Great sermon by Todd Jones at Hutterthal Mennonite Church. 

Are we destined to walk alone?  Might water be a sign for us as well – an answer to our unspoken need for communion with God and one another? It’s not our villages or our language or our dress or our heritage that now mark us as distinct from the world if, in fact, they ever really did. What makes us distinct is the presence of God within and among us. What makes us distinct is that, knowing God is with us and that we are accountable to one another, we carry each other. We stop acting like a bunch of individuals and we become one.  We care about each other; we see each other and we choose to love each other. Whether we should or not doesn’t matter; we’re God’s beloved children and His desire is to bring all people rest and to restore us to fellowship – to community – that we might abide in His presence, whole and blessed. Together we draw water from the well of salvation, and together we bear one another up. Together we’re conformed to Christ, walking in obedience to God and His Word so that we might resist temptation rather than simply blend in to the culture. God is with … us! This we hold in common as, indeed, we always have. We are the Body of Christ…Read more...


 

The current issue of Beyond Ourselves, the publication of Mennonite Mission Network, features the Ecuador Partnership as a great example of partnership for mission!  "Partnership, as a way of being in mission, invites us to ministry in service to others, as we together serve a common vision, God’s vision, for a healed and restored world. Partnerships, such as the one developed for ministry in Ecuador, announce to the world that a community of collaboration in the spirit of mutuality and respect is a much more faithful example of our Christian calling than a lone ranger mentality," writes MMN Executive Director Stanley Green.

Report from the Latest Fellowship and Learning Tour (Don Kempf)

Miguel Rodriguez, Santiago Gomes, Carolyn and Dennis Peters, Cathy Wismer, Mark Epp, Don and Shirley Kempf, Gerald and Joetta Schlabach

As I reflect on the recent Fellowship and Learning Tour to Ecuador, I am very grateful for the ways that I have seen God at work.  We were very impressed with the maturity of the congregation in Quito as we observed the end of their process to choose a new pastor.  Last summer when I first saw the qualifications that they had specified for the job, my first reaction was that they will never find someone of that caliber.  They also had a timeline set up for each part of the process and again I was skeptical that this would happen.  However, God always has a way of surprising us in Ecuador.  Everything went as planned and Luis Tapia was voted in as their pastor while we were there in the end of January.  He has most, if not all, of the qualifications for which they had asked.  Read more….