For years, Adrienne De Forrest, a member of Boulder (Colo.) Mennonite Church, had driven a 1991 Subaru station wagon that now had over 250,000 miles on the odometer. The car had been reliable and the engine was strong, but some peripherals were starting to go bad due to age and weathering. Aware that she might have to replace the car sometime, she researched dealers’ prices for used cars and put away enough money to cover the cost if it came to that …
The essence of a missional vision is to align with the purposes of God. But what does that mean? …
Some time ago a friend asked me, “Why have you and your son had long tenures in pastoral ministry but some of us have moved every couple of years? Some of us have left the ministry. What’s your secret?” …
The six of us sat on the wooden dock in the hot sun, waiting for a water taxi to take us north to meet some friends of our hosts. The taxi was due to arrive at 5 p.m., and it was now 5:10.
We chatted, and I wondered aloud if maybe they forgot. Wayne, one of our hosts, said, “They’ll come sometime” …
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 …
A colleague walked into Sara’s office one day at the seminary and talked about how going to church was causing him to lose his faith. “So much of church is deadly,” he said …
