Annual Gathering 2017

Creating Healing Environments

MHF Annual Gathering 2017!

Creating Healing Environments

Annual Gathering 2017 Logo

June 23-25, 2017

Laurelville Mennonite Church Center

Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania

Co-hosted with the Mennonite Chaplains Association

Report on Annual Gathering 2017

MHF focuses on Creating Healing Environments at Annual Gathering 2017

Nearly one hundred members of Mennonite Healthcare Fellowship (MHF) gathered at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center over the weekend of June 23-25, 2017 to explore the theme,  “Creating Healing Environments.” Severe weather, including torrential downpours and tornado warnings, greeted the attendees at they arrived on Friday, but the weather grew steadily more pleasant as the weekend progressed.

The plenary sessions included meaningful worship experiences, energetic singing, and thought-provoking input by presenters Donna Minter, John Wenger, David Baker, Anthony Brown, and Katerina Friesen. Eight workshops were presented on Saturday afternoon on a variety of topics, with participants able to choose up to four options.

Attendees represented a broad diversity of ages including several families. Twelve children participated in a lively and fun children’s program which met during the adult sessions. A large number of participants were attending their first MHF gathering. Long-time friendships were renewed and new friendships formed over social time, during meals, and between sessions. A highlight of the fellowship was the Saturday evening hymn sing and ice cream social.

For the first time, MHF tried live-streaming the plenary sessions on Facebook. Also created was a short video featuring a number of attendees making brief statements about how they create healing environments in their work. Videos can be viewed on Mennonite Healthcare Fellowship’s Facebook page under the “Videos” tab.  

Prior to the Annual Gathering, the MHF Board of Directors met on Thursday evening and Friday morning to consider a number of business items, including discussion about future Annual Gatherings. The consensus of the directors was that an annual meeting is important for maintaining the momentum of the organization, and for providing maximum opportunities for members in various parts of the country to attend. Next year’s Annual Gathering will be June 22-24, 2018, likely in Ohio. The exact location will be shared as soon as a contract with a facility is finalized.

This year’s gathering was co-hosted by the Mennonite Chaplains Association (MCA), of which about a dozen members were present. At their meeting on Friday afternoon, members of MCA voted to disband the organization, citing the difficulty of maintaining a national organization. MCA members are encouraged to become members of MHF, and/or to participate in chaplain cluster meetings sponsored by Mennonite Health Services or denominational chaplain circles. The presence of the chaplains at MHF’s Annual Gathering 2017 enriched the time together. Interim Executive Director Timothy Johnson expressed gratefulness for their attendance. He also expressed special thanks to J. Melvin Janzen, MCA President, for leading a time of centering prayer on Sunday morning before worship.

Annual Gathering 2017 Photo Gallery

Select a picture to start slide show.  

Worship and Music Leaders

Brad Yoder — Music Leader. Pittsburgh-based singer-songwriter Brad Yoder led in music throughout the weekend, and also playing his own songs in a coffeehouse performance Friday night, during the “Snacks & Fellowship” time. 

 

 

Kayla BerkeyKayla Berkey — Worship Leader,  Chair of Worship Commission at Pittsburgh Mennonite Church led the worship time.

 

Plenary Session Presentations

Friday evening, June 23 – Opening Plenary

Donna MinterEngaging the Anabaptist Vision: Healing in the Way of Jesus

Donna Minter

 

 

 

Saturday morning, June 24

John WengerHealing Spaces within 21st Century Healthcare Systems

John Wenger

 

 

 

Saturday evening, June 24

David BakerHealing in the Third Age

David Baker

 

 

 

 

Sunday morning, June 25 

Healing through Sharing Song and Story

Tony Brown

 

 

 

Leaves for the Healing of the Nations: Addressing the Spiritual Roots of the Climate Crisis

Katerina Friesen

 

 

 

Workshop Sessions

  • Introduction to Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) – Donna Minter
  • Repairing the Breach: Churches as Sites of Environmental Healing and Food System Change – Katerina Friesen
  • One Disease: Redox Imbalance as the Root Cause of Chronic Disease – Michael Sherer
  • Restoring Trauma-Informed Care: Keeping Ourselves Accountable with Cultural Humility and Social Consciousness – Aaron Erb
  • Training in the Healing Professions – Randy Longenecker, Shari Leidig Holland, and panel
  • Aging: A time for family conversations—and healing – Marlene and Gerald Kaufman
  • Healing Conversations around Contentious Subjects – Kenton Derstine
  • Mobilization for Service Reports – Grant Recipients

More information

Essay Scholarship

Students, residents, and other professionals in training were encouraged to submit an essay (under 2,000 words) on the theme “Creating Healing Environments” from their respective perspectives and experiences. Awards and publication were given to the following persons: 

Announcements

Webinars

Mennonite Health Journal

Paul D. Leichty

Paul D. Leichty, MDiv
Williamsport, Pennsylvania
Executive Director of Mennonite Healthcare Fellowship

I am committed to assist healthcare professionals to integrate their Anabaptist Christian faith and their professional life. It is a privilege to serve hundreds of committed and caring healthcare professionals in their faith journey. 

Finding Holy Space in a Pandemic: Reflections from Four MHF Members

Finding Holy Space

Reflections on Serving in a Pandemic from Four MHF Members

 This pandemic time has been unlike anything we’ve known in healthcare and in our faith-lives. Four MHF members took time to reflect on how their Anabaptist faith has supported them as they served in the Covid-19 Pandemic. We deeply appreciate their willingness to share their stories with us. If you would like to share a story of how your faith informs and upholds your practice with MHF, please e-mail cate@mennohealth.org

Faith and Resilience – Beth Miller Kraybill 

Before reflecting on the impact of my faith on my resiliency, I thought I should probably revisit the definition of resilience. I must admit I was a bit taken aback. Nearly all definitions have an adverb that indicates timeliness: to recover quickly, or easily; to adjust readily. Hmm, I thought. Perhaps I’m actually not very resilient, because none of those descriptors seem to fit my journey. And then another definition came forward – capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture. Ahh. Yes. That was more like it.

In truth, my experience of resilience is much like my faith itself. My faith tends toward slow and steady. Sometimes it buoys me forward with great energy. Other times I am full of doubt and longing. Mostly it is a constant undergirding that allows me to engage in the work I love without permanent rupture. Resilience is a similar undercurrent, an often-unrecognized stream that moves me onward.

Toward the end of 2020, I felt anything but resilient. All of my self-care and spiritual practices could not overcome my accumulated feelings of exhaustion, grief and work-related secondary trauma. Feeling embarrassed (aren’t I supposed to be able to ward this off?) and guilty (who walks away just as the pandemic is resurging?), yet also with a deep sense of knowing, I requested a six week leave of absence. I was met with tremendous care and support from my supervisor, colleagues, and co-workers. Words of affirmation and encouragement abounded, often in statements such as ‘thank you for being a good role model for taking care of oneself.’ I was able to turn the compassion I received back toward myself, and lean into time and space as necessary means of restoration.

Those six weeks helped me reconnect with core tenets of my faith. I continued to meet God in a variety of ways – weekly spiritual direction, hikes and walks in the beautiful area in which I live, and (mostly virtual) interactions with family and friends. I fed my spirit with books, jigsaw puzzles, music, and lots of sleep. I was able to participate in new support structures within my faith community. All of these helped to shore up my resilience and allowed for a slow and steady return to knowing myself as capable, compassionate, and beloved.

My faith and my resilience are integrally intertwined. I am grateful to be reminded of that truth.

Beth Miller Kraybill is a staff chaplain at Swedish Medical Center, a large urban hospital system in Seattle, WA. She is the sole spiritual care provider in a small campus with a focus on behavioral health and addiction recovery.

Finding Holy Space – Rachel Eash-Scott

One of my favorite Christmas books as a child was “Papa Panov’s Special Day,” a retelling of the Leo Tolstoy folk tale. After being told by Jesus in a dream to be on the lookout for him, a humble shoemaker spends his day watching the street and wondering when Jesus will come. As he pays attention, he notices human suffering and works to help those in need. As evening falls, he is stricken by the thought that he has missed Jesus: perhaps Jesus walked by while he was feeding the homeless man, or as he was warming the woman and child by his fire? He falls into an exhausted sleep, in which all the people he helped that day call to him, “I was Jesus. I was Jesus. I was Jesus.”

This pandemic has been exhausting. I’m a family physician working in an urban community health center; our patients are frontline workers and our COVID positivity rate hovered around 35% for most of the summer and fall. I’ve labored with COVID positive patients, wearing full PPE and sweating underneath. I’ve watched my colleagues struggle even more, especially those working in more direct care with patients with COVID. Some days, especially now in the bleak days of February, it’s hard to know how to keep going.

In these hard moments, I find myself thinking of Papa Panov. While trying to keep his eyes open for Jesus, he found himself noticing the needs of the people in front of him; he stopped his watch to care for them, and in doing so found Jesus. It’s not always easy for me to stop and pay attention in the middle of a busy day: sometimes it seems that I just can’t find the emotional energy. But I find that when I’m able to pause for a minute to truly listen to a patient’s story, or to take the time to hear about what brings them joy, or to bear witness to their heartbreak, it brings us both into a holy space. Jesus is present in those small moments. He finds his way into the exam room and across a computer screen and into my tired heart. These spaces of connection are what give me a link between my patients and my faith, and a renewed sense of hope that allows me to continue the long, challenging work of being a doctor in a pandemic world.

Rachel Eash-Scott is a family physician with obstetrics and sees patients of all ages at Sixteenth Street, a community health center on the south side of Milwaukee, WI, where she is also the Director of Family and Internal Medicine. She is a member of Milwaukee Mennonite Church.

The Faith of Friends – David Yost

Like many newly minted COVID clinicians, 2020 landed me far from my anticipated plans.  Retiring in 2018 after three decades with the Indian Health Service and Centers for Disease Control, I envisioned a life of short-term missions, world travel and enjoying the wonders of grandparenting.   Yet by March, I had returned to full-time work as a COVID hospitalist and field physician with the IHS, learning those skills on the fly in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

Native Americans have been disproportionately impacted by the virus.  By June, my reservation hospital in mountainous east-central Arizona had the unfortunate distinction of serving a community with the highest per capita COVID rate in the country.  Despite ready access to PPE, testing, and treatments as compared to many non-Native groups, the Apache and Hopi communities where I served lost dozens of revered elders who were key to maintaining tribal culture, language and history.  COVID landed on a backdrop of crowded multigenerational homes that frequently lacked power and water, stressing families already struggling with diabetes and substance abuse. 

In a hospital accustomed to a census of <15 but improvising daily to house 30+ COVID inpatients, I worked hours not seen since residency.  Losing patients to COVID who were friends, work colleagues, and members of my Presbyterian congregation was disheartening and fatiguing.  Yet through these experiences, I was supported by work and community partners who seemed to take each additional setback as a challenge to unite and move forward with the assurance that God’s grace would sustain us.

Although we are a federal facility, I’m blessed to be part of a medical staff filled with believers from numerous backgrounds.   As COVID work strained our resources, our collection of Presbyterians, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists  and the chance Mennonite stepped up to support one another by cross-covering shifts, working extra days, and just checking in regularly on each other’s well-being.  Recognizing the rejuvenating importance of rest, we facilitated breaks to get our teammates away from the hospital, even to the point of allowing my wife and I time to travel to Goshen in August to meet our first grandchild.  

More impressive than our staff’s resiliency was the rallying response of our tribal communities.  Schools were converted to testing and vaccine sites, casino hotels served as quarantine hostels, gymnasiums became water delivery depots, sawmill workers morphed into hospital security guards, and high schoolers learned to be elder advocates.  Facing mandatory curfews and the closure of most tribal businesses, community members with vehicle access readily adopted food delivery roles for homes where 8-12 people often shared small 2-bedroom houses.  Stress was evident, but so was strength and a dedication to helping others.

COVID continues to teach lessons we didn’t want to learn.  For me, it taught the value of relying on the faith of friends to support my own faith.  I pray my life will also reflect God so that others may draw upon my faith in the same way that I have grown from them.

David Yost is a family practice physician who spent the bulk of his career with the Indian Health Service on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. He also served with the Centers for Disease Control and has worked globally in locales including Puerto Rico, Tanzania, and New Zealand. When not enjoying their new granddaughter in Goshen, he and his wife continue to make their home in the mountains of rural Arizona.  

Finding What I Need – Todd Weaver 

The year before COVID 19, my wife Anne Kaufman Weaver and I had the chance to travel to Ireland with Sheryl Shenk and Ted Swartz on Eklectic Pilgrimage which focused on the inward journey of Spirituality.  Practices of reading, meditation, prayer, thought, and symbol have become so meaningful to me and especially during the pandemic.  I needed to find use for all these practices this past year.  At first the spreading virus  was traumatic and we responded with closing one of our two offices and discontinuing all elective procedures for three months.  However, because of my specialization in invasive dentistry and emergent dental care I was immediately at the front of the line with COVID 19 risk.  I actually found myself very busy and taking care of a lot of dental needs from local dental offices that were closed.  I was fearful for myself taking a bath in saliva and blood all day, and anxious about not wanting to bring virus home to my family, and scared to possibly pass the virus on to vulnerable patients if I became an asymptomatic spreader.  PPE was a trusted barrier to the coronavirus, but then again my inward spiritual practices also became a barrier against the fear and anxiety that I felt toward being a frontline worker.  I ran a lot in those early days of the pandemic and I began to collect poems on my phone and spread it across my icloud account so that I could access them from all my devices.  I have now collected over forty poems and readings that have helped to center me.  Recently the release of the new Voices Together Hymnal has provided me with considerable solace with learning new songs and readings.  Voices Together has become the new way of coping and has focused me with song and text and I’ll always be thankful for receiving one of the early copies last fall.  Our small group from church has continued to meet outside and socially distant, and has been a tremendous support for me this past year.  In small group and in my relationship with my caring wife have I been able to express myself and feel emotionally supported.  I have found what I need during this time of pandemic. 

Todd Weaver has an expanded practice in general dentistry in southeast Pennsylvania and has been invested in a dental mission to Nicaragua until recent pandemic restrictions.  He is married to Anne Kaufman Weaver who has an MDiv and is a chaplain at Landis Homes Community.  Together they have three young adult children.

Indigo Miller, BSN, RN

Indigo Miller, BSN, RN
Boston, Mass.
RN & MPH Candidate

MHF does important work providing opportunities for health professionals and students to build relationships across disciplines while encouraging tough conversations centered on how faith influences our individual and collective work improving health and seeking physical, mental, and spiritual human wellness. I am personally thankful to MHF for offering valuable opportunities in leadership and networking as a young professional, and their generosity via the Steven Roth Memorial Grant Program in support of my public health volunteering in Tanzania.

New Podcast Episode: Esther Bucher and the Impact of Occupational Therapy

NEW PODCAST EPISODE with Esther Bucher

Occupational Therapy Makes Life Accessible

 

Occupational therapy makes life accessible: An interview with Esther Bucher

Esther Bucher talks about her experience as an occupational therapist, how she came to her profession in her forties and her two service terms abroad with different Mennonite mission groups, including time in Vietnam as a MCC service worker where she worked with victims of Agent Orange.

 

Available on All major Podcast Platforms

Lyubov Slashcheva, DDS

Lyubov Slashcheva, DDS
Iowa City, Iowa
Dental Resident/Fellow

Engaging with the mission of MHF allows me to bridge my identity as a follower of Jesus and healthcare professional, allowing me to strengthen the faith-based motivations in my career as a dentist.

Mennonite Healthcare Fellowship

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