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Posts from the ‘Mennonite Issues’ Category

May 24

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Friday Miscellany

It’s Friday, and I’m not preaching this Sunday. What this means, of course, is that there are a number of unrelated and not necessarily coherent ideas rattling around my skull that I need to dump somewhere. I’m (mostly) kidding. I think much more highly of preaching than that. Although I have found it quite remarkable how frequently the events and ideas and reading of a given week will find their way into a Sunday sermon. At any rate, a few miscellaneous thoughts on a grey, rainy Friday morning… Read more

Apr 3

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On Future-Proofing

How can the Mennonite Church be future-proofed? I clicked on the link with bit curiosity and no small amount of trepidation. It was an interesting choice of words. “Future proofed?” Would that be possible? Desirable? It turned out to simply be a brief article—with the much less exciting title of “Introducing the Future Directions Task Force”—about a group that was going to be looking at the issue of how to work toward financial sustainability at the conference level. No five easy steps, alas… Read more

Jan 29

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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

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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

Aug 27

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Difference as Essence

It is not at all uncommon for me, as a pastor, to encounter some variation of the question, “So, what’s the deal with all the different denominations in Christianity? Why can’t you all agree on anything?!” Read more

Jul 17

8 Comments

Back to the Bible?

Well, it’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks of travel and holidays back in British Colombia which has, obviously, meant less time for writing here. I plan on posting a bit more in the coming weeks, but things will likely remain a bit slower than usual over the next little while as I try to get caught up and settle back into a regular routine. I am also planning on tackling the intimidating stack of unopened/half-read books that I have accumulated over the last year or so. I spent much less time reading than usual during the last year as I stepped into a new job, and I am beginning to think this needs to change. I plan on reading more and, perhaps, writing a bit less over the rest of the summer.  Read more

Jul 11

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On Denominations and Open Doors

One of the highlights of our last week and a half or so in Greater Vancouver and Vancouver Island has been the opportunity to reconnect with some of the many good friends we made during our six years out here. Aside from the irritation of fighting a cold almost from the moment our holiday started, it has been a great time filled with great conversations and great people. Read more

Jun 27

14 Comments

The Anabaptist Vision—Synchro Blog

A few weeks ago, someone who has been worshiping at a Mennonite church for nearly a year, and who had no prior exposure to or experience with Mennonites, remarked to me that, while they had deeply appreciated their time with the community, it seemed to them that Mennonites were basically people who did lots of good stuff and liked to do things together.  It is a common enough sentiment.  Many expressions of Anabaptist faith can come to seem like little more than an ethical system designed to produce Christ-like behaviour and character with little, if any attention, paid to the indwelling presence of Christ and the ongoing power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. Read more

May 11

23 Comments

Vengeance is (Not) Mine

We have a tendency to want to create a God in our own image who we can then emulate.

These were the words of Perry Yoder, professor emeritus of the newly renamed Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, at a theological studies conference put on by Mennonite Church Alberta that I have been attending in Calgary over the past few days. We have been talking a lot about how we read the Bible—about the presuppositions that inform our interpretations, about how our various traditions dispose us toward certain possibilities, about what to do about seemingly irreconcilable texts, and myriad other issues around reading and understanding Scripture. Including, as the quote alludes to, the constant temptation to read Scripture with an eye toward the God we expect (or would prefer) to find.  Read more

Mar 27

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Delight in This?

Part of last weekend was spent in Calgary at a provincial gathering of Mennonite churches and organizations where our time together was focused upon the theme of “Delighting in Scripture.” It’s a very pious sounding theme, isn’t it? Good Christians are supposed to love the Bible, aren’t they? It sounds like something we should all be doing all of the time. It calls to mind impressions I had in my childhood that if you were a follower of Jesus, you couldn’t wait to read your Bible and eagerly did so whenever the opportunity presented itself.

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Oct 29

17 Comments

The Strange Math of the Cross

During my time in the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, one of the issues that generated a fair amount of interest and controversy was that of the nature of the atonement. I have devoted a number of posts to this topic over the last few years (see the”Atonement” category at the bottom of this page), and have found the atonement debates simultaneously stimulating (it’s just a flat-out interesting theological issue) and frustrating (we have not always been able to talk about this matter as civilly as we ought to).  It is an issue that continues to generate considerable conversation, whether within Mennonite circles or in the larger church body. Read more

Oct 26

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Meet in the Middle

In light of my comments in a previous post about the subtle differences in emphasis between the two streams of the Mennonite world I am becoming increasingly familiar with, I was intrigued to come across a passage by Ron Rolheiser in my reading this week that addresses the importance of both the private (i.e., individual piety) and the public (i.e., concern for justice) dimensions of Christian spirituality. Read more

Oct 21

9 Comments

Peace, Pietism, and Personal Branding

Part of this week was spent at a gathering of Alberta Mennonite pastors just north of Calgary. The drive alone would have made the trip worth it. I had forgotten how spectacularly colourful autumn in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains can be! More importantly, though, it was a good opportunity to connect with new colleagues, as well as to get a sense of some of the strengths, challenges and theological perspectives of a conference that is still fairly new to me. Read more

Sep 23

5 Comments

The Scandal of the Cross—Take Two

God’s self-giving goodness and his determined commitment to rescue and redeem his creation were demonstrated two thousand years ago on a Roman cross. This is the guiding conviction that animates Mark Baker and Joel Green’s exploration of the meaning and scope of the atonement in the second edition of Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts. Read more

Jun 9

14 Comments

On Narratives

I’ve been thinking a fair amount about narratives recently, for personal and professional reasons.  On a personal level, I suppose major transitions in life always afford the opportunity to re-evaluate things—where have I come from, where am I going, what are my reasons, what have I learned, how will it affect what may or may not lie ahead, what changes should I make, how is God guiding, shaping, and using my story, etc, etc.  These are normal things to consider whenever we close one chapter and begin another. Read more

May 30

23 Comments

Theological DNA

During my sermon yesterday, I made some remark about how such and such a way of looking at the Christian life was “in our theological DNA” as Anabaptists.  I suppose the comment was meant to communicate that the stream of the Christian tradition from which we emerged has had a specific take on what discipleship looks like and that those of us who trace our lineage to the Anabaptist tradition are theologically hard-wired to embrace certain things.  It’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves.  Or can we? Read more

Apr 7

2 Comments

(How) Is God in Control?

One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :).  Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more

Feb 10

23 Comments

Pilgrims in Enmity?

I had breakfast yesterday with a couple of friends, one of whom happens to be the interim editor of our denominational magazine, the Mennonite Brethren Herald. Not surprisingly, the conversation eventually touched on the January issue of the Herald which was devoted to the doctrine of creation. Perhaps less surprisingly, given the nature of the  issue’s content, my editor friend has been getting a bit of heat—both directly, via email, and indirectly via the blogosphere—from those on the “young earth” end of the spectrum. Even less surprisingly, the rhetoric can (and does) quickly turn fairly nasty when it comes to topics like these (I’ve reflected on this before here). Apparently, we still have much work to do when it comes to learning how to disagree Christianly. Read more

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