Mennonite Central Committee is poised to celebrate its centennial.¹ The planning committee of an upcoming conference, scheduled for October 23-24, 2020 at Manitoba’s University of Winnipeg, is designed to celebrate “MCC at 100.” Former and current MCC workers, students, and all those with a heart for MCC and the service and humanitarian work for which it has become known over the century, are urged to submit proposals. MCC at 100: Call for Proposals | Intersections I serve on the conference planning committee as a voice from Quebec, but my ruminations here emerge largely from my thoughts as I prepare my own proposal.

My thoughts go back to the beginning of the nearly seventy-five year history of Mennonites in Quebec. MCC’s presence comes fifteen years after two young ‘Old Mennonite’ couples, Tilman and Janet Martin, and Harold and Pauline Reesor, responded to their respective sense of call, establishing a Mennonite mission north of Montreal in 1956. Four years later, the Mennonite Brethren turned their attention to Quebec when civil strife in the Congo closed down their mission in that country; by 1961 Ernest Dyck had established a congregation in St. Jerome.²

It was a decade later, with the radical Front de libération du Québec’s kidnapping of two government leaders that MCC Canada, like Canadians across the country, turned its attention to the discontent that the “October Crisis” signalled.³ Quickly discerning that the issues were too complicated to have a direct role in promoting reconciliation in Quebec, MCC established a voluntary service program. By 1973 MCC programming was run mostly through the House of Friendship, or La Maison de l’Amitié, established by MCC Canada and the Mennonite Conference of Ontario and Quebec.⁴

MCC, by the very nature of the organization, is known for the possibilities that it has provided throughout its history for Mennonite and Brethren in Christ women to take on positions of leadership.⁵ My history of MCC Ontario, and Esther Epp’s Tiessen’s telling and analysis of the story of MCC Canada’s first 50 years, abundantly illustrate this.⁶ The photo that appears on the back cover of Mennonite Central Committee in Canada, and at the beginning of this post, taken at the 2009 Montreal peace festival, suggests the opportunities for young women. This, and the four other references in the book to MCC’s presence in Quebec, tantalize those readers who may wish to learn more about the voluntary service programs that began in the province in 1973.⁷

Women’s leadership, as it was formed through their involvement in MCC, was evident in the Mennonite church congregation Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal, from 1980 with the hiring of Robert and Deborah Martin Koop as pastoral couple.⁸ My recent research on le Comité des femmes inter-églises, the inter-congregational women’s committee established among the Mennonite Brethren two years earlier, although not directly connected with MCC, revealed the strong female leadership in this Mennonite Brethren para-church organization, from its establishment in 1978 until its demise in 1998.⁹ A question that I have been left with is this: Did the women who sustained the organization for those two decades ultimately benefit MCC’s Quebec ministry?

The placement of two Mennonite Brethren couples in succession as directors of the Quebec office – Jean-Victor and Annie Brosseau (1996-2008) and Muriel and Claude Queval (2008-2017) – with both women having been previously involved in the MB women’s committee, would suggest the affirmative.¹⁰ A close look at these women and MCC’s Quebec programming during these years, along with Debbie Martin Koop’s management of the office in the previous decade, provides the opportunity to fill in the gaps in previous studies which have overlooked Quebec.¹¹ For example, the void in Douglas Heidebrecht’s newly published and excellent analysis of Mennonite Brethren women and their journey to leadership ministry, when it comes both to MCC, and to Quebec, is suggestive. Indeed, it makes inquiry into women’s strong presence in MCC leadership in Quebec all the more intriguing.¹² My goal will be to explore significant questions around Women in Ministry Leadership as it unfolded in Quebec’s MCC office from its founding in the mid-seventies, through the demise of Le Comité des femmes inter-églises. It is these and other significant questions that will be subject to enquiry at the MCC at 100 conference and I hope that you will consider submitting your own proposal proposal to what promises to be a wonderful time of celebration.ion. MCC’s centennial milestone.

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1. Photo credits: MCC Summer service workers Nathan Bonneville, Armella Mpinga, Elizabeth Lougheed and Victoria Pelletier, taken by Mattieu Lambert, MCC Quebec; Annie Brosseau, co-director of Quebec’s MCC office from 1996-2008, speaking, MAID CA CMBS NP149-1-909. ↩
2. Richard Lougheed tells these stories in Menno au Quebec: A History of French Mission by Four Anabaptist Groups, forthcoming from Pandora Press. ↩
3. Epp Tiessen, Mennonite Central Committee in Canada: A History (Winnipeg, MB, 2013), 102. ↩
4. For a brief history of the organization see my article, “A Lonely Outpost: The Mennonite Maison de l’Amitie of Montreal, 1973-2006,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 24 (2006), 149-67. ↩
5. Nancy Heisey has noted this in “Getting the Steps Right,” 100, in Telling our Stories: Personal Accounts of Engagement with Scripture, edited by Ray Gingerich and Earl Zimmerman (Telford, Pa.: Cascadia Publishing House and Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2006). ↩
6. Marr, the transforming power of a century: Mennonite Central Committee and its Evolution in Ontario (Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press, and Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2003); Epp Tiessen, Mennonite Central Committee in Canada: A History (Winnipeg, MB, 2013). My review of the latter highlights this facet of Epp Tiessen’s storytelling and historical analysis. Please see Mennonite Historian 40, no. 1 (March 2014, 9-10.↩
7. Epp Tiessen, Mennonite Central Committee, 101.↩
8. Richard Lougheed, Dory Reimer, Lucille Marr and Dora-Marie Goulet, “Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal: 1978-2003” (unpublished essay, 2003).↩
9. Le Comité des femmes inter-églises, 1978-1998: a compass for the women of l’église des frères mennonites du Québec, Journal of Mennonite Studies Vol. 37 (2019), 105-18.↩
10. Lougheed, Menno au Quebec.↩
11. For instance, Epp Tiessen, Mennonite Central Committee in Canada; Marlene Epp, Mennonite Women in Canada: A History (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2008); Gloria Neufeld Redekop, The Work of their Hands: Mennonite Women’s Societies in Canada (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996).↩
12. Heidebrecht, Women in Ministry Leadership: The Journey of the Mennonite Brethren, 1954-2010 (Winnipeg, MB: Kindred Publications, 2019).↩