To encourage women to enter church-related work, the General Conference Mennonite Church began the “Women in Church Vocations” program in 1957. Pictured, Elmer Ediger discusses the new program with interested young women at Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg. Women recruited to the program would pursue a college education and be mentored into such positions as local congregational administrative work, Mennonite Central Committee assignments or missionary commissions. The program never really grew and was discontinued in 1963. Perhaps this generation of women was beginning to have different ideas about what it meant to serve the church.
For more historical photos in the Mennonite Archival Image Database (MAID), see https://archives.mhsc.ca/
Photo: The Canadian Mennonite / Mennonite Archives of Ontario
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