Pastor Carol’s Blog

Located in the town of Vineland, Ontario, we are a small, friendly,  inter-generational church in the Anabaptist tradition that worships God and together seeks to follow Jesus’ example.   We have a long history—we were the first Mennonite church in Canada.  On this site you can learn about the people and the work of our church, find directions to our facility, and learn about our history.  You are welcome to join us!

Worship Service at 11:00 Sunday mornings (10:30 a.m. 1st Sunday in July through Labour Day)  Sunday School for all ages begins at 10:00, except in summer.  Hope to see you there!

Pot-luck lunch usually on the first Sunday of the month (except in July/Aug)

3357 Rittenhouse Rd, Vineland (see directions page for details)

 

We look forward to meeting you!

A peaceful history?

There is an article in the Globe and Mail today about Mennonites, pacifism and the commemoration of the war of 1812…

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/bicentennial-military-events-affront-to-stouffville-onts-pacifist-roots/article2423730/

Yella!

On Monday Kailey and Michaela and I will join Yella!, a three week middle eastern study tour sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee Ontario and Mennonite Church Eastern Canada.  We are all getting excited, packing suitcases and/or backpacks, wondering what adventures are in store for us.

The group will be posting pretty regularly on a blog, you are welcome to follow along to see what we are doing. See below.  We’ll be land in Tel Aviv, but we are getting whisked away almost immediately to Nazareth.  Nazareth!  We’ll be hiking around parts of the Sea of Galilee, walking where Jesus walked on the Jesus Trail.  We’ll be spending time in Bethelehem and in Jerusalem.  it’s tremendously exciting!

And we’ll be doing all this with twelve young adults, a leader on staff from MCCO, two pastors (myself and Alissa Bender, pastor at Hamilton Mennonite Church), and a professor of Bible, Derek Suderman, who teaches at Conrad Grebel College.  The young adults are from all over, getting to know them will be a big part of our trip. We invite you to pray for us and for our tour; for safety, for open minds to hear what is said to us, and open eyes to absorb what is not being said in words!

 http://yellatour2012.blogspot.ca/

 

Meet the church guy!

Not everyone has a chance to go to our larger church assemblies and meet the various leaders who work and volunteer there. One person you might like to meet is Willard Metzger. He is the Executive Director of Mennonite Church Canada. If you can’t meet him in person, why not meet him on the blogosphere?

As someone who travels across the country pretty frequently, and even around the world, he has his hand on the pulse of who Mennonites are. I think you will like to meet him.

Willard Metzger’s Blog

Life is a precious gift

“Life is a precious gift”, that is one of the lines from the new video about Katie Dow who we see running up for the children’s story every week.  70,000 people suffer, like she does, from Cystic Fibrosis.   I invite you to pray for a cure for Cystic Fibrosis, and perhaps sponsor part of Team Katie at this year’s Great Strides fundraiser.  Jesus was the great healer, in his time many people suffered from diseases with no cure.  When people came to him he helped the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk.  We may not have the ability or gift to heal people with a touch, but we can join together to fund research that can provide hope to 70,000 people and their families.

Next Sunday Todd will be sharing for a few minutes about their journey with Katie on this difficult path.  Here is a video about Katie this year:  

The link for the video is as follows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k3ze9wG1Xxc

First thoughts

What is your most memorable breakfast?

I am not a breakfast person, but even I have a memorable breakfast story.  I remember cooking bacon in Waterton National Park at a remote camping site; Eugene had gone off for a hike.  Suddenly I heard a bear growling right behind me, and I whirled around with my knife in my hand!

To find…Eugene falling on the ground laughing.  A very memorable breakfast.  That was on our honeymoon…good thing I wasn’t faster with that knife!

This Sunday we are going to be exploring the story of a famous breakfast.  It’s the story of Jesus making a barbeque breakfast on the beach for the disciples.  It’s the first breakfast he shares with them after the resurrection…as far as we know it’s the only breakfast he shares with them after the resurrection.  In fact, it’s the only breakfast with Jesus that I can think of being described in scripture!  (let me know if you can think of one!)

Why would Jesus be rustling up breakfast?  What was this meeting on the beach all about?  One thing we know for sure, it’s a breakfast the disciples never forgot.

Years ago I gave out a little book of table graces, and this week’s prayer is the shortest one from that collection (I always think of Robert Friesen when I say it, he told me it was his  favourite prayer):

For bacon, eggs, and buttered toast, 
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

 

Picturing the road to Emmaus

It`s not very long until myself and Kailey and Michaela will be visiting the land where Jesus walked, (we head out on May 7^th). Part of the interest will be seeing the places where Jesus walked.  Scholars are divided about where exactly Emmaus was, even though the text tells us how far it was away from Jerusalem.

One of the possibilities is a little town called Imwas.  The little town was totally destroyed in the Six-day War in 1967, when Jewish forces advanced with tanks and weapons.  The unarmed Palestinian villagers fled; they didn’t know that the army had orders to totally obliterate their village.  Those who were left behind, who could not run, were buried alive by the bulldozers.  Even after the war the townspeople  were never allowed to return to rebuild.  In fact, Canadian citizens gave $15 million dollars to the Israeli government to establish a park there, which is called Canada Park.    Just this little story tells a lot about the history and the modern-day reality that we will be meeting.

Picturing the road to Emmaus is hard to do physically, since we don’t know exactly where the road was.  But what did the disciples look like as they walked along?  For some reason this story has captured the imagination of artists through the ages, and this is one of the most popularly depicted scenes from the New Testament.  This Sunday we’ll be seeing some of those pictures.  How do we relate to those first two disciples?  This Sunday is baptism, and I’ll be connecting these disciples with the two disciples we are baptizing!  Hope to see you there!

This week’s prayer:  Jesus stand among us, in your risen power, let this time of worship, be a hallowed hour.

A funeral for Jesus

Death is hard to grasp.  Our mind recoils at it, and sometimes denies it.  When someone we love dies, part of us can go on believing that it isn’t true.  Even when we’ve seen someone die with our own eyes, we can still be in denial.

One of the ways we come to terms with death is by ritualizing the ending of someone’s life.  We get together in groups and perform certain actions and say certain words when someone dies.  We call this a funeral.  The funeral is not “for” the dead person, as much as it is “for” the people left behind, to help them acknowledge that death has happened.

Tomorrow, our Good Friday service is structured as a funeral for Jesus.  Of course, when Jesus died, there was no funeral. He had been executed by the state, his body was hurriedly buried by a few friends, anxious to finish preparations for burial before the Sabbath.

I’ve structured the service in this way because a funeral ritual is the way in our culture we come to terms with death.   Perhaps by following this form, we can come to a deeper understanding of what happened on Good Friday.  What were his friends, his family feeling or thinking the day he died?  How were they making sense of what happened?

Today, of course, when someone dies, we take great comfort in the resurrection, and that Jesus conquered death.  But for those friends mourning Jesus’ death, there was no such comfort.  Their hopes and dreams seem shattered.  They would have felt shell-shocked (although that word had not been invented yet) by watching their friend be tortured and die a gruesome death.

Good Friday is a time to face death and look it squarely in the eye.  That’s what Jesus did.  Join us in our service this year, to enter into this holy time of passion.

This week’s prayer:  (a verse from the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded”  a hymn whose words are attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, 1153)

Now from Thy cheeks has vanished their color once so fair;
From Thy red lips is banished the splendor that was there.
Grim death, with cruel rigor, hath robbed Thee of Thy life;
Thus Thou hast lost Thy vigor, Thy strength in this sad strife.