Cousins write family saga: Daughters in the House of Jacob

June 15, 2016 | Artbeat | Volume 20 Issue 13
Amy Rinner Waddell |
ABBOTSFORD, B.C.

Two Canadian Mennonite women, one a pastor and the other a professor, introduced their new book, Daughters in the House of Jacob: A Memoir of Migration, at the Mennonite Heritage Museum on June 4, 2016.

Cousins Dorothy M. Peters, adjunct assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity Western University, and Christine Kampen, co-pastoral elder at Highland Community Church in Abbotsford, had been working on the book for three years. Kampen grew up in Mennonite Church B.C. congregations and attended both Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Ind. Reading aloud passages from the book, the two women traced their individual callings to teaching and ministry to Jacob Doerksen, their preacher/teacher grandfather. Although Doerksen died while Kampen’s mother Betty and and Peters’ father Len were still teenagers, the two cousins feel they knew him through stories from their parents. In the course of researching their family saga through letters, pictures and documents, the two uncovered some surprising stories going back to their great-grandmother.

Daughters in the House of Jacob is published by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission through Kindred Press.

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