Juana García, a pioneer leader of the Brethren in Christ Church in Cuba, passed away on January 20, 2017 at age 93. In the 1950s García worked alongside Howard and Pearl Wolgemuth, who served as Brethren in Christ missionaries in Cuba beginning in 1953. In 1960, when Wolgemuths were advised to leave Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, García and Keep Reading…
“We don’t understand why it happened, but we do know that God was with Al through all this time.”
“I could not work with those who would destroy the church, who were responsible for the sufferings of so many Christians.”
“The Bibles were needed so badly that we used everything that we could!”
The following excerpt is taken from Jim Bertsche, “That’s all you can do to me,” in The Jesus Tribe: Grace stories from Congo’s Mennonites, 1912-2012 ed. Rod Hollinger-Janzen, Nancy Myers and Jim Bertsche (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2012): 71-72. Co-published with the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism. The first warning Pastor Keep Reading…
“Maybe people think persecution is always negative, but for us we learned how to depend on God while our church was closed.”
Written by Gerald Mast. The below text was originally presented as a sermon at First Mennonite Church of Bluffton, Ohio and published on Mast’s personal blog in January of 2015. In order to find our way into the story of Anna Jansz, we must travel from Zurich, Switzerland in 1525 to the north German city of Keep Reading…
In the Tamil Nadu region of India, Paul and Suja Phinehas serve as leaders of Gilgal Mission Trust, a member church of Mennonite World Conference. In August they shared with Bearing Witness some of the struggles they face as Christians in a predominantly Hindu society. Paul Phinehas’s grandfather worked as a healer in a Hindu Keep Reading…
Pour français cliquez ici Note: This story has been updated. In the village of Sidi, Burkina Faso, Mennonite Christians face losing access to the land they farm, because of a growing conviction that the requirements for land use in the village are in conflict with their faith in Jesus Christ. Land in Sidi is managed Keep Reading…
Stanimir Katanic’s story is written by Marcia Lewandowski, who interviewed Katanic in 2014 about his experiences as a Nazarene conscientious objector in Yugoslavia. I met Stanimir Katanic as an 83-year-old man living in Ohio. In our interview, Stanimir requested to speak about the years of his imprisonment as a young man in Serbian, rather than English. Keep Reading…