In October it will be My Church’s Anniversary With prayers for you and cake for me Happy once, Happy twice Lots of happy Mennonites*   *with apologies to Maurice Sendak The Church I attend turns 75 this year and we are having a party. Or at least a potluck on Sunday and a “sit-down dinner” on Saturday. Yes, this is the meal’s official title. “Sit-Down Dinner.” The organizers have been hard at work for months and I imagine that they discussed long and hard just what they should call the Church dinner that they were planning for this Mennopalooza. To call it a gala would raise expecta ..read more

 We have come to that time of year once again when we all pour ourselves a drink and reflect, again, on Mennonite heritage. That’s right – we are just days away from Mennonite Heritage Week. And while I am sure that you are all busy addressing and sending out your Mennonite Heritage Week cards and planning your Mennonite-themed cocktail party menus, we should also pause at this busy time of the year to think about the Mennonite Heritage moments we experienced over the last year. Perhaps you smiled fondly once when you saw the number 606. Maybe you squabbled with someone over wedding ..read more

  It has recently come to my notice that a number of Mennonites have dropped the “Russian” from their identity.   This is not, as might be supposed, because they have finally succumbed to the relentless pressure from Churchy Mennonites to cease considering “Mennonite” as something of an ethnic identity. In fact, the word Russian added on to the word Mennonite might be seen as a way of distinguishing the ethnic identity — so offensive to some — from the religious identity that should in no ways have a nationality attached to it. Well, maybe not in no ways. A person who attends a ..read more

I am sorry to report that I have recently learnt that the publication date of Menno-Nightcaps has been delayed. It appears that there were limited spots on the boat that was meant to take the box of books from the printer to the publisher. And being a Mennonite book, my unassuming little tome deferred its place and humbly let others take its spot in the shipping container. Or something like that. There are rumours that it slept in and was nursing a hangover after going on a bender the night before. But I call that malicious gossip. In an exercise of overthinking, I mulled over the possibi ..read more

Honestly. Am I the only one who thinks that it’s about time we all stopped feeling ashamed about Münster? I know that I’ve talked before about our remarkable Mennonite ability to hold a 500-year grudge but this one takes the cake because none of us really know what happened — and we’re still embarrassed. Not that we think about it all that often. There’s only so much time a single group can spend in a state of perpetual shame.   I was recently reminded of the events at  Münster and our collective shame when I listened to episode 5 in the “Just Plain Wrong” podcast.  In ca ..read more

This year, Mennonites all across Canada can be split into those who found a copy of the new Mennonite hymnal under their Christmas tree and those who found a copy of Andrew Unger’s new novel, Once Removed.* It’s a shame, really, that these two books came out in the same year, competing as they were for the Mennonite gift-buying budget that is already strained by the many MCC goats and school kits we also feel compelled to wrap up and place under the tree every single year.   At first glance, the two hottest books of the season have little in common. The Voices Together hymnal is ha ..read more

A Russlander and a Kanadier Mennonite engaged in class conflict circa 1960. My parents liked to joke that theirs was a “mixed marriage” because she was a Russlander Mennonite and he was a Kanadier Mennonite. It was only funny to that tiny subset of the population who was both in the community enough to know the difference and out of the community enough to think it a laughing matter. My mother, herself, wouldn’t have understood the joke until after she was married. When she met my father, she knew only that he was Mennonite; she had no inkling of all the various types of Mennonites out there w ..read more

Something Amish I have come to the conclusion that in every minute of every day, there is someone, somewhere trying (and failing) to explain the difference between Mennonites and the Amish. These are people with a little bit of knowledge but not a lot. People who might have Mennonite (or Amish) ancestry. Maybe they lived once in Lancaster, PA. Or at least passed through. They might have once employed a Mennonite contractor. Or chatted to the woman who sold them a quilt. But they speak like people who know. Always be wary of words about us spoken with confidence. People who know a little mor ..read more

Do not expect actual balloons at Mennonite Heritage Week events. In just a few short weeks, Canadians will celebrate their first ever annual Mennonite Heritage Week. And I don’t think any of us are ready. We were all a little stunned and a lot embarrassed earlier this year to see Members of Parliament from across all party lines get up in the House of Commons and sing our praises. It was a rare moment of cross-partisan consensus that just goes to show that unity of purpose is most easily attained when there is general ignorance about the subject at hand. And when the stakes are low. But whatev ..read more

When I was a grad student studying history, stories used to go around about rich Americans who would pay people like us to dig up their family histories. Though it sounded like a cash cow, the stories usually ended with having to deal with the ire of people discovering that their ancestors were neither luminaries of the Enlightenment, pirates of the Caribbean, nor bejewelled nobility, but merely shopkeepers, labourers or petty criminals. Believing ourselves wise in the ways of history, we graduate students laughed at the rich Americans’ disillusionment. What fools they were to imagine their an ..read more