In 1948 the assassination of Liberal political candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán touched off a ten-year civil war in Colombia. In nearly the same year, Colombians joined with Mennonite missionaries to form the first Colombian Mennonite congregations. But the civil war cast a long shadow over the church’s early years. Because Protestantism was seen as a Keep Reading…
Gjorgje Nikolic wrote well. He loved to write, and with a job for a paper like Belgrade’s Politika, just after World War I, he had great opportunities. With the opportunities came a deeply troubling experience. In the fall of 1926 the reporting manager of Politika sent him to observe a strange case before the Danube Keep Reading…
Pour français cliquez ici Esther Mbombo wa Tshipongo was a strong and generous woman, whose dedication to the church sometimes made her an object of criticism and conflict. Someone who knew her says, “Her only response was to suppress her tears and devote herself to reconciliation, even if she wasn’t at fault.” Many people remember Keep Reading…
What do you talk about when you’re buried up to your neck in the earth, surrounded by the handful of scruffy guerillas who put you there? When Kasai Kapata was in that position he spoke up with, “Comrades, it’s a good thing that I am here in this grave.” “They thought I was crazy to Keep Reading…
The story of David Klassen, a Mennonite Brethren church leader in the USSR who was imprisoned three separate times between 1936 and 1965, is an inspiring account of faithfulness in the face of overwhelming opposition. How did he and other Mennonite Brethren in Karaganda sustain their faith in such difficult circumstances?
The stories collected by the Bearing Witness Stories Project are meant to inspire and challenge readers with their testimonies of faithful and costly discipleship. But they also raise many questions.
When Paulina Foote was invited by the Mennonite Brethren Board of Foreign Missions to serve as a missionary teacher in China, she accepted the assignment as confirmation of her own sense of God’s calling to serve in a foreign land. During the summer of 1922 she gathered her belongings and prepared to say good-bye to Keep Reading…
Pastor Salvador Alcántara, from the rural precinct of El Garzal, Simití, Sur de Bolívar, Colombia, is an exemplary and inspiring man. He is a husband, father, grandfather, pastor of the Foursquare Gospel church in El Garzal, farmer, president of the local comunal action council (junta de acción comunal), and vice-president of ASPROAS—the Alternative Producer Association Keep Reading…
Klicken Sie bitte hier auf Deutsch zu lesen. David Klassen was born in 1899 to Johann and Anna Klassen in a Mennonite village called Rosenort in South Russia (now Ukraine). Although Johann and Anna owned a small grocery story, they owned no land and were not wealthy. At a young age, David, along with his Keep Reading…