The governing body of Mennonite Church Canada has decided to end the full-time Indigenous-Settler Relations (ISR) position held by Steve Heinrichs and replace it with a new half-time position.

Heinrichs’s 10-plus notable years with MC Canada are over.

At the same time, MC Canada will add a half-time climate action position and a half-time associate executive minister position. The decisions were made at the April 9 to 10 meeting of the Joint Council.

The MC Canada release states that Heinrichs will not be filling the new half-time ISR position. MC Canada executive minister Doug Klassen says policies prevent him for disclosing whether Heinrichs was offered the half-time position. Heinrichs is similarly limited in what he can say.

That said, his preference would have been to continue in the role he had. Heinrichs was not involved in the April 9-10 decision. The cutback was effective immediately, although Heinrichs has offered to remain for a short time, to assist with transition and to wrap up projects. Klassen hopes to have the half-time position filled in the fall.
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There are hundreds of denominations within Christianity, and it can be easy to focus on the differences between them all. But a group of Mennonites and Anglicans is breaking through those walls. A group of 12 people from both denominations gathered from May 24 to 26 at the University of Manitoba’s St. John’s College in Winnipeg. They spent the weekend sharing the struggles each church experiences and the resources they offer, a practice they have labelled the “exchanging of gifts.”

“It seems that denominational affiliation is becoming less important, and Christianity is shrinking in many sectors in Canada,” says Melissa Miller, interim pastor at Home Street Mennonite Church in Winnipeg. “So it seems more important that Christians from different denominations engage with each other and learn from each other and lay down some of those divisions.” Miller is the Mennonite co-chair of the dialogue, and Christopher Trott, warden of St. John’s College, is the Anglican co-chair.
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For the first time in its history, the Anglican Church of Canada will enter into a bilateral ecumenical dialogue with Mennonite Church Canada (MC-Canada) following a motion passed at General Synod, July 12.

The motion’s mover, Bruce Myers, coadjutor bishop of the diocese of Quebec and former coordinator of ecumenical relations for the national church, explained that as the Anglican church’s relationship to mainstream society changes, it could benefit from talking to a church that has always had a fraught relationship with the mainstream.

“Mennonites have often existed as a church on the margins, both historically and in the contemporary Canadian context,” he noted. “As the Anglican Church of Canada enters a new stage of its life, some of us have been asking if there is something we can learn from our Mennonite sisters and brothers, about living faithfully as disciples of Jesus on the margins of society.”

Myers said the bilateral dialogue would be based on a new approach to ecumenism based not on an attempt to minimize differences, but to receive it as a “gift.”

This “receptive ecumenism” is a way for churches to learn from the differences in each other’s theology and lived experience, without feeling the need to push toward reunion or a full communion relationship.
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Assembly 2016 held in Saskatoon from July 6-10 may become known as a watershed year by delegates in attendance.

By turns intense and emotional, joyful and worshipful, the gathered made significant decisions that will impact the Mennonite Church Canada body of Christ for years to come.

On Thursday evening, delegates voted in favour of repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery – a settler teaching that has marginalized and taken rights away from indigenous people for centuries. While much education on the Doctrine of Discovery has already begun among congregations, much more is required.

On Saturday morning, 85% of delegates voted in favour of the Being a Faithful Church (BFC) recommendation to create space and test alternative understandings to traditional beliefs on committed same-sex relationships. Congregations who are asked to bless same sex marriages will now be given space to do so, even as the national family of faith continues testing to see if such discernment is a nudging of the Spirit of God.
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Question: What’s the fastest-growing Mennonite church in Winnipeg? Answer: Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church on Ethelbert Street. That old joke came back to me last week when I learned the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada and Mennonite Church Canada will be voting this summer to enter into a five-year bilateral dialogue. If passed, it would be the first time the Anglican Church of Canada has engaged in a bilateral dialogue with a denomination from the Anabaptist tradition.

In an interview with the Anglican Journal, Archdeacon Bruce Myers, formerly the Anglican Church of Canada’s co-ordinator for ecumenical and interfaith relations, specifically references Winnipeg as an inspiration for the dialogue. “There are all sorts of people who happily migrate” between Saint Margaret’s and Saint Benedict’s Table, another Anglican congregation in the city, he says, adding this “creates all sorts of interesting questions for ecumenism.”
Through the dialogue, the two church groups could learn a lot of from each other, Myers says.
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An official application for membership in the Canadian Council of Churches from the Mennonite Church Canada has been enthusiastically received and unanimously approved by the other member churches of the CCC. This brings the membership of the Canadian Council of Churches up to twenty traditions, including Anglican, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern and Oriental Orthodox
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