Hopewit

The world is so full of a number of things, I think we should all be as happy as kings H is name is actually Stuart Murray Williams but he uses his second name as his surname when he writes books like The Naked Anabaptist, Post-Christendom:Church and Mission in a Strange New World. He spoke at the Canadian Mennonite banquet in Rosthern Saturday night and with others, I was all ears as he talked about the consequences of Christianity moving from a majority to a minority standing in this age we’ve come to call post-Christendom.         His thesis centered around minority behaviour and the hope that we would not become belligerent, withdrawn or resigned as communities of faith, but that we would rather work at being creative, hopeful, prophetic, thoughtful risk-takers in a world that needs to be blessed by the radical Jesus-way option (my summary, not his).       I was impressed with his analysis although—and he admitted this—hi...

Coming soon to a flower bed near you! Along with others, I imagine, I’ve wondered about the nature of the third member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost. Reading on the subject exposes two distinct views: the spirit is like a person or is better described as an influence . If the former, we’d be led to believe that the Holy Spirit acts somewhat like a person, that is, moving about at will, thinking about things and making decisions, knocking on doors and being admitted—or not—and hearing and speaking to us as friends do. Rev. William Evans understands the Holy Spirit to have personality as opposed to being only what he calls, “an influence.” He argues, “No one but a person can take the place of a person; certainly no mere influence could take the place of Jesus Christ, the greatest personality that ever lived. Again, Christ, in speaking of the Spirit as the Comforter, uses the masculine definite article, and thus, by His choice of gender, teaches the pe...

A Stony Knoll act of Reconciliation Religious Freedom. The right to worship and follow (within bounds, of course) the person or concept you and I have chosen to believe in as being true and right. Baal, Buddha, Mohamed, Jesus Christ, the Bhagavad Gita, Holy Bible, Torah, Book of Mormon, Quran. The value of a civil agreement saying that the body politic won’t restrict the right to belief and practice of citizens emerges when you read about or imagine a nation, a world, without it.       “Christendom” is a word that combines Christ or Christian and kingdom and the memory of European states committing genocide on those who broke from the state church is accessible to us still in the book Martyrs’ Mirror by Thieleman J. van Braght . But for me as a Mennonite, it’s primarily a sampling of one case: Christians and state intolerance of emerging beliefs of one sect (Anabaptist) inside the Christian pantheon.       The Truth and ...