The gospels portray physical healing as a central component of Jesus’s ministry, and the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles suggest that healing was important in the early church. Caring for and restoring the integrity of the body is, in these New Testament examples, a sign of creation’s renewal and the arrival of God’s reign. Even when Christians have lost sight of this precedent, emphasizing instead an otherworldly salvation of the disembodied soul, the ministry of healing has rarely been completely discarded. This issue of Anabaptist Witness explores the place of healing in the church’s conception of its purpose and task.
Two recent events emphasized the ways that the power of prayer combined with relief and peacemaking work are energizing the mission of God in the Ethiopian context. The first of these was a Zoom conference on February 15th featuring President Desalegn Abebe of the Meserete Kristos Church (MKC), an Anabaptist denomination in Ethiopia with […]
We share this prayer with permission from the Association of Mennonite Congregations in Germany. Information about ongoing prayer opportunities is found at the bottom of the page. —ed. Prayer on the occasion of the 1st anniversary of the Russian government’s war of aggression against the people of Ukraine. 24 February 2023 War causes endless […]
1. Everydayness – a concept conquers the academic world In recent years, academic discussion in the social sciences has focused strongly on the concept of the ordinariness of human existence. In this context, everydayness is understood to be a “common, everyday occurrence characterized by nothing extraordinary” or even an “everyday process.”[2] Even more, it is […]
The Flag Says Everything At the beginning of July, I visited Poland with a WEA staff member with the aim of getting to know a bit better the refugee work of the Slavic Protestant congregations in the country. Among others, we met the newly married couple Natasha and Ivan. Both fled from Belarus to Poland […]
How to Relate to Enemies the Jesus Way? Evangelical Christians are quick to pull out the golden rule of proper behavior. “What would Jesus say?” is that rule. In times of war, however, the rule seems not to apply for the vast majority of Christians. Christians turn instead to just war theory, enroll in the […]