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Letters to the editor
Mennonite Brethren Herald welcomes your letters on issues relevant to the Mennonite Brethren Church, especially in response to material published in the Herald. Please keep your letters courteous, brief and about one subject only. We will edit letters for length and clarity. We will not publish letters sent anonymously, although we may withhold names from publication at the request of the letter writer and at our discretion. Publication is also subject to space limitations. Because the Letters column is a free forum for discussion, it should be understood that letters represent the position of the letter writer, not necessarily the position of the Herald or the Mennonite Brethren Church. Send letters to:
Letters, MB Herald
3-169 Riverton Ave.
Winnipeg, Man. R2L 2E5
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or by e-mail to mbherald@mbconf.ca. (Please ensure that your postal address is included in your e-mail correspondence.) |
Position needs revisiting
I commend John Redekop’s “Revisiting the alcohol question” (Personal Opinion, May 11), and hope that this will lead to a revision of our denomination’s official position, which has remained unchanged since 1969. Redekop raises a number of important “fundamental realities” and also provides the solution that we should not claim more for the Bible than it claims for itself.
Even the official position contains a “better way” when it says, “the Bible . . . does not explicitly forbid the use of alcohol (and) does declare wine to be a benefit from the Lord.” I suggest, however, that the opening statement in the official position would be more accurate if it said, “the Bible does warn against the abuse (not the use) of alcohol”.
Our covenant as a denomination would be a more credible witness if it called believers to a disciplined life in Christ, which for many may entail abstinence. That leaves us, it seems to me, with only one remaining issue – the “offence to the weaker member”. I can only imagine that to be drunkenness, which the Bible clearly teaches against.
John Konrad,
Abbotsford, B.C.
Communication or information
To communicate, according to Webster, is to exchange information. The editor of the MB Herald has been doing an outstanding job in allowing proper communication, and it would be a tragic loss of membership expression if this periodical became a one-way promotional paper. We have already in many of our churches gone to communication “from the top down”. Why is it that the same people that complain about government dictatorial methods have no trouble rationalizing the same method for church structure? When you remove the ability of the grassroots people to voice their opinions and ask questions in an open forum, you also take away the desire to participate and contribute. To discontinue the Herald because some people consider it a “sacred cow” (Letters, May 11) would be tantamount to saying that whenever some people consider something greater than others do, we should do away with it. If the Conference really wanted to know what the MB constituency would like to see done, they would include a survey sheet in a fall or winter issue, when most people aren’t on holidays. I realize that this is contrary to current leadership thinking, because that is how we used to do church and we dare not go back even though it may be right. The editorial in the April 27 issue does an exceptionally good job of addressing the communication flow between leadership and the constituency.
P.J. Funk,
Abbotsford, B.C.
Correction needed
As we are likely the only household in New Zealand to receive the Herald, I thought it necessary to respond to a “People and Events” clip in the April 27 issue. The clip states that the New Zealand government is considering passing a law to give homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual married couples and in so doing will “approve of same-sex marriage”. This is incorrect. The legislation (which is now law) deals only with the issue of the division of property after a relationship breaks down. The law does two things: 1) it allows the courts to consider such issues as giving up a career/job to raise children (when dividing property, which gives a fairer deal to many women in divorce situations); and 2) it applies these regulations to the breakup of married couples, but also to heterosexual and homosexual couples that have been together for some minimum time period.
The clip apparently was included in your magazine to provide evidence of the secularization of society and a turning away from traditional Christian values. To be sure, the New Zealand government, like many Western governments, does not fully recognize the benefit to society which stable families bring; however, it is not at this time giving homosexual relationships the status of marriage. As a Christian, I find little wrong with this law.
We already live in a society which has a different view of marriage from the Christian one; if that view becomes formalized in our nation’s laws, why should we be surprised? Jesus calls us to live a holy life in the midst of the world. Let us work at strengthening and growing our marriages (despite how the state might define that term) as one sign of that holy life for those who need to see the love of Jesus in action.
Allan Willms,
Christchurch, New Zealand
Model responsible use
Re: “Revisiting the alcohol question”, (May 11). I came from a non-Christian home where it was accepted that adults smoke and drink, and I started doing both when I was of legal age. I understood that some people drank excessively, but, like most of my peers, I did not expect that to happen to me, and in fact it did not.
I became a Christian at university through the witness of a Christian club whose members modelled a wide range of positions on smoking and drinking. I stopped smoking after a relative died of lung cancer, but continued to drink moderately on social occasions.
My wife came from a conservative Mennonite home where neither smoking nor drinking were acceptable. One of her siblings developed a drinking problem in his 20s but later committed his life to Christ and was delivered from this habit. This left my wife with a horror of the risks of alcohol. After we married, I found it no great sacrifice to adopt her position regarding our home, so we raised our children in an alcohol-free home.
Now that they have grown up, one child has a strong dislike of alcohol, but the others are fascinated by it to various degrees. We may have failed them by not modelling the responsible use of this ubiquitous substance. Some experts say children learn self-discipline by hearing parents say, “No more. That’s my limit.” Ours never heard that.
The Bible is right in declaring wine to be a benefit from the Lord. Numerous scientific studies confirm the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, defined as no more than one drink per day for women or two for men (men’s bodies eliminate alcohol faster).
The 1969 MB resolution justifying abstinence reminds me of the way the ancient rabbis surrounded the law of God with man-made laws. For example, they expanded Exodus 23:19 into a prohibition against eating meat and milk at the same meal. They believed anyone obeying their strict man-made laws would never break God’s laws. In reality, they were insulting God by suggesting that He didn’t make His own laws strict enough. Finally, I find it ironic that we should be revisiting our policy on alcohol at a time when the rest of our society is discussing the decriminalization of marijuana. I hope our resolution-writers are preparing for that challenge.
Please do not publish may name. It could cause difficulties with both my family and church.
Name withheld
Another call for name change
Catching up on the Heralds that had accumulated during an absence, I found a wonderful page (15) in the April 27 issue. David Poon’s account of the Bethel Chinese Christian MB Church trip to China, and then the list of leadership issues generated in the Canadian MB Conference’s Open Space dialogue in Winnipeg.
My heart was particularly warmed that the list included “Calling/Affirming women for leadership”. But then I remembered what had happened when I had attempted to make a contribution to the Coalition Against Child Poverty’s letter to politicians. I told the person at the other end of the line my name, and said that I was a member of a Mennonite Brethren Church. She said, “I can’t put that down. What else are you involved with?” (She used my Mennonite Central Committee affiliation.) As I understood her objection, she felt that it would be laughable to put down a woman’s name as a member of a church of Brethren.
Remembering that one of the first prosecutions (of MBs) in Russia involved a young woman who was baptized by immersion, I thought, “The woman at the Coalition is right. Our name only represents part of our history. It is not appropriate for a Conference whose leaders proclaim as key issues “Calling/Affirming women for leadership” and “Training young adults through missions”. One of the ways of affirming women, especially young women, for leadership would be to find a more inclusive name.
Donna Stewart,
North Vancouver, B.C.
Musicians recognized
I was in the audience at Central Heights MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C. on Sunday, May 27, attending the Mennonite Historical Society’s presentation “Invitation to Celebration: Celebrating the Musical Heritage of Mennonites in the Fraser Valley”. I thank the MHS and Holda Fast Redekopp (whose vision made the afternoon possible) for the comprehensive overview of our heritage superbly presented by emcee Tony Funk. I am grateful for the opportunity to sing ziffern [songs for which the music was written in numbers rather than notes], to sing with a Vorsänger [a song leader who would sing each line for the congregation to repeat], and to repeatedly join the excellent choirs and orchestra in singing.
As the children and grandchildren of the conductors celebrated rose to the podium to lead the choirs, as audience members repeatedly stood to be recognized as singers with a particular conductor, and as the details of each man’s contribution to the community was articulated, I began to realize that the celebration was as much a tribute to excellent teachers as it was musicians. Each man left a legacy that continues to thrive into the present.
As the emcee pointed out, the cultural legacy also included Gemeindschaft [the concept of church as a family or community]. He reminded us that the introduction of four-part harmony, which we take for granted as the foundation of our musical heritage, split the church when it was introduced. I could not help but wonder that the ideal of Gemeindschaft could be so easily shattered byæof all thingsæmusic. Several hundred years later we still haven’t learned from our history. People still condemn others in the Gemeinde [congregation] and marginalize them for matters of taste that the dogma of the day labels “spiritually superior”; as one view takes pre-eminence, another is cast aside.
While I enjoyed the artistry of the performers during the afternoon, I could not help but think of other artists and intellectuals whose God-given gifts were scorned by the community and who have never received redress, much less celebration: painters, poets, preachers of the “wrong” gender, playwrights, etc. Their legacy (or their unrealized potential legacy) has largely been ignored or lost. Perhaps that is something the MHS or a doctoral candidate in search of a thesis could address, if not redress.
So I sat there enjoying the lengthy excursion through the cultural canon acutely aware of the fact that there wasn’t a place for every Mennonite-born bird in the choir. However, when the entire audience, the mass choirs and the orchestra rose to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” in a mighty voice, I could not help but be grateful for the legacy in spite of its limits. Because it limited me, it also liberated me.
Verity Harms,
Surrey, B.C.
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© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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