> First Mennonite Church Meeting, Yarrow, BC (Source: yarrowbc.ca)
“We believe the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ is for all people. Christ commands the church to make disciples of all nations by calling people to repent, and by baptizing and teaching them to obey Jesus. Jesus teaches that disciples are to love God and neighbour by telling the good news and by doing acts of love and compassion” (MB Confession of Faith).
As some of you know, my mother passed away very shortly after receiving a cancer diagnosis this past summer. I see the world a bit differently after those ten days at Abbotsford Hospice Society’s Holmberg House.
One particularly powerful moment was when a lady and her son visited my mother. It turns out that she is one of the 87 people who repented, was baptized, and is now obeying Jesus through the ministry of my parents and their many friends and supporters at South Abbotsford M.B. Church (1980 - 2000).
This wonderful lady prayed powerfully for my mom and then shared her testimony with me; how through my mother’s life she was impacted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is now living for Him along with her adult son and his wife. The son told me, “We are now working on our extended family!” Wow.
Seventy-five years ago, MEI was founded on the values and beliefs of the dear Mennonites who had immigrated to the Fraser Valley in the 1920s primarily from Russia. These people were fleeing persecution that is too horrible to describe here. Our family’s own Opa and Omi (Ben & Martha Janzen) came to Yarrow and Abbotsford during this time. It was the children and grandchildren of these immigrants who were responsible for bringing the Manuel family to Abbotsford with the hopes that my parents would be able to reach out with the good news of Jesus to the Indian peoples settling in this community in their own language. Why? Because they believed that salvation is for all people. Without the vision of these people of God, a church of purely new believers in Jesus would never have been established here. Again, wow! Praise God!
Friends, let’s make this the year of telling and sharing of the love, joy, and peace that we can all experience as a result of a Holy Spirit led life.
...“for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!””
Romans 10:13-15
Let us be the ones to bring the good news to those who are in our circles of influence, for “We [continue to] believe [as did the Mennonites who established MEI] that the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ is for all people” (MB Confession of Faith).
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