When I worked for the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for New­comers, staff were invited to reflect on the values that mattered most in the organization.

A Somali colleague said, “The Mennonite peace tradition. That is what matters most.”

A devout Muslim, she resonated with this foundational faith principle. In her assertion, I found a generosity that I want to celebrate.

When we understand the values that guide our faiths and our cultural traditions, we open the door to a beautiful synergy. I experience this as the mystery of Christ (Colossians 2:2), where walls of hostility (Ephesians 2:14) come tumbling down.

This only happens when we enter relationships with enough humility to be teachable. We have to learn to be teachable. Many teachers have taught me how. They have helped me understand my role as a “White lady,” as I have been called, and reminded me of the nuance required for interfaith work.

My journey in interfaith spaces began in 2000 when I joined the staff of EMCN, a settlement agency for refugees and immigrants. EMCN was founded in 1981 by three Edmonton, Alberta, Mennonite churches with a vision to support the settlement needs of Vietnamese people. This year, the organization changed its name to Newcomer Centre.

As we responded to wave after wave of refugees coming to Canada, we hired people from the various waves to approach settlement needs respectfully, taking both faith and culture into account.

Since 2021, I have taken over the role that Donna Entz, a former Mennonite mission worker in Africa, played in Edmonton and beyond through North Edmonton Ministries, a program of Mennonite Church Alberta. She spent 10 years in Edmonton building bridges between Muslims and Christians under the umbrella of A Common Word Alberta. She laid the groundwork for an annual interfaith dialogue that brings Christians and Muslims together.

The guiding principles of this work are hospitality, dialogue, peace and witness. If our encounters come from a place of hospitality and a desire to dialogue, to build peace and to offer an honest witness to our faith, the mystery of Christ as the wall crumbler will happen. I have witnessed this miracle many times.

In Alberta, we have expanded the work Entz began to include different denominations, faiths and cultures. As a provincial Mennonite community, we realized we should strengthen our interfaith and intercultural heart muscles to create possibilities for the mystery of Christ to emerge.

We renamed this work Bridge Building to recognize that our 11 Mennonite Church Alberta congregations are lodged within different kinds of diversity. Larger cities have more diverse faith traditions; rural communities might be neighbors to an Indigenous reserve.

How can we bring our church communities along to be bridge builders and witnesses to walls crumbling through interfaith and ecumenical relationships? With the help of the Holy Spirit, that is our ongoing work.

In his bridge-building ministry, Jesus didn’t evangelize the lepers, tax collectors, Samaritans and Greeks. He recognized their strong faith and worked through that to bring wholeness and healing.

Perhaps the mystery of Christ is not limited to bringing Jews and Greeks together into one faith. Perhaps the mystery of Christ is that which opens our eyes to each other.

Perhaps we are at our strongest when we honor the faith of others, live from the values of God’s greatest commandments, and let God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, do the rest.

Suzanne Gross is Bridge Building Facilitator for Mennonite Church Alberta.