Last Saturday I gathered on Zoom with Mennonites from across our conference for our annual mid-year gathering. These gatherings used to happen in person across a few different weekends to accommodate the wide geography of the Central District Conference, but have moved solely online the last few years. This means these gatherings bring people together from Madison, Wisconsin to Raleigh, North Carolina, from Ann Arbor, Michigan down to Sarasota, Florida (and lots of congregations in between). This gathering introduced the conference’s new theme that we will be exploring together for the next while: Listen! Wisdom is Calling. During the meeting a few congregations shared stories of times in their history when they experienced the wisdom of God leading them in discernment. Many of these stories involved their discernment processes about welcoming LGBTQ+ people into their congregations, and what exactly that welcome entailed. Later in the meeting, we broke into smaller

As you approach our church building from the south, walking up Broadway Place between North Broadway Street and Oakland Park Avenue, you pass three apartment buildings on your left, each a quad.  The third is unique.  It’s attached to the church.  Inside, the rooms have been converted to our downstairs offices and upstairs nursery and preschooler areas.  It was the Baptists, who bought the building from the Presbyterians, who incorporated the apartment building into the church structure, sometime between 1965 and 1975, when they built a new foyer and sanctuary, all of it currently utilized by us Mennonites. In August of 2017, when Edith Espinal was seeking sanctuary, CMC leadership determined we could convert a little-used nursery room above the offices into a living space for her.  That plus a bathroom remodel enabled her to live in our building for 1,235 days, nearly three and a half years, remaining with

On Sunday, I met with the junior high Sunday school class.  We’ll celebrate our nine sixth graders at the Coming of Age service February 4.  One of the ways we prepare together is through study and discussion of that morning’s Bible story.  Because the junior highers requested we also declare that day Pajama Sunday, I thought the text should include something sleep-related.  So we’re going with Genesis 37 – the young Joseph’s dreams about his brothers bowing down to him, and the fallout that resulted.  It’s a packed chapter that starts with Joseph’s coat of many colors from his father Jacob, and ends with Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, with plenty of drama in between. But it’s hard to understand what’s going on in Genesis 37 without knowing the backstory of Jacob’s own sibling rivalry and the conflicts between the mothers of Joseph’s brothers.  So we started

On Monday and Tuesday, Ila (our 11 year old daughter), Kyle Kerley, Carolyn May, and I represented Columbus Mennonite in Washington, DC at the Mennonite Action call for a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel.  There are good write-ups out there, like The Washington Post and Common Dreams.  I love that Al-Jazeera’s headline named “Christian protestors…”, since one of the goals was to provide an alternative voice to Christian Zionism.  Mennonite Action has its own image-rich summary of the witness on its webpage.        Carolyn and Kyle were on the Red Team.  This included around 130 folks who engaged in civil disobedience inside the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building near the Capitol.  Members of this group were eventually handcuffed, removed, given misdemeanor charges, required to pay a $50 fine, and released that evening.  The write-ups above include some video footage of Red Team singing-all-the-while.  Ila and I (and all

A core principle of nonviolence is recognizing the humanity of your opponent.    -opening line of an editorial in the January issue of Sojourners magazine From our beginnings, Mennonites have emphasized the peacefulness of Jesus – his teachings, his life, his refusal to violently resist his execution at the hands of the state.  The church, Mennonites believe, is a continuation of this peaceable kin-dom of Jesus, a now-but-not-yet-fully-realized embodiment of the ancient prophetic visions of Isaiah: They shall beat their swords into plowshares. (Isaiah 2:4) The wolf shall live with the lamb. (Isaiah 11:6) Over the centuries, Mennonite nonviolence has ranged from separatist communities with military exemptions disengaged from the state, to active forms of peacemaking.  The Sojourners editorial cited above leads into an interview with Palestinian nonviolent activist Ali Abu Awwad.  Some quotes from him: My goal is not to have a dialogue.  My goal is to solve this madness…