World Conference Global Assembly (the global gathering of Mennonites). Pauline Aguilar arrived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, carrying cloth from North American, South American, Asian and other African countries. There, she and hundreds of others stitched together 258 squares of fabric. With the addition of another 12 squares later in California, the Koinonia HIV/AIDS Quilt was finished. If you saw this quilt as it travelled through Canada afterwards, you will have noticed those who pieced it together sometimes stitched in a name, either their own or that of a loved one who had been affected by AIDS.

I later heard Mennonite World Conference general secretary Larry Miller say how strange the European Mennonite tradition of quilting seemed to some of those African Mennonites that helped make it: “It was stitched together by about 400 people, many of whom who had never done a quilt and didn’t know that this was part of the family’s tradition. [They] wondered, ‘Why are you cutting up that good material to just sew it back together?’” he related with a smile.

The quilt is a metaphor for Mennonite Church Canada: many shapes, varied colours, and much cutting-and-reshaping go into creating what becomes an unexpectedly lovely object. There is misunderstanding and difference, yes. Yet, with mutual respect, commitment to stay at it, and with time, beauty emerges. This is what God does: He takes us from rags to richness, remaking each of us while stitching us all together anew into his church.

An MWC release on the quilt describes that by the fourth day of quilting together, “a sense of community had developed as stitchers learned to know each other by name.” The quilt’s name is a good fit. Koinonia is the Greek word used both to describe the fellowship of believers with each other and our joining in Christ in the communion meal. It comes from a family of words that describe a willing and ready sharing with each other. In Acts 2, what believers did to show mutuality in sharing their resources is described using a word from the same root.

A willing and ready sharing of our gifts with each other, a steadfast commitment to mutuality and connections kept strong through the trustworthiness of our bonds in Christ’s body, is what koinonia should be for us.

Obituaries: As I announced earlier this summer, we are launching a new obituary section (see page 11). This is in response to the closing of our church’s separate magazine, Der Bote, which published many of these. (Obituaries are open to all of you, not just Der Bote readers.) We will also be publishing obituaries online and indexing them. Details on submission information, costs and funding are available by contacting our office or sending an e-mail to obituaries@canadianmennonite.org.