Forward from the author:

A few years ago I began to hear about students in our community struggling with gender and sexuality. I knew that this had been a concern in other places, but our small community had largely been quiet on this front. I found a desire to think well about sex and gender in order to walk well with students and families who might be navigating the challenges of gender dysphoria. Since I was concurrently studying at seminary, I took the opportunity to begin researching and writing papers in this topic area for class. This paper was initially written for a Christian Ethics course, then edited and expanded to become the paper I wanted it to be (and what you have in front of you).

This week I read an article on gender medicine in Christianity Today, a magazine I appreciate and nearly always agree with. It happens I fully agree with the writer that adolescents should not be receiving gender-altering treatment, but it was disappointing that their argument seemed to have so little sense of the issue either for parents trying to understand or communicate with their “trans” kids or people of any age who experience gender dysphoria/incongruence. Worse, the writer’s use of the biblical text was scant and superficial yet their conclusion allowed no room for discussion.

Award-winning Canadian author Miriam Toews based her 2018 book Women Talking on these events, and in December 2022 a movie from Sarah Polley based on the book was released in theatres to generally positive reviews but also some frustration from those with first-hand knowledge or experience on the colonies. This story, as foreign as it may seem to most of us, is very connected to EMC.

At first, they were told it was ghosts. Or demons. Or the product of an ‘overactive female imagination.’ And while the women knew this was wrong, they lacked the evidence to prove it.

I watched the movie Women Talking four times in two days.

Sometimes a new film comes out and its title alone grabs your interest. In a subtle way the recent film Women Talking does just that. The title doesn’t reveal anything about the setting or the subject matter, and this is key, as we are drawn into the story with no preconceived ideas or opinions.

It’s easy to pick on the details a movie gets wrong, like how the colony’s village was laid out wrong or how names were mispronounced, but those details were not particularly important to anyone we spoke to about Women Talking.

This past summer, an Indigenous woman stopped by our office to talk about her work with a sixties scoop foundation. She wanted to talk about the possibility of the EMC offering an official apology to people like her who had been adopted or fostered in non-Indigenous EMC homes. She grew up not far from me and had stories about the abuse she and her Indigenous friends had faced in the area.

And so yeah, I was adopted in 1988 during a particularly harmful period in our nation's history… One of the longings of my heart was that my whole life, actually I wanted to be Indian—the term we use then. I would read books—well look at pictures in books—and just wish I could be like that. And yet the message that I heard in our—I heard constantly—not just… everywhere in this area was that Indians are garbage.

Broken systems hurt everyone. The child welfare system has hurt Indigenous children and families the most, but it also has left a mark on the non-Indigenous families and children who have been involved with it. Much has been written about the negative experiences of Indigenous children in the care of white families, and rightfully so. However, what is the effect of this broken system on the non-Indigenous (white) families who chose to foster or adopt Indigenous kids?

“Well, you know what Child and Family Services does. They just go and they just take kids away.” Well, if that's your only picture, your only vision of, or only experience, then I guess that's true. But I know that that's not what the role of Child and Family Services is. That their role is to investigate when it is believed abuse or neglect has occurred. And the Act, Child and Family Services Act has a double-edged sword to it. And every worker that does this work is charged with that, and that is keep children safe and look after their best interests. And do everything you can to keep families together. Those two are diametrically opposed to each other sometimes.

Does it even make sense for the church in the present to speak to something that happened in the past, Bergen asks, and what does a public apology do? He goes on to discuss the questions we should ask when we’re considering a public apology: Are we listening? Are we truly sorry? Will we ask for forgiveness? What actions are required? And finally, are we prepared to not be in control?

"Mennonite" is more than a culture or ethnic group. Mennonites are ethnically and culturally diverse and can be found around the world, and we have a heritage - a legacy of faith - that unites us.

I have lived in southern Manitoba longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. For those familiar with these parts, you can’t live here very long before you encounter—or at least hear about—Mennonites.

For many Canadians, the term Mennonite refers to a specific culture and people group, but the cultures that comprise Mennonites around the world are many and varied.

GT interviews Dallas Kornelsen, part of Many Rooms Church Community, an EMC house church group in Winnipeg, and a staff member at Crisis Pregnancy Centre of Winnipeg.

As we heard from over 20 women throughout EMC with varying levels of experience and study on the topic of abortion, similar threads wove through their responses. For almost everyone who grew up in the church, abortion had been a simple issue with a clear right and a clear wrong, yet for many of them, their perspective has shifted over time. Without questioning the sanctity of life or the fact that abortion is the death of a child, each one acknowledged that it is an extremely complex topic…

To address the topic of abortion, several women leaders of the EMC were asked about their views. Some provided written responses to key questions, and some were interviewed through video conference. One of the questions pertained to abortion in the church.

Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade a few months ago, it’s the abortion conversation in and about the US that has dominated most of our thinking and Canadian information and the concerns here have been largely overshadowed. For that reason, some basic information about abortion in Canada is being included in this issue.

Science is fascinating but how thorough is the process of testing and how trustworthy are the results? What do we do with dissenting voices and scientific claims that don’t agree?