April 14thLet's Make Kimchi Together
I want to talk a little bit about the event that we have set for the Saturday morning portion of our Annual Church Gathering. We're making kimchi but more importantly we're having a shared experience together to help us talk about what it means to be a Regional Church body that's made up of many different cultures and yet we are all called together to follow Jesus to put our faith into action in a Mennonite Anabaptist understanding of faith.
Hi, MCEC, Leah Reesor-Keller here. We are getting so close to our Annual Church Gathering April 23rd in the evening and then in the morning and early in the afternoon on April 24th. I hope your calendar is marked and that you're signed up and ready to come whether you're an official delegate sent by your church or whether you're interested in getting a broader, bigger picture of what's going on in our Regional Church. You are welcome. Please sign up.
I want to talk a little bit about the event that we have set for the Saturday morning portion of our Gathering together. We're making kimchi but more importantly we're having a shared experience together to help us talk about what it means to be a Regional Church body that's made up of many different cultures, many different beliefs within that and yet we are all called together to follow Jesus to put our faith into action in a Mennonite Anabaptist understanding of faith.
This is an out-of-the-box kind of way to do this. You might feel uncomfortable. It might feel a little strange. Maybe you know you don't like kimchi or maybe you do or maybe you're just not sure. But I invite you to try something new because when we enter into a space of vulnerability our minds are open to think about things in new ways. And God, the Holy Spirit, is able to be present and at work in us when how we're coming to things is not quite so fixed. We're open to hearing what God might have to say to us.
This is an opportunity to do something that will hopefully be kind of fun and different and interesting. And yet my deeper hope is that the breakout group discussions, the larger picture of how do we use this as a metaphor to think about how God is calling us into the future as Mennonite Church Eastern Canada. My hope is that can be a transformative experience and at the very least a significant milestone in our journey of courageous imagination as we're thinking about who are we together? What are the different reactions that we have together as we interact?
Many of us across MCEC have been reading this book - The Intercultural Church by Safwat Marzouk. For those of you who are able to join the pastors and congregational leaders training day we had an amazing opportunity to have a conversation with Dr. Marzouk and to explore this in more detail. There's a whole chapter here on food and building an Intercultural church. One of the things that sharing food together does, exploring different kinds of food together does is it helps us foster a community that seeks to embrace and understand and be transformed by the differences among us rather than be divided by them.
So I hope that you're able to join in with that spirit, a spirit of vulnerability, a spirit of curiosity and a willingness to learn from each other. So I will be there with my purple cabbage and my blender and I hope to see you there. Sign up today.