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.
WINNIPEG, Man. — Canadian Mennonite University made headlines this fall when it was revealed that workers at the CMU Farm, in collaboration with members of the Métis community, had successfully grown an ancient variety of squash from seeds shared with them by the White Earth Seed Library in Minnesota.
Thanksgiving’s roots in an encounter between European settlers and indigenous people point to a dark side of that history. Mennonites who want to raise awareness of unjust treatment of indigenous people are using a little-known historical precedent — the Doctrine of Discovery — to show how indigenous people are still being negatively affected today.
