Health-care sharing has become an attractive option for many people since the Affordable Care Act came into effect in the U.S., but it’s an arrangement many conservative Anabaptists have had long before. Whether it’s a formal health-care sharing ministry or multiple congregations pooling resources to meet a specific need, the practice of mutual aid for medical expenses replaces both commercial and government health insurance.
HARRISONBURG, Va. — What is the secret to a superb apple pie, worthy of featuring on The Rachael Ray Show? Two tablespoons of French apple brandy, homemade caramel sauce and a blog enterprise run by two Eastern Mennonite University accounting alumni.
Jessica Reesor Rempel and Chris Brnjas call themselves “Pastors in Exile.” They aren’t officially pastors, but then, their congregation isn’t officially a church. They are the part-time leaders of a ministry network — “a movement,” Reesor Rempel says — in the Waterloo-Kitchener area of Ontario.
Unity and division crossed paths in Pennsylvania this summer as Harrisburg hosted the Mennonite World Conference assembly and Lancaster Mennonite Conference moved to leave Mennonite Church USA. Word of Lancaster’s proposed withdrawal spread during MWC’s weeklong celebration of global fellowship. The timing heightened the sense of contrast between Anabaptists drawing closer across national borders and splitting apart within one of them.
KIGALI, Rwanda — Mwasa Niyon Senga felt trapped as a first sergeant in the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, an armed group that terrorizes villages in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As a Rwandan soldier during the 1994 genocide, Senga feared he would be arrested, and probably killed, as an enemy of the state if he returned to Rwanda from Congo. He had fled to Congo during the genocide as soldiers for the current government took control of Rwanda.
