The six of us sat on the wooden dock in the hot sun, waiting for a water taxi to take us north to meet some friends of our hosts. The taxi was due to arrive at 5 p.m., and it was now 5:10.
We chatted, and I wondered aloud if maybe they forgot. Wayne, one of our hosts, said, “They’ll come sometime” …
Mennonite Church USA was born in 2001. In 2005, church leaders sharpened the purpose of this new denomination in the statement “Mennonite Church USA 2020: Joining in God’s activity in the world, WE develop and nurture missional Mennonite congregations of many cultures.” All vision work is hard. It’s been hard for the Executive Board, the church’s agencies, area conferences and congregations to figure out how to work on this task. We’ve “been to the mountain” and sense that God has a wonderful future for us, but the way that leads from here to there isn’t always clear …
The clusters of 50-story apartment houses and the crush of people waiting to board the ferry were overwhelming to this country boy now from Kansas. I was accompanying Sheldon Sawatzky, director for east Asia with Mennonite Mission Network, during a sabbatical in 2007. We were in Hong Kong, a former British colony now a special administrative region of China with 7 million people stacked into a little bit of real estate: 16,500 people per square mile. (The population density of Kansas is 33 people per square mile.) Hong Kong is people, people, people everywhere …
To continue growing in faith really does require more than Sunday school, as the title of our cover story says. But Sunday school is the framework onto which other important practices and spiritual disciplines can be added …
A colleague walked into Sara’s office one day at the seminary and talked about how going to church was causing him to lose his faith. “So much of church is deadly,” he said …
In 2006, more than 2,200 members of Mennonite Church USA completed the Mennonite Member Profile, a survey of beliefs and practices. This profile was a follow-up to two previous studies conducted in 1972 and 1989. Included in the profile was a question about an individual’s frequency of Sunday school attendance …
There is an old treasure that some are glad to claim and others prefer to bury. Traditionally it has been known as Sunday school, but it also goes by Christian education, nurture or discipleship classes. The rationale behind its inception, if we dig deep enough, still applies today …
Something happened our last night in Evansville. It all started around midnight. The adults had gone to sleep and we youth were still up …
My earliest memory of church takes place in a Sunday school classroom. I am 3 years old, seated at a low, rectangular, wooden table with a half-dozen other children my age. Our kind, smiling Sunday school teacher has just finished telling us a Bible story. Then she removes the tabletop, and inside the table we discover an amazing surprise—a sandbox. For the rest of the class session, we play together busily …
