Features

Books and stories can plant seeds of empathy, and to empathize with another is the beginning of peace.

God has always been interested in getting to the heart of the matter (pun intended), so why don’t we move away from the externals as well?

Black History Month is an invitation and an opportunity to dig deeper into U.S. and Canadian history and the accomplishments of black people in North America.

Once, my mentee snuck out of our hotel in Washington, D.C., with her friends and proceeded to explore the city—without shoes on.

Storms and challenges, promises and blessings—“Waterfalls” explores the complexity of life through these biblical themes.

I have been drawn into conversations that are not casually shared, but vehemently debated. You can lose friends over this one.

The Christmas season often becomes the inverse of Advent. Rather than being a season marked by anticipation, wonder, and joy, it becomes an end-of-year blowout marked by consumerism, busyness, and sentimentality.

Nothing I have read so far explicitly names the greatest obstacle Joanna Veenstra faced in her preparation for mission: the institutional opposition of the CRCNA.

We’ve come to wonder if the problem with being included and fitting in is less about our girls’ disabilities and more about the ableist culture in which we live.

Surely we are not left with just two stark options of hypermasculine men who behave badly or emasculated, effeminate men.

As Christians, we need to dig deeper to find out what motivates our political groupings. If our leaders disagree on the right policies to pursue, it is often because they are effectively worshiping different and conflicting gods.

She didn’t care. But she cared that she didn’t care. Why didn’t she care anymore?

We tell ourselves that we’re not playing for the money, and this might be true for a friendly game of no-stakes poker, but lotteries are always about the money, aren’t they?

How could you sleep at night knowing the other schools in your area are more open and welcoming to all the king’s children than your school is, even if those other schools don’t acknowledge each child’s royal status?

How does a church emerge decades after a mission field is closed? Is it possible that the seeds of good news were planted during the decade when the mission was active—only to lie dormant and sprout much later?  

Meet this year’s candidates for Minister of the Word. For the first time, some are anonymous.

To bear out our faith in public life and policy with neighbors who do not all share our religious convictions is to walk a minefield. Yet walk it we must, for to stay home is a political commitment too. Discernment is of the essence. 

Born in 1959 as Ha-Jin, Lee was the fourth son of a struggling atheistic family in South Korea, a country still recovering from the Korean War. With Ha-Jin’s birth, nine people lived in their small house.

The restorative justice movement began with Mennonite Christians in search of a better response to crimes. They started with a biblical understanding of justice and shalom, centered in the need for accountability, reconciliation, and peace. 

If biblical justice is a movement that restores broken relationships, then our pursuit of justice is as much about everyday acts of courage and conviction as it is about those dramatic—and intimidating—moments of history. 

I will likely have depression for the rest of my earthly life. But for all of eternity, I have been, am, and will be God’s beloved. And so I go forward, knowing that even in the darkest places, my God will hear me.

We know the gospel writers are only rubbing our noses in human limitations because they are setting us up to watch God blow those limitations out of the water.