Although a myriad of stuff has been happening within and around us, it seems timely to write about our church’s international mission emphasis. Our church has been going through a six-week series detailing these ministries.

Around 2009 I realized I was pastor to a lot of people who didn’t attend church while the church we had planted was losing momentum.

Twenty-six attendees spent the evening of March 19, 2022, interacting and listening to learn about the history of our Indigenous communities in Canada and the impact of contact with white settlers/Europeans who came to live in this great land.

It is indeed a blessing to be joined together in worship with people of other nations. The blessing becomes even more tangible when born-again believers who have been raised in other beliefs or countries intentionally choose to become a part one’s own church body.

Before we’ve even learned to walk, we humans begin fighting for freedom; first, in play but then more seriously as we object to authority, consequences, expectations, guilt, pain, doubt, anxiety, and death—the freedom wish list is very long.

At a subconscious level, I have a fear of being shown up as deficient, of not being enough. Each of us struggles at some level with the feeling that we come up short, that we’re not good enough in our own eyes or the eyes of someone else.

As a teenager, I convinced my parents that I should join their 25th wedding anniversary trip. We crossed the ocean with a suitcase full of ventriloquist puppets and landed with astonishment during a protest at the international airport in Bangalore, India.

Bzzz. Bzzz. The dog barked her warning that someone was at the door. It was just about 10 at night—acceptable here in our host country where many are eating dinner at this hour. Because I was already getting ready to end the day, my husband ran down the stairs to answer.

In the silence that lived between the deadly warnings of air raid sirens, the sound of a small choir, singing a song of praise, echoed out of a church sanctuary in western Ukraine. Just the night before, Anna*, administrative coordinator for MCC Ukraine, had absent-mindedly hummed a few bars of the song during an evening tea break at the church.

Jesus has always been a tough person to follow. The church has never mastered the art of imitating the whole Jesus. Its easy to say “Jesus” and then change the subject to something more manageable. Why does Jesus make himself so hard to follow?

Shame is one of the most universal human experiences. Whether we are young or old, students or teachers, leaders or followers, all of us can identify with the sting of failure. For many pastors and ministry leaders this season of division and loss has brought with it deep feelings of inadequacy and exhaustion. How do we combat the feeling in our souls that we aren’t enough, or that we don’t measure up?

Most of us don’t think of peacemaking as an endeavour we would call “fun.” It is hard, messy and difficult work. There is, however, a strategic element of peacemaking that includes an intentional focus on shared recreational activities.