My neighbor is a master gardener and demonstrates her growing skill with more elaborate, more beautiful gardens every year. Before she studied gardening, her backyard was an overgrown, poison ivy-infested hillside sloping down toward the St. Joseph River …

Ask Gundolf Niebuhr when you visit the Jacob Unger Museum in Filadelfia, Paraguay. Want to see specimens of 210 species of mammals in the Chaco?

If you are looking for Ernesto Unruh, you just may find him on his hands and knees with other members of the congregation, painting the floor of the church in Yalve Sanga, the Chaco, Paraguay. If you have the honor of speaking with him, which you can do at Mennonite World Conference 2009, you will find he will humbly speak of working together with others, of cooperation and harmony …

Helga Dueck and the School for the Deaf in Filadelfia, Paraguay Helga Dueck had no idea, when she started out for the Mennonite World Conference

Since the first exploration in 1921, Paraguay has become a kind of city of refuge for Mennonites. In 2008, the entire multiethnic Mennonite population, including the indigenous and Paraguayan Latinos, was around 60,000 …

I’d gladly go to the desert for 40 days. Spare beauty there in a season of not yet— Snow peels itself back from peaks, and

Pastor J.P. Masih’s has come to the Asian Mennonite Community Church in Aurora, Ill. “Our congregation is very small,” J.P. says—so small they can’t afford to pay for pastoral health insurance …

Scattered throughout the letters of Paul are references to a collection he initiated for distressed believers in Jerusalem. In 2 Corinthians 8–9 Paul appeals to the Corinthians and other Gentile churches to respond to the material needs of their fellow believers in Jerusalem …

Communion and mission can go together. Early Christian tradition, not New Testament teaching, tied baptism and Communion together. In the first few centuries after the

Carol could never catch up financially. Before she could pay for rent, food and child care, her purse was empty. As we became friends, I often found her staring into an empty refrigerator and crying over her broken marriage. Although she was a teacher, she didn’t manage money well and was too devastated by her divorce to care …

Tears flow freely this week. Fatback died a few days ago. Liver failure. Caroline gathers us into a circle around the plastic folding table. Hand in hand—some more filthy than others …

I studied in the Middle East with Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Va., during the fall semester of my junior year, and this period of international learning altered the course of my life. My experiences abroad initiated misgivings about going into medicine after graduation, I began a period of global travel to explore possibilities …