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 …