Canadian Mennonite
Volume 13, No. 23
Nov. 30, 2009
Are we listening to the Spirit blowing?
MC Eastern Canada pastors, leaders ponder ‘being a faithful church’
Baden, Ont.
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As the wind whistled around Steinmann Mennonite Church with an autumn gale, Sue Steiner wondered aloud, “Is the Spirit trying to break in?”
Steiner acted as moderator as Mennonite Church Eastern Canada pastors and leaders gathered on Oct. 31 to hear MC Canada general secretary Robert J. Suderman speak on discernment and then practise a variety of spiritual discernment tools. Suderman shared from his paper “Being a faithful church,” that he first presented at the MC Canada assembly this summer in Saskatoon, Sask.
“If we together believe, then the prophet’s voice has a place,” Suderman told the gathering, but, “if we together do not believe, then the prophet’s voice is silenced because then it doesn’t matter what we believe.”
Suderman’s paper was divided into three presentations:
• Listening to God: Who are we in God?
• Listening for God: Why are we here?
• Listening with God: What shall we do?
Key to Suderman’s paper is the “reality that, while different parts of our body are reflecting on the same foundational scripture, guided by the same Holy Spirit, revealing the mind/will of the same God, we are discerning what appear, at times, to be contradictory and irreconcilable directions in understanding Christian faithfulness.”
This led Scott Brubacher-Zehr, pastor of Rockway Mennonite Church, Kitchener, to wonder at the microphone if the MC Eastern Canada leadership had a hidden agenda in holding this day, and whether there were specific issues to discuss.
MC Eastern Canada executive minister David Martin replied, “The issue today is discernment. . . . Do we stop to ask, ‘What does God want the church to be, to do?’?”
In the afternoon’s discernment exercise, “Listening together with God,” individuals were asked to write what they had heard from God’s Spirit during the day. Each table group then took those statements and wrote down one statement that gathered the ideas together. Five summary statements were finally arrived at.
While this was just an exercise, MC Eastern Canada leadership is taking these statements very seriously. Jim Brown, pastor of Riverdale Mennonite Church at Millbank, on the other hand, found the exercise hurried and forced, and wondered about its worth.
By the time the event was over, the wind had died down, and the doors—jammed shut with cardboard—had stopped whistling, but the energy of the discussions and conversations made many feel the Spirit had made it into the building.