Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Community’ Category

Sep 26

6 Comments

The Heart of a Stranger

I spent part of today listening to good stories. Our church hosted the AGM of MCC Alberta and, not surprisingly, much of the conversation throughout the day centered around the work that MCC is presently doing with the Syrian refugee crisis.

But we also heard stories of what MCC has done for other groups of people in other parts of the world. Saulo Padilla, an immigration educator with MCC USA shared of his own refugee journey from Guatemala to Canada, and the many twists and turns that his story has taken along the way. And he made one comment that has stuck with me throughout the day. Read more

Jul 24

7 Comments

The Church is Actually a Beautiful Thing

It’s 11 PM ET and I’m sitting in a hotel lobby in Harrisburg, PA reflecting on the week thus far at the 2015 Mennonite World Conference. It’s been another full day and I should probably be more tired than I feel, but I’ve been sleeping poorly all week so I’m not even going to bother trying until after midnight. I think my body is still on Mountain Time. What better time, then, to try to scramble a few thoughts together on the MWC experience so far? Read more

May 8

15 Comments

On Small Churches and Large Worlds

I followed a rabbit trail this morning from a blog that I occasionally read to the website of the church where the blogger was a pastor. It had been a while since I had visited the website of an American evangelical mega-church, and after a few minutes of browsing I was beginning to experience a bit of sensory overload. There was a page for every conceivable ministry under the sun—addictions, young moms, men, young adults, sports enthusiasts… On and on the list went. And then there was the “staff” page. There must have been close to fifty people and profiles as I just kept scrolling down and down and down the page. Pastors for care, for counseling, for administration, for music, for preaching, for teaching, for kids, for “operations,” for seniors, for outreach… I didn’t see any pastors for pets, but maybe I didn’t scroll down far enough.

I thought of our church website’s staff page with its one lonely inhabitant…  Read more

Feb 19

13 Comments

Putting Out FIRES

I’ve been reading Tim Otto’s Oriented to Faith over the past few weeks as I seek to help our church have healthy conversations about sexuality. Like many churches, ours is characterized by a wide diversity of views when it comes to how the church should live with and think/talk about homosexuality. As we have these conversations, one thing that I am convinced of is that we need to make space to hear from a plurality of Christian voices on these matters, whether it is those who would have an “affirming” view or those whose perspectives would run along more traditional lines.

Or those that don’t fit nicely in any camp. Like Tim Otto. Read more

Dec 11

47 Comments

Lament for a Small Town Bible School

The official news showed up where all things show up these days: on my Facebook feed. Right there next to cheesy inspirational slogans and idiotic videos and family photos and passive-aggressive politicking…

It is with profound sadness and regret that the Bethany College Board of Directors announces that the conclusion of the 2014-2015 year will mark the end of the ministry of Bethany College in its current iteration.

It wasn’t a surprise to me—I had seen this sad news coming for quite a while, had been talking with my twin brother (the academic dean) about it for months—but I was surprised at the way my heart sank when I read the announcement. Surprised by how surprised I was to see the words on the screen.   December 10, 2014. The day the news came that another small Canadian Bible school—an institution that has been around since 1927­—would be closing its doors. Read more

Mar 25

5 Comments

Faith is Change

A few days ago, we got together with some good friends to share and to pray. These are people we have, in some cases, known since we were teenagers. When we were younger and flush with spiritual fervour and the optimism of youth, we would get together like this more frequently, praying for revival, for victory and blessing, for change, for all kinds of wonderful things that we believed lay just around the bend.

We’re a bit older now. Maybe even a bit wiser. If nothing else, life has left its mark on all of us, in the wide variety of ways that life always does. We have had to negotiate the death of parents and others we love, we have watched relationships fracture and fragment into divorce and separation, we have participated in the elations and agonies of parenting, we have negotiated the challenges of infertility and adoption, we have struggled with physical health concerns, vocational anxieties, and crises of faith. We have seen, in short, that life is a mixed bag, and that faith is not (and has never been) some kind of inoculant from the pain of living.

Read more

Jan 6

4 Comments

You Were Born to Be Loved

I’ve written here before about delightful “holy moments” that I have experienced in the church I serve (see here and here, for example). These are often moments when something unexpected happens, something that spills out of our careful containers of planning and order, something that points simply, poignantly, and powerfully to the hope of the gospel in a way that no eloquent sermon or finely crafted liturgy ever could. I love these moments. Even when I don’t notice them.  Read more

Oct 31

Planted: Book Review

I distinctly remember the first time I heard about the work of A Rocha, a Christian conservation and stewardship organization that began in Portugal through the work of Peter and Miranda Harris, and has since branched out around the world. I was sitting in a first year Christian Thought and Culture class at Regent College in 2005 and Peter Harris was lecturing on creation care. Read more

Sep 5

Ten Things I Really Like About My Church

Occasionally, I get accused of being a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I don’t know where this comes from, but I will have to take others’ word for it 🙂 .

So, in an attempt to combat this persistent myth, and because it’s early September and everyone is just staggering into fall schedules and routines, and because there is the usual anxiety and apprehension about what the upcoming (academic) year will hold, and because I’ve noticed that pastors (myself included) tend to feel a bit of pressure around this time of year to “start with a bang” and make a good impression on newcomers when secretly we’re just hoping we can keep it all together with what we’re already doing, and because—well, yes, it’s true, because it’s way easier for me to focus on negatives than positives—I thought I would do something completely out of character and do a bit of bragging about the little church that I am a part of. Read more

Aug 22

8 Comments

Up and Down

My infallible WordPress stats counter tells me that this blog recently passed the 700 posts and 8000 comments mark. We had a little party, WordPress and I, which consisted mainly of the WordPress minions showering me with randomly generated congratulations and what I imagine were intended to be inspirational quotes. I’m not too proud to admit that I choked up a little. So touching, that WordPress would take the time…

At any rate, the passing of this momentous milestone means—that’s right, you guessed it!—it’s time for another tortured, myopic reflection upon the nature of blogging where I predictably vacillate between self-congratulation and self-flagellation and various other points in between. If you’ve seen this movie before, please feel free to ignore the following and put your next ten minutes or so to more profitable use elsewhere.

Seriously.

Still here? Ok, well on with the show, such as it is… Read more

Jun 18

19 Comments

Seeing the Light

Based on my own entirely unscientific observations, it seems that there is a burgeoning market for “recovering pastor who saw the godless light” stories these days. The genre is familiar enough by now, right? Fundamentalist pastor grows up in the church, uncritically swallows the whole religious package, devotes x number of years to serving as pastor in [insert small Bible belt American town here], gradually begins to have doubts, finally has the courage to leave his (it’s almost always a “he” so far) faith behind, is persecuted, scorned and rejected by his townsfolk and former parishioners still imprisoned by the shackles of fantasy and indoctrination he has so recently (and heroically) shed, and eventually staggers into the warm and compassionate embrace of this or that atheist group devoted to helping recovering clergy. And then, for the triumphant finale, our hero embarks on a life of spreading the good news of atheist liberation on [insert motivational speaking tour here] amassing inspiring (de)conversion narratives of other clergy that he has “helped” along the way. It’s not a bad gig if you can get it. Read more

May 8

2 Comments

“You’re Gonna Pray for Leroy, Right?”

The following comes out of an experience I had yesterday. I try to be very careful in deciding if/how to share about stuff that I encounter in my daily work. There are issues of privacy, of course, in addition to the simple fact that not every experience I find meaningful necessarily needs to be shared—especially in an online/cultural context where over-sharing is reaching almost epidemic proportions.  

Having said that, I think it is important to hear the stories of our world and our communities—perhaps especially the unsettling ones. Stories move and change us. At the very least, it’s important for me to hear/tell them. There are so many things that I cannot do in light of the many problems in our world, but one thing I can do is simply to write, to tell stories like this one. It is especially relevant, I think, in light of my recent posts on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (here, here, and here) and yesterday’s post on “Normal Unhappiness.” All the names below have, of course, been changed. Read more

May 5

3 Comments

God’s Strong Medicine

It’s intriguing to me how frequently our morning worship services will contain a pleasant surprise of some kind, whether an unplanned correlation between a song and a prayer or a testimony that just fits with this or that aspect of the sermon or some other thing. It’s remarkable how frequently the Spirit of God seems to be working in similar ways and prompting similar ideas in the hearts and minds of people in our community. Read more

Mar 11

17 Comments

Going to Church

Often when I get up in front of the congregation I am a part of on Sunday morning, I will silently wonder why each person has come to church that morning. Did they come hungering for an encounter with the living God? Out of grim duty or rusty habit? For their kids’ sake? To worship? To hang out with friends? Because there were rumours of a soup lunch afterward?  There are likely as many different reasons (or combinations of reasons) as there are people in the pews on a given Sunday. One Sunday a number of years ago, I began the service by saying, “I’m not sure what brought you here today…” but before I could finish the sentence, a middle-aged man with a penchant for loudly and delightedly answering any and all rhetorical questions posed from the front blurted out, “The bus!!” Like I said, many responses… Read more

Jan 29

6 Comments

Picking and Choosing

The denomination in which I serve—Mennonite Church Canada—is currently asking its congregations to engage in a lengthy and challenging process of facing challenging difficult ethical issues of our day (issues around human sexuality, religious pluralism, pacifism, environmental concerns, etc.) head on and discerning together what the Spirit seems to be saying to us regarding how we are to respond as followers of Jesus. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an attempt to put hands and feet to our theology.  Mennonites affirm, among other things, the importance of community, the priesthood of all believers, the inappropriateness of hierarchical power structures and modes of relating to one another, and freedom of the Spirit to lead us into deeper and truer understandings of Scripture. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an (ambitious!) opportunity for churches to demonstrate that we actually we believe what we say we do. Read more

Oct 24

6 Comments

The Power of All: Book Review

Over the past two thousand or so years the Christian church has consistently, in its worship, its leadership structures, its pedagogy, and its general ethos, deviated from the spirit and intent of the community Christ envisioned. Rather than becoming a community of believers gifted and called to participate together in the ongoing task of becoming disciples of Jesus in life and worship, the church has become an institution maintained by professionals. There have been exceptions along the way, to be sure, and of course God has seen fit to work with and through the church with all of its errors, but the general trend throughout most of church history has been to move away from multivoiced communities of active participants toward mono-voiced institutions filled with passive consumers. It is time for this trend to change. This is the provocative thesis of Sian and Stuart Murray Williams in their book The Power of All: Building a Multivoiced Church. Read more

Sep 11

“There’s No Such Thing as an Uninteresting Life”

Every Tuesday morning, a group of older gentlemen—anywhere from 5-15 guys, some from our church, others from another local Mennonite church—gather for coffee and conversation at the coffee shop across the street. The topics vary. Politics, history, current events (yesterday’s wildfires near Lethbridge, for example!), family, and, yes, church—any or all of these and more could find their way into the discussion on a typical Tuesday. Read more

Sep 5

5 Comments

Right Side Up

This week, I have been waking up each day to the Beatitudes. Take Our Moments and Our Days is a specifically Anabaptist prayer-book which means that daily prayer is intentionally structured around the teachings of Jesus, his call to recognize and participate in the in-breaking kingdom of God. During “Ordinary Time,” the book follows a four-week cycle of prayers and readings focused in turn on The Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, Parables, and Signs and Wonders. It’s a very different approach than other prayer books I am familiar with, but it has been a breath of fresh air to be daily called to praise, discipleship, and intercession in this uniquely Anabaptist way.

Read more

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »