Short stuff

The Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Conference of MB Churches took place Friday, Oct. 12 at Bakerview MB Church, Abbotsford, B.C. with some 118 delegates in attendance. CFO John Wiebe reported on the conference’s 2006–2007 financial statements, and Victor Wall, executive secretary of International Community of Mennonite Brethren (ICOMB) brought greetings from our brothers and sisters around the globe. Full reports are available online.

Elmer Martens, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, spent a week in Shanghai, China in Jan. providing intensive teaching to house church pastors. More than 30 pastors attended the seminar organized by Timothy Training Institute. An earlier October seminar was cancelled for security reasons after a government crackdown on religious groups last summer.

—ICOMB release

MCC responded to civil unrest in Kenya by giving $5,000 to help the Anglican Church of Kenya give personal hygiene items to some 4,000 people near the city of Eldoret, and $5,000 to help Kenya’s National Council of Churches provide rice, beans, and cooking fat to nearly 5,000 people near the city of Kisumu. The conflict, precipitated by disputed national elections Dec. 23, has claimed several hundreds of lives and driven about 250,000 people from their homes.

—MCC release

Feb. 29–Mar. 2 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Conrad Grebel University College, of the University of Waterloo, and a discussion “Building Bridges, Breaking Down Barriers: Religion’s Role in Reconciliation” will be given by pastor James Wuye and imam Muhhamed Ashafa, co-recipients of the Tanenbaum Peacemaker Award in 2000 and the founders and co-executive directors of the Interfaith Mediation Centre and the Muslim–Christian dialogue Forum of Kaduna, Nigeria.

—Conrad Grebel University College release

Fifty Congolese from Mennonite Brethren, Mennonite, and Evangelical Mennonite churches gathered in Kinshasa Nov. 22–25 for the first national forum of the Congo Forum for Conversation (CFC). With the second largest Mennonite population on the planet, the group, represented by equal numbers of men and women, were “unanimous in citing [inter-Mennonite relationships] as a matter of central importance,” according to MB leader, Toss Mukwa.

—Mennonite World Conference

In “Burning at the Stake: How global warming will increase religious strife,” Philip Jenkins, a well-known historian and author of The Next Christendom warns of “medieval levels of misery and doom” for Third-World Christians, after studying the results of climate-modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He argues that North American conservatives who combine themes of “world stewardship and protecting minorities” will be needed to stem possible conflicts in Nigeria over water supplies, and ethnic cleansing in Egypt, Kenya, and Uganda.

—Sightings by Martin Marty