Courageous Imagination: Sprouts
Stories from Mennonite Church Eastern Canada
Scripture Reading and Background:Our scripture reading for this morning is from Isaiah 43:16-21. This is the theme text that Mennonite Church Eastern Canada has chosen to guide its Courageous Imagination visioning journey over the past year. You might remember it from back in May, when MCEC Executive Minister Leah Reesor Keller came to speak about it in our SJMC worship. Before I read it, I’ll share just a bit of background to this Courageous Imagination process and what has been happening along the way. MCEC, or Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, is the regional church that we are part of here at St. Jacobs. There are over a hundred congregations and church plants that identify with MCEC, in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.And Courageous Imagination is MCEC’s current journey of dreaming, imagining and listening to our stories of faith as we seek to hear God’s voice and discern together where God is calling our Regional Church in the years ahead. And it’s what has inspired our worship on the same theme this winter. Courageous Imagination began in a public way just under a year ago with a gathering for prayer, and has continued in the months since through opportunities to share and listen over social media, in surveys and small group consultations, a really cool Courageous Imagination Podcast that we’ll hear a clip from after the service during the Worship Response time, focused interviews, regional gatherings and lots more. And now, the good stuff that’s been generated in these places is in the process of being pulled together into some new guiding statements of identity and direction for the church that will hopefully be presented to the MCEC Annual Church Gathering at the end of April. There have been some in-progress reports released along the way, and if you’re curious about what’s rising to the surface, three key themes have been noted so far: •MCEC’s growing diversity and interculturalism•An openness to transformation through relationships and listening•A strong emphasis on community, sharing God’s love, costly discipleship and intergenerational relationships. You can find lots more about Courageous Imagination on the MCEC website. We are a part of MCEC here at St. Jacobs Mennonite Church, and so we want to be engaged in this important work with our family of congregations. Hopefully these next weeks of our winter worship can be one way for us to get involved. So, with all that as a backdrop, I invite you to listen to the words of the prophet from Isaiah 43: 16 Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,17 who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior;they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:18 Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.20 The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches;for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert,to give drink to my chosen people,21 the people whom I formed for myselfso that they might declare my praise. One really neat feature of MCEC’s Courageous Imagination journey is a theme-song that was commissioned especially for the occasion – written and performed by Moses Mugisha, a young musician and leader at the Goshen Mennonite Church in Ottawa. Moses was born in Rwanda and grew up as a refugee in Tanzania. This song is written in English and Swahili and invites us to come together as we build the body of Christ. We’ll listen to it together now. Courageous Imagination Theme Song – Moses Mugishu for MCEC It’s time for a children’s feature. It’s great to have all of you kids watching and participating from wherever you are – you are an inspiration and a delight, and we can’t wait until you can be together with us in person again to liven things up! In the meantime, we’ve got a familiar face ready to share with us by video, so let’s pay attention to Wendy. Children’s Time – Wendy JanzenMCEC Storytelling We have just heard Wendy share during the children’s time about the exciting addition to her growing eco-ministry through a new part-time position with MCEC. As she described, climate care and a spirituality of creation is something that’s really important right now and reflects a growing edge of who MCEC is. I am personally excited to welcome Wendy to the staff team at MCEC, where I also happen to work part-time. We want to spend the next part of our service telling some more of these kinds of stories, to give you a sense for what all is going on within our MCEC community these days. Since we’re borrowing this courageous imagination theme from MCEC, we want to highlight the good things happening there too. There is a great need for courageous imagination in our time, but also lots of examples of it taking shape within our family of congregations, and it’s good to share and celebrate them together. We’re going to begin by returning to Scott, who is joining us again from the Conrad Grebel campus. As he mentioned in his opening, Scott recently started a new job with the Indigenous Neighbours program at Mennonite Central Committee. But he has also been quite heavily involved in MCEC’s Truth and Reconciliation Working Group, and has some stories to share from that experience. Stories from MCEC Truth and Reconciliation Working Group – Scott Morton Ninomiya So, an emerging Eco-Ministry and a significant investment in Truth and Reconciliation as the church comes to terms with its history of colonization in Canada. There is also an MCEC Palestine-Israel Network Working Group, creating opportunities for learning and encouraging movements for peace in that part of the world. MCEC certainly remains committed to supporting creative expressions of the church’s witness to God’s justice and care for those in need. Another of these expressions is playing out in Quebec right now at a place called Care Montreal. We can easily forget that MCEC isn’t just about Ontario churches. In fact, there are some really exciting things happening in Quebec too. I have a staff colleague at MCEC named Michel Monet, who is a francophone church planter and mission catalyzer in Quebec. He helped to start a faith community called Hochma in Montreal, and now works with a handful of other emerging ministries in Quebec that are part of MCEC. A few years ago, the Hochma congregation heard a call to meet the needs of its community by opening its building up as an overnight shelter for the homeless. With a grant from MCEC and construction volunteers through Mennonite Disaster Service, Hochma renovated their basement and begin the Care Montreal ministry. When Covid hit, many shelters in Montreal were closed or lost capacity, and there was a serious crisis of beds for those who needed them. Care Montreal reacted quickly to expand capacity and services, becoming a full-time shelter. Two new buildings were added, volunteers and staff grew, and funding emerged from various levels of government. As the director of Care Montreal, Michel describes this growth as “atomic”. “We went from an out-of-the-cold shelter open November to April with 60 beds”, he says, “to 300 beds in our shelters open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year!” All this from a congregation committing to respond as God invited them to serve in their neighbourhood. This theme of engaging with neighbours and neighbourhoods has been especially important for MCEC in recent years. For the past number of years, MCEC has been inviting individuals and congregations to participate in a transformational journey called “ReLearning Community.” The idea is that as Mennonites, one of our traditional strengths is this sense of community and sharing life together with others in the church. But what if we re-learned this gift of community in ways that extend beyond the walls of our churches? What if we re-learned community in ways that engage with our neighbours and our neighbourhoods? What if our sense of community inspired us to invite others into our lives of faith and make disciples in the places we live? A whole bunch of cohorts have now moved through the two-year ReLearning Community experience, and this way of imagining community is fermenting in a lot of MCEC congregations. Craig and Kim Frere have been part of the leadership for ReLearning Community. Until quite recently, Craig was the pastor at Community Mennonite Fellowship in Drayton. But over the past year, Craig and Kim felt God calling them to a different kind of ministry. So, this summer they moved their family to St. Catharines to imagine something new. They have a vision for connecting with their new community and forming networks of disciples that may not look like a traditional church. Instead, their ministry will take the form of small family groups that share life together in the context of work and play, meals and activities. Craig and Kim are finding work in their neighbourhood and pouring their lives into this new kind of ministry that actually looks a lot like the way the earliest communities of Jesus-followers might have functioned. Craig explains: “God has invited Kim and me into a different mindset of how we function as church. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we can be and do church differently. Together we need to explore more ways of being church if we are going to be faithful to the call that God has given us.” Alongside this renewed commitment to neighbours and neighbourhoods, MCEC is also in the process of learning what it means to be an intercultural church. And this connection makes sense, as our neighbours and neighbourhoods are also increasingly diverse. These intercultural connections are not new – MCEC has been carefully and intentionally entering into relationships with refugee, immigrant, marginalized and under-resourced communities for two decades already. Sometimes these have been relationships that MCEC has sought out, but often they have been wonderful surprises that have arrived as gifts of grace. New Canadian congregations from places like Ethiopia, Myanmar, Laos, Congo and many others have reached out to MCEC with a particular interest in what it means to be an Anabaptist faith community. And so relationships have begun and grown, trust developed, gifts shared. Now, MCEC is being invited to partner with international mission ventures, as new Canadian congregations like the Chin Christian Church in Kitchener want to go back to their home countries with the gifts of Anabaptism that they have learned among Mennonites here in Canada. At the moment, there are MCEC congregations worshipping in 19 different languages, and the Mission office is in conversation with other groups that may expand this list in the years to come. It’s an impressive list, and worth sharing. MCEC is a body that speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Creole, Amharic, Oromia, Tigrinya (these are Eastern African dialects), Hakha Chin, Falaam Chin, Matu Chin (from Myanmar), Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi (Central Africa), Lao, Thai, Mandarin, Cantonese and Tamil. Wow!! What does it mean to be a church composed if all these people and language groups? How do we be a church together when all this diversity is often divided between congregations of people who mostly look like each other? How do we listen and learn from each other, even where we may differ significantly? These are big and tough questions, but this is what MCEC has been working at for a long time now. Last year MCEC hired Fanosie Legesse as its first Intercultural Mission Minister to be a resource in this journey. Fanosie spoke to us here at St. Jacobs just over a year ago, and he’s been very active resourcing congregations in addressing racial justice issues and encouraging relationships across our differences of language and culture. It’s another place of courageous imagination, and among the most urgent matters of identity for MCEC in the years ahead. Of course, all of this important work has had to happen in the shared context of a global pandemic over the past couple of years. It’s been a tough time for communities everywhere, with so much re-imagining, re-positioning and re-visioning of who we are and what we do. But the amazing thing has been how active the life of MCEC communities has still been during this time. I just recently had a conversation with Norm Dyck, MCEC’s Mission Minister. “In the first months of the pandemic,” he said, “I figured this was a time where we’d all just shut down and hibernate for a while. I was preparing for a really quiet season. But that just has not been the case.” Norm counted, and came up with 11 new conversations and relationships that the Mission office has entered into since the pandemic began. 11 new potential partners or congregations or church plants that are exploring what it might mean to be part of the MCEC family. The pandemic may be keeping us at home, but it’s not keeping God from moving and working and inspiring new things in the life of the church. The Mission office has been busy, but other parts of MCEC have too. Lots of events and activities and conversations have moved online or changed shape as needed to work in changing circumstances. We know from our own experience at St. Jacobs that congregational life hasn’t just taken a break over this time. Things continue to happen, and MCEC continues to resource congregations in their ministries. It’s amazing to think how many pastoral transitions have taken place in MCEC during the pandemic. Pastors have resigned or retired, said goodbye and concluded ministry in seasons where we can’t meet in person. And congregations have managed to candidate and hire pastors fully online, leaving a number of situations where months into their ministry a pastor has never met with their community in person. People have been called to ministry, installed, licenced and ordained during this time. God continues to work in the lives of individuals and congregations, and MCEC continues to walk alongside with resources and support. And of course, the other remarkable pandemic project that MCEC has embarked on is this Courageous Imagination journey itself. A large-scale visioning and identity process beginning and ending in the shadow of Covid. It’s taken a different kind of creativity and imagination to engage a wide constituency like MCEC through this time. And a renewed commitment to trust and follow where God might be leading in a time of much uncertainty. The passage from Isaiah 43 that I read earlier, the theme verse for MCEC’s Courageous Imagination process, offers encouragement and assurance for this kind of work in our time. Partly in the reminder that God is about to do a new thing, that springs forth into our present if we the eyes and ears to notice. But also in the conviction that through it all, God is the one making the way. A way through the waters, when it feels like we’re drowning. And a way through the desert when it feels like we might just die of thirst. Mennonite Church Eastern Canada is a community of congregations and a family of faith. In the end, it’s not about the offices at 50 Kent or the staff that supports these ministries. It’s about local expressions of the body of Christ working together and supporting each other as one church. We are MCEC as we attend to climate and creation, or truth and reconciliation. We are MCEC alongside Hochma church and Care Montreal, we are MCEC as community is re-learned and new ways of being church are explored, we are MCEC in the challenging and transformative work of becoming intercultural, we are MCEC in this bewildering season of pandemic where the biggest surprise of all might be that God remains stubbornly at work making way a way through seas and deserts. Seeing all this might well take some courageous imagination, but on this front we find ourselves in good company, thanks be to God. Amen.