Finding Hope

Where do you find hope?

I have been weighed down with the burdens of the difficulties of change in some of our MCBC congregations. I have also been weighed down in my volunteer ministry with the despair of a man who is seeking to bring his wife and daughter to Canada, but has almost exhausted all of his options. He is a fairly new Canadian, and I know him from when I was pastor at Sherbrooke. In my personal life, there are ongoing relationship challenges with some of our fellow-owners in our townhouse community strata.

Where is the hope in the midst of this kind of heaviness? In my last blog entry I shared about some new signs of the church coming together as a more unified voice of witness these days. This gives me hope.

Awhile back Diane and I went to a story-telling concert with Adrian Plass (as the Christian humourist storyteller) and Glen Soderholm (as the musician). It was so peaceful and energising of an evening.

Last night Diane and I, our daughter Jill and her husband Andrew went to the Vancouver Symphony Christmas concert. It included an ensemble choir and an actor/story-teller interspersing the songs with dramatic readings from "A Christmas Carol". What a great evening again set aside all the troubles of the world and just take it in.


Then tonight, the Place of Refuge Society board hosted the MP for Vancouver South, Ujjal Dosanjh, at the Place of Refuge house. Mr. Dosanjh was given a tour of the house and then we sat down to tell him about social justice concerns in this area of Vancouver - matters to which we would like him to give influence. These included: affordable housing, affordable daycare for low income people, the increasing number of people begging on Fraser Street, and more. There were people who spoke that represented MCC-related ministries in all of these areas of concern. Mr. Dosanjh was very supportive of our concerns and simply said that we needed to raise our voice louder so that our voice gets all the way to Ottawa for the federal government to hear these concerns. This meeting was filled with people that have hope for a better community. I also was filled with hope. I guess it is people with hope who give me hope. It is being with people who give off positive energy coming from godly convictions that energises me and lifts me to a place of new hope after walking in places of despair. (Photo courtesy Patrick Tam/FlungingPictures.com - Thank you Patrick.)

May God bless you with this hopefulness too!

The Church Coming Together Across the Board

Recently I heard this quote, "What the ecumenical movement was unable to do, the missional church is doing." Within the last six months I have been given opportunity to participate in three gatherings of British Columbia church leaders that have brought together an unprecedented mix of area church leadership.

On October 13th, district leaders from ten different evangelical denominations gathered in Surrey to build relationships and learn more about what it means to be missional. This group included the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Mennonite Brethren, Christian Reformed, four different types of Baptists, Evangelical Free, Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and us. As Lee Dyck says in the ECDC report, Mennonites are very near to being the missional church that God has called us to be. For 10 years we have claimed our way of being as missional church and we have taken some major strides in this direction. Many other evangelical churches have only begun to realise that the church growth paradigm they have been working with is no longer useful in our multicultural world and with this generation of young adults, and that the missional church paradigm is worth considering.

On November 9th I attended a More Than Gold prayer meeting for the executive leaders of this effort (the coordinated Christian presence at the 2010 Olympic Games). Again, this was a cross-denominational gathering of church leaders seeking to respond to God's call.

Then yesterday (December 7th) I had the privilege of sharing lunch with a new, but not so new, group of church leaders - even more diverse than the first group. We were at least 15 church leaders called together because of our denominations' commitment to participate in More Than Gold, but more so, called together to just meet each other and let God lead us in the things that he might call us to do. Someone mentioned that if you added up the people that all of our church groups represented in BC, it would be at least a million. Wow! The interesting part is that six of those in this second group were also part of the first group called together on October 13th. I am working at helping coordinate this by simply making sure that the facilitators of both gatherings are talking to each other.

I believe that God is doing a new thing where the walls of division between churches are coming down. We are starting to find that our similarities are more important than our differences! Who knows what God's plans are, but let's be sure to engage the new thing that he is doing. In John 17 Jesus said the world will know who he is when his followers are unified.

Let me know what you think of all this.