In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, suggested that communities can sometimes form even though their members never encounter each other face-to-face. What matters is that members perceive themselves to be part of a group, joined by a mental image of the things they have in common.
In a recent congregational report to The Philippine Witness, the bimonthly newsletter of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite (better known as the Holdeman church) mission outreach to the Philippines, Randall Plett, pastor of the Christian Light Mennonite Church in Sapang Palay, posed a heartfelt question. Why were the fruits of nearly 30 years of mission efforts so meager?
In the aftermath of World War II, Christians on all sides of the conflict were forced to ponder the sobering consequences of modern warfare. The sheer devastation of the war — symbolized by the firebombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — raised new questions about the logic of “just war” arguments.
In the summer of 1963, David Wagler and Joseph Stoll, two Amish farmers, were threshing oats in a field close to Aylmer, Ont. They reflected on the need for more literature that spoke to the interests and concerns of their Old Order community.
In 1997 a group of ministers from the Conservative Mennonite Conference formulated a resolution lamenting the conference’s “theological drift” from its “historic moorings.”
GUATEMALA CITY — More than 120 Mennonite leaders from 19 countries gathered at a Catholic retreat center Feb. 10-14 seeking a shared identity and hope in a context of poverty, violence and competing religious currents.
There was a time when virtually every rural town in North America had a newspaper. The papers often appeared weekly and provided a rich mixture of local news, agricultural updates, human interest stories, editorial opinions and details on personal lives that outsiders might confuse with gossip.
Nearly 30 people from 18 countries recently gathered at Goshen College to launch the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) “Global Anabaptist Profile.” The MWC project, which is organized and funded by the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism at Goshen College, will be the first systematic study of how the MWC “shared convictions” are finding expression and also shed new light on the demographics of the rapidly-growing global Anabaptist family.
A six-member task force appointed by Mennonite World Conference (MWC) Faith and Life Commission met at Goshen College with counterparts from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) on July 20-23 to review progress on the commitments that the two global communions made to each other during a service of reconciliation in Stuttgart, Germany in July 2010.
During May term, Goshen College Professor of History John D. Roth led 17 students in an exploration of the different Anabaptist cultures of Paraguay. The class trekked from the capital city of Asunción to Mennonite colonies in the Gran Chaco and in eastern Paraguay during their three-week learning tour of the country.
