As excitement continues to grow for the global Assembly, Mennonite World Conference (MWC) has created a variety of free resources for congregations and communities to use as they talk about and promote Pennsylvania 2015. All are available on the MWC website.
Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba’s 50th anniversary benefit concert will be held on April 18, 2015, at 7:00 p.m., at Knox United Church in Winnipeg. The fundraising event for affordable housing in Manitoba will feature former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Joe Clark as keynote speaker.
Dieunold Sterling works on a motor at his motorcycle repair business in Desarmes, Haiti, as his nephew Dumas John watches. The advanced mechanical skills he learned at a vocational school that MCC helped re-energize, allowed Sterling to get an education and develop a business in his hometown without going to overcrowded Port-au-Prince. (MCC photo by Silas Crews)
Planting opportunity, rebuilding lives
In Cabaret, 39 kilometres outside the capital city of Port-au-Prince, breezes flutter the sheer fabric hanging in the doorway of Gladys Joseph’s new home. There’s room in the yard for her children to play. And, for the first time since she was sent to Haiti’s capital city as a child, she has a garden full of corn, beans, manioc and okra.
Anne Garber Kompaoré took time out from her Hebrew studies to discover the geography of Israel. (Photo credit: Mennonite Mission Network)
Daniel and Anne Kompaoré discuss their ministries.(Photo by Lynda Hollinger-Janzen/Mennonite Mission Network)
The Sicite people, a small ethnic group in southwestern Burkina Faso, stepped onto the world’s linguistic stage when their language was awarded a coveted place in the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in September 2014.
Stories about music, the environment, justice, violence, the Mennonite-Anabaptist community, and sexuality got our readers’ attention this past year. Here’s a glimpse at what was popular among our online readers:
Cesar Garcia and Rick Stiffney (MWC photo)
Leaders of Anabaptist/Mennonite healthcare institutions and healthcare professionals will hold a conjoint international meeting during an international leadership summit July 20-21, 2015. The summit will be sponsored by Mennonite World Conference and Mennonite Health Services.
Rebecca Dali, a member of the Church of the Brethren, visits a displaced family in a makeshift camp they fled to because of violence in northeast Nigeria. (Photo courtesy of Rebecca Dali, on the Church of Brethren website)
For the second time in four months Mennonite World Conference issued an urgent appeal for prayer, this time for the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria – EYN), which is experiencing horrendous violence and persecution by Boko Haram.
The MWC music ensemble leads the international assembly in song. (Credit: Merle Good)
Mennonite World Conference is seeking gifted vocalists to join the International Vocal Ensemble for the Pennsylvania 2015 Assembly.
Joanne Dietzel of Lancaster, Pa., is coordinator of the Mennonite World Conference Prayer Network. (Credit: Liesa Unger)
Mennonite World Conference is establishing a prayer network, recognizing the importance of prayer as preparations are made for PA 2015, the global Assembly being planned for July 21-26, 2015, in Harrisburg, PA.
Jasem Mohammed carries a food package distributed by MCC partner Zakho Small Villages Project at the Garmawa displaced persons camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Like most people living in the camp, he fled the city of Mosul after its takeover by Islamic State. (MCC Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler)
It’s not just you. The news was been particularly bad last year. Islamic State is gaining ground, while videos of beheadings and other violence circulate online.
The newest building on the campus of Canadian Mennonite University. “We are honoured to open this spectacular space,” says university president Cheryl Pauls. (CMU photo)
Canadian Mennonite University will celebrate the grand opening of Marpeck Commons, CMU’s new library, learning commons, and bridge, on Sat., Nov. 29, 2014.
The public is invited to join CMU staff, faculty, and students at 2299 Grant Ave. for the grand opening celebration from 1:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. An open house is scheduled for 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
In response to an extremely large snowfall, volunteers from the Drayton, Ont. area, shovel snow off the roof of a dairy barn near West Seneca, N.Y. (Credit: Paul Hunt)
Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers often describe their service as being “the hands and feet of Jesus.” During the weekend of Nov. 21-23, those hands—and backs—were working hard, shovelling the historic snowfall in upstate New York.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) has invited its member churches and partners to join the World YWCA campaign “NoXcuses for Violence against Women.”
Bobby Switzer, organizer of the hymn marathon, leads a hymn during a Goshen College chapel service. In 2012, he started the Goshen College Hymn Club, which regularly invites the campus community to sing four-part hymns out of the blue Mennonite hymnal. (Photo by Brian Yoder Schlabach)
Singers work their way through the “Hymnal: A Worship Book” just before midnight during the “Sing for Peace” hymn marathon at Goshen College. (Photo by Brett Conrad)
Bobby Switzer did not grow up going to church or singing, but he has become passionate about hymns and congregational music since coming to Goshen College four years ago.
When he started the Goshen College Hymn Club in 2012, little did he know that he would end up singing through every verse of all 658 hymns in Hymnal: A Worship Book, in a 30-hour marathon of song.
Jewel and Richard Showalter
We are Richard and Jewel (Wenger) Showalter. As church planters, missionaries, educators, mission administrators, parents and now grandparents, we have walked as part of the Mennonite family throughout our lives.
Laura Funk and Gilbert Detillieux live on the bridge between the Mennonite and Catholic faith. (Photo courtesy of authors)
The authors participate in the activities of Bridgefolk, “a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other's traditions, explore each other's practices, and honor each other's contribution to the mission of Christ's Church” (Bridgefolk website).
Goshen College students will sing all 658 songs in the Mennonite hymnal from Nov. 14-16 in order to raise money for Christian Peacemaker Teams, an international peacemaking agency. (Credit: Goshen College)
With the goal of uniting in harmony to bring peace to a troubled world, Goshen College’s Hymn Club will bring together students and community members to sing continuously through every verse of all 658 songs in Hymnal: A Worship Book.
Chester and Sara Jane Wenger on their 70th wedding anniversary (Credit: Greta Shenk Bucher)
I am profoundly reluctant to write this letter because I know there are those it will wound deeply. But I have also come to the conviction that I can no longer hide the light the Lord has lit within me, under a bushel. I want to share with you what the Lord has been telling me and my dear life companion.
Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander has proposed a bill that would ban marriage for underage children and make polygamy grounds for deportation. (RNS photo courtesy Michael Swan/Flickr)
Canada is weighing legislation that would ban arranged marriages of minors and make polygamy grounds for deportation.
The “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act,” introduced on November 5 by Chris Alexander, minister of citizenship and immigration, would set 16 as the minimum national age for marriage in Canada.
Participants of the Thai Anabaptist conference pray for Khmu church leaders, after worship at a Khmu church in a Thai village. (Credit: Sarah Schoenhals)
Prior to Lek (not his real name) believing in Jesus, ten of his fifteen children died. After he became a Christian, his children stopped dying. People in his village noticed!
While “deeply shaken” by the terror caused by IS (Islamic State) militias in Iraq and Syria, “we believe that the situation does not render pacifist convictions obsolete,” declared the faculty of the Theological Seminary Bienenberg in a mid-September statement.
The Drayton Riders cycled in the Ride for Refuge, which raised almost $20,000. Back row (l to r): Pauline Weiland, Ange Dewar, Nicole Lienhart, Ron Weber, Luke Hiller. Front row (l to r): Travis Wiens and Jason Martin. Missing from photo: Joel Hiller. (Photo provided by MC Canada)
Henry Krause (l) and Willard Metzger (r) joined 54 other riders across Canada for Mennonite Church Canada’s Ride for Refuge. (Photo provided by MC Canada)
On October 4, 56 cyclists and eight teams in six locations across the country took part in Mennonite Church Canada’s Ride for Refuge. Together they raised almost $20,000 in support of a ministry project for youth at risk in Botswana.
The MHC Gallery exhibit, IDENTIDAD/IDENTITY features three artists with roots in South America. From L to R: Gabriela Agüero (Argentina), Lucy Riquelme (Chile), and Fanny Gómez de Correa (Colombia) stand in front of Riquelme’s mixed media painting, Mapuche’s Kultrún. (Credit: Ray Dirks)
On Sept. 19, 2014, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights received national attention for its opening in Winnipeg. On the same day, the Mennonite Heritage Centre Art Gallery quietly launched its own exhibit on human rights.
Afternoon prayer at the St. George Church in the historic Assyrian Christian town of Alqosh in the Nineveh Plain of Iraqi Kurdistan. Locals adhere to the Chaldean Catholic religion. The town was nearly overrun by Islamic fighters earlier this summer, when Peshmerga forces withdrew their forces, abandoning the Christian town. (Credit: Jodi Hilton/RNS)
Basima al-Safar retouches a picture of Jesus on an easel outside her house overlooking the flat Nineveh plains, 30 miles north of Mosul.
The murals she paints tell the story of her people, Christians in Iraq. But with Islamic State militants nearby, she is worried that life in Alqosh and towns like it could soon come to an end.
The Nigeria Brethren church headquarters property has been overtaken by Boko Haram extremist insurgents. The news was shared in the early hours of October 29, in an e-mail from the staff liaison of Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria (EYN, the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria), who wrote:
