Church mailbox scandal
After being a member of my home church, Foothills Mennonite in Calgary, Alberta, for 5 years I’m starting to wonder when I’m going to get my own mailbox. It’s not that I have a lot of mail to collect or that I dislike sharing a mailbox with my parents. It’s that getting your own church mailbox is a sort of right-of-passage for the young Christian. At least that’s the way it has always been presented to me. But apparently my home church in Calgary doesn’t “hand out” mailboxes willy-nilly.
3 years ago when I decided to attend the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, my dream of having a mailbox at Foothills was shelved. “Why should I have my own mailbox when I’m not there for 8 months of the year?” I said. My decision to stay in Winnipeg this year and work with the Federal Government over the summertime helped subside the feelings of mailbox disenfranchisement at Foothills…until last week when at Bethel Mennonite, the church I semi-regularly attend in Winnipeg while I study at CMU, gave me my own mailbox after I made an off-hand remark to their Senior pastor that I wanted to get a little more involved by attending Adult Bible study.
I went from mailboxless to mailboxed after my first conversation with the Senior Pastor of Bethel Mennonite. After taking my name and phone number into his pocket address book he said, “If you’re going to be around in the summer, I’ll get you a mailbox.”