Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Conference News

Care & Share hosts Green Fair

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The Care & Share Shoppes’ invite the community to their annual Green Fair to be held under a big tent in their parking lot on Saturday May 2, from 10am to 5pm. The Green Fair is an opportunity for the community to met local businesses who provide earth friendly services and products. This year, a special feature will be WHYY’s You Bet Your Garden host, Mike McGrath. He will be leading two informational sessions at noon and 2pm.

Sarah Bergin, Executive Director of the Care and Share Shoppes, explained the connection between thrift shops and the environment, “If you stop and think about it, thrift shops are all about recycling! We take recycling very seriously at the Care & Share. We are committed to the reusing of the products which are donated to us. If we do not sell them in our shoppes, we take extra steps to make sure they are responsibly recycled elsewhere.”

Mike McGrath’s enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge of chemical-free horticulture will provide a wonderful compliment to other businesses who will be promoting their earth friendly products and services as well as stewardship of the earth’s resources at our event. Mike’s noon session is “Seven Secrets of Successful Organic Gardeners”, and at 2pm, “Organic Answers to your Toughest Garden Questions”.

Other vendors who are participating are: Annie’s Rag Rugs, recycling cotton and wool to make rugs; Miller Trailer Sales, promoting a method of vacationing that is environmentally conscious, economical and fun; Montgomeryville Cycle, featuring their Vectrix Electric Scooters; Reichman Enterprises, candles from vegetable waxes; Skippack Creek Farm, featuring organic produce and all natural soap; Deer Run Daylily Gardens, organic daylilys and products; Wash Tyme, recycled vegetable oil to make bio-diesel and the byproduct Gylcerin is then used to make soap; Ten Thousand Villages, promoting fair trade products; and Ethos Healthy Paints, an ecofriendly paint store and contractor.

Good publishes a collection of reflections from Cambodia

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by Ben Noll, The Goshen College Record

Recent world history will soon be coming into clearer focus for Goshen College students when Sheldon Good, a senior, releases his Pinchpenny Press book, “Surviving the Khmer Rouge: Stories on the Struggle to Stay Alive,” on Sunday, April 5, 2009. Good is a member of the Salford congregation.

Accounts of the impending tribunals and sentencing for Khmer Rouge leaders of the genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s made world news headlines at CNN on Monday, March 30, 2009.

Good’s edited volume tells the stories of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge communist regime. Most stories in the book are gathered from host parents of Goshen College students from the spring 2007 Cambodia Study-Service Term (S.S.T.).

The interviews detailed in the book sprung from an assignment given by Keith Graber Miller, Cambodia S.S.T. leader professor of Bible and religion. “Keith gave us this assignment the second week we were in Phnom Penh,” Good said. “Many of us were pretty intimidated to interview people about such a delicate subject.”

Graber Miller, in a foreword to the book, comments that Cambodians have adopted a “forget and forgive” attitude towards the events.

Relying on host siblings to translate for Khmer-speaking parents, Good said, that “many of our host siblings heard their parents’ survival stories for the first time through these interviews.”

“These are stories that need to be told, and heard,” Graber Miller said in his foreword. “For our host families and friends – and for all Cambodians – we hope for the authentic healing necessary to truly get on with living, out from under the oppressive shadow of the Khmer Rouge.”

Good hopes that this book can play a small part in the reconciliation process by allowing these survivors’ stories to be shared and encourages us all to look for our own stories of healing and reconciliation to share with our neighbors.

Good’s collection is the 2009 Horswell Anthology Series book. One Horswell Anthology is published each year with the intention that in can be used as a text for a future class. The spring 2010 Study-Service Term to Cambodia will use it as a required text.

Contributors to the book include current Goshen College seniors Abigail Groff, Dirk Miller, Hillary Watson and Greg Yoder as well as 11 Goshen College 2008 alumni.

Groff contributes to MPN's Adult Bible Study Online

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Gwen M Groff, pastor of Bethany Mennonite Church; Bridgewater Corners, Vt.; is the current writer for the March – May 2009 quarter of Mennonite Publishing Network (MPN)’s Adult Bible Study Online feature. This quarter’s series is entitled “New Creation in Christ”.

MPN’s Adult Bible Study provides a quarterly study of the Bible from an Anabaptist perspective. Lessons are based on the Uniform Series: International Bible Lessons for Christian Teaching created by The National Council of Churches. In addition to weekly lessons, Adult Bible Study offers daily Bible readings and suggested resources for additional study. Due to production and writing schedules, the teaching materials found in Adult Bible Study are prepared many months in advance therefore, MPN also provides the Adult Bible Study Online feature as a free resource providing an update to the printed materials, prepared and posted just prior to the date of the lesson. These columns are designed to help bring current events and Bible study together.

“This assignment from MPN to write a weekly essay connecting the week’s text to current events disciplines me to reflect more broadly on scripture,” writes Groff. “The writers for this quarter’s Adult Bible Study (Leonard Beechy) and its teachers’ guide (Sharon Kraybill) are both insightful interpreters of Scripture, and I enjoy reading each of their perspectives on the week’s text. After reading them I spend time with various news web sites; the New York Times, the BBC, CBC, etc.; looking for stories that might connect with the Scripture lesson. Karl Barth said, ‘We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.’ I always think that’s a good idea but this assignment requires me to actually do it.”

Teachers and students are encouraged to visit the Mennonite Publishing Network website and benefit from her insights and observations. This service is provided by Mennonite Publishing Network to encourage the study and application of the Scriptures to life today.

Elizabethtown College hosts workshop on Anabaptist racial diversity

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Elizabethtown College is presenting a workshop, “Divided by Faith: Racial Diversity and Anabaptists Today,” on Thursday, April 16, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Young Center’s Bucher Meetinghouse. Sponsored by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and the Sociology and Anthropology Department of the college, the workshop features Michael O. Emerson, Ph.D. Emerson is the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and founding director of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life at Rice University. The workshop is open to the public free of charge.

Emerson will discuss his research on racism among American evangelicals and share his stories and findings from multi-ethnic congregations in the U.S. Also included will be an overview of findings about race and racism from Church Member Profile 2006 (a study of Anabaptists in the U.S.) by Elizabethtown College professors Conrad Kanagy and Jeff Bach, and responses by several Mennonite and Church of the Brethren pastors including Leonard Dow, pastor of Oxford Circle Mennonite Church a Franconia Conference Partner in Mission.

At 7:00 p.m., students in Kanagy’s Sociological Theory course will host an “Author Meets Critics” discussion with Emerson, where they will critique his work and pose questions. This event will also be held in the Bucher Meetinghouse and is open to the public free of charge.

Emerson is the co-author of several books, including the award-winning “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America” and “People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States.” The latter book won the 2007 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for making the most significant contribution to overcoming racism, awarded by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association. His most recent books are “Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money” and the forthcoming “Religion Implicated: What Sociology Teaches Us about Religion in Our World.”

Dock Woods Community hosts pastoral care seminar

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Chaplains, pastors, counselors and lay ministers are invited to Aging Well: Recognizing Losses and Opportunities On the Last Stage of Life’s Journey at Dock Woods Community on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 from 8:00am – 11:45am in the Fisher Auditorium on Dock Drive, Lansdale, PA. The seminar qualifies for 2.5 APC Continuing Education hours.

Doctors Carol and G. Peter Schreck will lead this seminar which is part of Dock Woods Community’s Annual Pastoral Care to Seniors seminar series. The Schreck’s are both practicing therapists and teach at Palmer Theological Seminary. They bring a family systems perspective to the topic of senior ministry.

The seminar is FREE to those who pre-register by April 17. A continental breakfast will be provided. For more information on this event click here or contact Chaplain Merlin Hedrick at mhedrick@dockwoods.com or 215.368.4438.