4 minute read
MB Herald Summer 2019
Just worship
Although worship calls us to be co-labourers with Jesus in transforming structures and seeking justice, it also reminds us that it’s not our burden to bear. Worship is a refuge for justice crusaders: it is God who dismantles power, wounds, and hate with truth, healing, and love.
WorshipTakesShape
“Liturgy is the shape worship takes when people gather,” says Christine Longhurst, worship professor at Canadian Mennonite University, “and every church has one.”
In him we live and move (Acts 17:28) “It’s natural for us to be moving during worship,” says pastor Rafiqua Masih of Behta Darya, Toronto. “Dance is part of who Punjabi and Pakistani people are.”
Through movement, Artisan Church, Vancouver, “deconstructs the sense that church is somewhere I go to be entertained,” says pastor of spiritual formation Nelson Boschman.
“The Christian calendar (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost) was simply the way in which early believers tried to live out the gospel story in real time,” says Longhurst.
Heritage Mountain Community Church, Port Moody, B.C., portrays the seasons of the Christian year as refreshing beaches they return to year after year, an image they also take literally – they walk around White Pine Beach every Good Friday, enacting Jesus’ journey to the cross.
Baptisms at Highland Community Church, Abbotsford, B.C., begin with a congregation-wide procession. “Everyone brings a container that represents themselves,” says pastor J Janzen: “a mug for the coffee lover, bowl for the baker, oil can for the mechanic, water bottle for the marathoner, teapot for the preschooler – filled with water. Everyone walks past the baptismal tank and pours their water as a sign that each individual is baptized into the community.”
When many churches use modern praise music and technology such as PowerPoint, The Gathering at Broadway, Saskatoon, is reaching a younger generation drawn to silence, contemplation, and premodern signs and symbols. “Ancient liturgy connects well with those who need rootedness,” says executive pastor Dale Dirksen.
“Heaps of silence,” especially during Prayers of the People, is one of the ways Vancouver’s Killarney Park MB Church worships, “alongside music and Scripture reading in our mother tongues (English, Mandarin, Korean, French, Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, and Kirundi),” says pastor David Chow.
Bhangra dancers at Behta Darya, an MB church inToronto.
Photo by Tabish Gill
More MB churches are celebrating the Lord’s Table weekly, such as Heritage Mountain does from Advent to Easter. “When we take communion, people volunteer to serve on the spot,” says pastor Paul Truman, “as a sign of how we participate in church life with each other, serving and being served.”
“If Mennonite communities are going to practice an Anabaptist discipleship where faith produces a flesh-and-blood life,” writes Michelle Ferguson in the MB journal, Direction, “there will have to be a reunion of body and spirit.”
Jesus is the Word…made flesh. Experiencing his birth, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit “through our whole being reminds us what story we’re part of and embodies it in us,” says Boschman.
NORTHERN LIGHTS
Believers in northern ommunities, where the only way in is seasonal ice road, twice-weekly train, or private plane, often feel isolated from the rest of the church.
Tony Schellenberg
Indigenous ambassador Paul Winter (far left) and his co-pastor at Living Word Temple, Winnipeg, Katherine Thomas (right image) are regularly invited to communities in Northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Ontario to encourage and pray with the believers there.
Article 17: CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER FAITHS
God’s provision of sovereign grace in Jesus Christ, the divine work of reconciliation, the gift of witness given to all the world, the offering of the kind of love and judgment that are expressions of God’s “being,” along with an eternal commitment to communicating all of these perfections (and more, of course) – it is this to which Christians are called to bear witness to a waiting world.
FOUR PS FOR TRANSITION
From the crafting of a new Collaborative Model of governance for the Canadian MB family, to the establishment of CCMBC Legacy Fund Inc. out of Stewardship Ministries, to the financial struggles of MB Seminary, the diminished financial capacity of the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, and the restructuring of Multiply, all of our ministries are in flux.
CREATING COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS IN CONGREGATIONS
These are humbling and challenging times. Times such as these require faith in a God who is not surprised by any of our present circumstances.
“If you could wake up in a world where the folks in your church had the capacity for brave and difficult conversations, would your church be transformed?” I asked this question in a workshop at the #churchtoo conference at Canadian Mennonite University, May 31–June 1, 2019. Most people put up their hands.
MOVING IN NEW DIRECTIONS
Women in Ministry Leadership was launched on May 10, 2019, at Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, with some 45 people in attendance. It is a more popular presentation of Heidebrecht’s PhD dissertation, “Contextualizing Community Hermeneutics: Mennonite Brethren and Women in Church Leadership” (University of Wales, 2013).
♥ the Herald
A heart that listens, a heart that speaks, a heart that serves.
Each community will end up confessing their faith somewhat differently than others within our Mennonite Brethren family, but I still hold to the belief that we are a family sitting at the table with each other,asking lots of questions, which lead to discussion, which leads todeeper relationships, which hopefully lead to loving one another morefully in the way of Christ.
Kevin Snyder, lead pastor, Coast Hills, Surrey
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