MISSIONS THANKSGIVING LUNCH 

Thank you, to everyone attending our Missions Thankgiving Lunch Fundraiser on Sunday, October 1st. We received a generous donation for the San Benito School in Nicaragua. Thank you!

Church News - Nicaragua, Membership Meeting and Ordination Sunday

Did you miss the Nicaragua Team Report?

The Nicaragua Team returned to Winnipeg this past week and took some time this past Sunday to share stories and photos. Safe to say, the time in Nicaragua was a time of blessing, of learning, of hard work and of being challenged by God in our view of the Kingdom. Thank you for the prayers and support.

If you missed this past Sunday, you might be wondering what it is the Nicaragua team did during their time in Nicaragua. Below we have attached an FAQ section. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask any of the team members, and if you are interested in going, keep your ears perked for details on next year's trip! But first some other news.

Membership Meeting

You may have forgotten about our Membership Meeting last week, and that is alright. During that meeting, we held a confidence vote for Pastor Rafael Duerksen, whose term was extended for another 3 years. Also and crucially important, Council gave an update on our budget income to the end of September. If you missed the meeting, please don't hesitate to talk to any Council members or Pastors to get an update on the discussions we had.

Pastor Jose Luis’ Ordination Service

Lastly, and most importantly, we are excited about this coming Sunday because we have the chance to celebrate and important milestone for one of our Pastors. Pastor Jose Luis will celebrate his ordination this Sunday, and we are excited to have Rick Neufeld join us from Mennonite Church Manitoba. The Licensing and Ordination process for Jose Luis was initiated by our congregation two years ago, and we are excited to finally celebrate this critical step in the life of our church family. Everyone is heartily invited to a Combined Service this Sunday at 10:45 a.m., followed by communion.

God has blessed our congregation richly, and we are excited about what Jesus has in store for us next. Please continue to pray for God to lead the way for our congregation and our community. Below some more information about the Nicaragua trip.

Nicaragua Service and Learning Trips

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the teams do when they are in Nicaragua?
This year marks the third trip we have taken to Nicaragua. Over that time, we have helped the Bethel Church and School in San Benito, Nicaragua with the construction of several buildings. We participated in the building a high fence to protect to the schoolyard, a washroom building for the students, a water tower to guarantee water pressure, as well as the foundations and walls for additional classrooms.

I don’t understand why we need to send work teams. Could we not just send the money and
employ local workers?
This question raises a valid concern, and as a matter of fact, local workers are employed to work alongside our teams. And we agree, we don't want to take work away from our Nicaraguan friends. But while we do work hard, we hope that working together with our friends can be a vehicle for us to learn and be encouraged. At the same time, we hope to promote and to build mutual awareness that we are connected through our faith and our common calling to serve our communities. As part of our agreement, the Bethel Church has to find the same number of local volunteers as we are bringing from Canada and they have had great success at finding volunteers to join which has helped the projects progress very quickly. As an example, without our presence this project would have only had 5 workers, but during our week there we had a total of 30 to 40 people each day.

Where does the money go that we donated at the fundraisers?
The $20,0000 we fundraised in 2019 go directly towards the construction project in Nicaragua. We donated these funds to Nicaragua through Generation Rising, which works together with the Bethel Church and School in San Benito.  The money you gave in 2019 went directly towards the start of the construction of new classrooms for the school which are crucial as more grade offerings are added. We did not complete the construction of the classes, and we will need to raise more money in 2020 to build a roof over the classrooms and finish the interior. 

 I am confused. We call the Bethel Church our sister church, but do we actually help the church or the School?
The short answer is yes.  We call the Bethel Church our sister church because this is our connection. The School is one of the ministries of Bethel congregation and our partnership is focused on that ministry.  In essence, we are helping and supporting the community outreach program of the Bethel Church. But our connection to the school is the relationship as two congregations. 

 I heard that the church pays for team members to go to Nicaragua and that the trips are free. Is that true?
NO, THIS INFORMATION IS FALSE. Everyone that joins the Nicaragua trips has to fund their trips. For example, the 2019 Trip cost $2100, and attendees paid from their own money or found someone to help them out with the funds.  The church does pay for a leader to attend these trips. The leader is there to ensure the successful execution of the trip, to make sure the team is safe and to translate and facilitate the building of friendships and relationships.

How do you choose who gets to go to Nicaragua?
You do not have to have any special qualifications to go to Nicaragua. We love the variety of people who go, and you do not need to have any experience in construction to join in. We bring people on a first-come-first-serve basis, and we are always looking for new people to come and experience the beauty of the country and the people in Nicaragua. Are you interested? Start planning now to attend the 2020 trip. You are invited!



October 1, 2023

Missions Thanksgiving Lunch Fundraiser

We had a fundraiser for the San Benito School in Nicaragua. Thank you for your generous donation.

It is time for Thanksgiving!

It is fall and Thanksgiving is right around the corner. And this year, Thanksgiving falls in the middle of a hard-fought national election campaign. And I haven't been able to ignore the fact that all of the major parties are telling us that we deserve more. That you and I, the electorate, do not have enough yet but that if we only elect them, they will make sure to give us more! It seems to be the theme of the election as each political promises more and more in the bid to outdo the other.

And it is easy to get caught up in it all, because who amongst us does not want more!

It is so easy to listen to the dominant voice of our society and buy into what it is saying. It is easy to start believing that we have been shortchanged, indeed that we have a right to more and that it is our time to get ahead.

This is why we need Thanksgiving!

Because when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are proclaiming the opposite. We declare to the world that we have enough. Moreover, we preach that the things we do have, be they big or small, are not something we deserve but something we have been gifted.

Thanksgiving then is the time of year where we are invited to recalibrate. We are reminded that we are called to live lives of thankfulness and not lives of constant complaining and worry. We are told by the very God who died on the cross for our sins, that the object of our lives is not to "get ahead" but to take up our cross!

And what gets me excited is that in recalibrating to lives of thankfulness, we have the opportunity to shout into this world that there is another way of engaging life. That there is a way of living that comes out of profound love and grace, a way of living that sees life as a gift! A way of living that gives everything up to serve.

Friends, we need Thanksgiving! I need Thanksgiving! So may the God of grace and love, the great giver of all good gifts bless us with thankfulness. May God recalibrate our desires and wants, and may God be made visible through word and action of His disciples!

Blessings,

Pastor Rafael

Together as a congregation we want celebrate with gratefulness and to do so we invite you to our annual Thanksgiving Service and Banquet. We are excited that this year Harvey Rempel has agreed to speak to us and share his stories of work in Winnipeg’s North End.

Join us this Sunday, October 6 at 10:45 a.m. for our Main Worship Service followed by a lunch in the basement!

Sundays are Back!

If you missed our regular Sunday worship in English during the summer, we have good news! Our Sunday Services in English are back, alongside a whole host of changes.

Starting Sunday, Sept 15 worship in the English language will start at 10:45 a.m. We will call this our Main Worship Service.

We continue to offer worship in German in our “Deutscher Gottesdienst” which will take place at 10:00 a.m. each Sunday. Alongside this new worship schedule we invite you to look forward to a new way of engaging our kids in our main worship and other changes that will be introduced gradually.

But that is not all!

Facebook Discipleship.jpg

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a disciple?

How did Jesus interact with his disciples?

How can I be a disciple?

We hope that these questions and many more will be answered in our new series starting this Sunday. We begin in Mark 4 where our guest preachers Carol and Lloyd Letkemann will take us through a parable that will give us a roadmap for discipleship.

Join us this Sunday for our Main Worship Service, 10:45 a.m. and come early for coffee and snacks in the foyer!

New Schedule - New Series

Summer is finally here!

And with the summer also our summer schedule. Join us on Sundays at 9:30 a.m. for our German services. Our English services will move over to Thursday nights starting June 20 at 7:00 p.m.

That means that this Sunday, June 16 we will not have an English service, just our regular German service!

And just in time for summer we are also starting a new sermon series. Over the next few months we will be in book of Exodus where we will be exploring God’s missionary heart through the story of Israel’s salvation from Egypt. Please join us either on Sunday mornings or Thursday nights and bring a friend.

Time for a Picnic

Summer is here!

And that means it’s time for our annual “Church Picnic.” We are meeting at Bunn’s Creek Park on Sunday, June 2 with the English Service starting at 11AM and lunch to follow. We hope to see you there. If you need a reminder or you want to invited friends, you can find this event on our website calendar.

Nicaragua Fundraiser Success!

If you joined us this past Sunday you will have experience a full Sunday; full of stories and pictures, full of good food, and also full of challenging teaching.

We are so excited to report that we made our fundraising goal of $20,000 for the construction of new classrooms at the Bethel School in San Benito, Nicaragua.

As a matter of fact we exceeded our expectations. Thank you so much for joining us and please keep in mind that we will be going to Nicaragua again, so if this is of interest to you keep an open ear for more info soon.

Why Mennonite?

While we interrupted our sermon series on Anabaptism for our Nicaragua Fundraiser we are back at it full tilt this Sunday. Pastor Jose Luis will share with us about discipleship and we are looking forward to it. If you have missed our previous sermons on Anabaptism or you need a refresher, you can find them here.

Please don’t forget to like and follow us on Facebook and connect with us in person.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Why we do Parent-Child Dedication

We are excited for Parent-Child Dedication this Sunday. It is a wonderful time for proud parents to introduce their children to the congregation, to ask for a blessing and to receive the promise of support.

And it is fitting that our Parent-Child Dedication comes right at the time that we are discussing our Mennonite heritage. Mennonites were originally called Anabaptist or re-baptizers since they insisted on a believers baptism as opposed to infant baptism.

But one thing the tradition of infant baptism has taught us is that the inclusion of children into the church community is important.

With this in mind here are three reasons why we dedicate our children and why we call it a Parent-Child Dedication.

  1. We believe it is crucially important that parents commit themselves to raise their children in a Godly manner with the desire to see them become disciples of the living Christ. There is a lot of biblical material to suggest that the dedication of children to the service of the Lord is important and a custom that dates back to the very early days of the nation of Israel.

  2. We believe that community is crucially important and that as Christians we are not called to live out our faith alone. That is why this time of dedication is done publicly in the presence of the congregation in which the parents are inviting the community to hold them accountable and to carry them as they raise their child.

  3. Lastly, we believe that the congregational commitment to the care of its children is of the utmost importance. The time dedication is a time of commitment and making of promises by the congregation. The congregation promises to cherish, and to pray for the child and the child’s parents. The congregation also promises to include the child in the community of discipleship and to remove any barriers that would hinder the child from growing in faith and love of the Lord.

So in summary, we take the dedication of our children very seriously. It is a time of mutual commitment between congregation and parents.

Through this time of dedication we declare that God has given us the gift of life, and that God makes a claim on all our lives starting in our infancy.

We hope you can join us this Sunday for this wonderful and joyous time together.

Happy Mother's Day to All the Women in Our Congregation

This past Sunday was Mothers Day. We know this is day of joy for some and an emotional time for others. We used these words or a variation thereof this Sunday to celebrate all the women of our congregation. We are extremely thankful to Rich Villodas and the New Life Fellowship in New York for feeling sharing these words that we have adapted slightly:

Mother’s Day is a wonderful way to celebrate so many women in our world and in our church in particular. It is a time for joy and celebration – a day to acknowledge the debt of gratitude we have for our mothers.

At the same time, Mother’s Day carries with it many different emotions and experiences. For some it’s a difficult day. Here’s why:

1. Maybe you’ve lost your mom

2. Maybe you are a mom that has lost a child

3. Maybe you’re a woman who’s been trying to have a baby, but you have not been successful.

4. Maybe you are single, and you are waiting to meet the right person and it’s been difficult, and this reinforces your pain.

5. Maybe you have been called by God into singleness and you have embraced this calling and yet, a day like Mother’s Day leaves you feeling lonely and unappreciated.

We know it is complicated and we know these emotions are hard to reconcile with the joy and gratitude we often are expected to display on Mother’s Day.

So, whoever you are, we want to affirm 2 things:

A) Whether you have children or not, you are called to be a spiritual mother – you are called to birth and nurture children in the kingdom of God.

B) Your identity is not determined by whether you are biological mother or not. Your identity is based on the truth that you are loved unconditionally by God. That’s where your identity is found.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the women of our congregation. May God’s richest blessings go with you, and may you continue to live into the commission of making disciples and birthing children into the Kingdom of God!

Why Mennonite? A New Sermon Series

We are excited to start a new Sermon series!

Have you ever wondered what is a Mennonite? Why we are Mennonite? What it means to be Mennonite? You may have. Or maybe you have always just thought of Mennonite as a last name. Maybe it just means that we are Dycks, Penners and Wiebes.

Or maybe you have just associated Mennonite with food. That curious mix of German, Ukrainian, South American and now Canadian foods all wrapped into one oil-dripping deep fried clump of goodness.

Whatever it is, being Mennonite is about more than that!

This is what we are so excited to share with you over the next month and a half. Starting this Sunday with some stories and history we will proceed to talk about who we read the Bible, what community means to us, why we keep talking about discipleship and why we are pacifist not passivists!

By the end our hope and prayer is that you will be excited about our faith tradition not just because of history, or food or last names, but because of what our tradition has to offer our world and what God is calling us to do.

We cannot wait! Will you join us?

Presenting our New Website

We are excited to launch our new website!

Over the last few years we have been working on an upgrade and now we are ready fo our unveiling. As you will notice, this is still a work in progress, however, we are overjoyed to present some of the features of this website:

  1. Our sermons: Here you will be able to listen to every sermon you may have missed. Please come back soon for more information as we are working towards turning our sermons into a podcast you can subscribe to on your phone.

  2. Information about our Programs: Following the “Ministries” tab will lead you to all the latest information about your children, youth and VBS programming. Come back soon to see pictures, event information and more information about our ministries.

  3. Events and News: These last two features we are especially excited about. Not sure what is going on every week at SHMC? Go to our events page, find the events on the calendar and click on them for more information. Similarly, make sure to check in on our News page as we regularly update with blog posts from our Pastors, more information on our sermon series alongside with any information we think is important for our congregation!

We hope you enjoy this new way of communicating with you. Please make sure you also follow us on Facebook and invite your friends to come and experience SHMC for themselves.

Pastor Rafael

Announcing VBS for 2017

Mark your calendars for our 2017 VBS week! On August 7-10, 6:30pm - 8:30pm all kids ages 3-12 are invited to join us for a MAKER FUN FACTORY adventure!

Pre-register by contacting the church office, 204-663-7273. Can't wait to see you there!

VBS Dates

  • 7 August 2017 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm
  • 8 August 2017 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm
  • 9 August 2017 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm
  • 10 August 2017 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm