Winnipeggers have organized a service of prayer and lament on Wednesday after Palestinian Christians called to remember and pray for people suffering due to the war in Gaza.
The service, which will be held at Home Street Mennonite Church at 7:30 p.m., will take place on Nakba Day. That’s the day when Palestinians commemorate what they call the nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
The call comes from Kairos Palestine, an organization made up of Christian Palestinians located in the Beit Sahour under the administration of the Palestinian National Authority.
The organization, which advocates for a just solution to the conflict in the region, is calling on churches around the world to hold events on Nakba Day to mourn the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, pray for an immediate ceasefire and call on their governments to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Karla Braun, who is part of Hope Mennonite Church, is one of the organizers of the Winnipeg service.
“My heart is heavy with what we are hearing out of Gaza,” she said, adding what also breaks her heart is hearing from Palestinian Christians in the region who say they feel abandoned by the church in the rest of the world.
“We have a responsibility to Palestinian Christians,” Braun said. “We will be held to account by God for what we did during these days… I can’t do nothing.”
Donna Entz, who attends Home Street Mennonite Church, is also organizing the event.
Entz, who spent her career building bridges between Christians and Muslims in Africa and Canada, says the service is “a time for people of faith to focus together and renew their trust in God, in a power higher than politics.”
She said as a grandmother, it is a time for her to remember the Palestinian children who have been killed.
“The world has really let them down, just as the world let down the children who were murdered during the Holocaust,” she said, adding the service is a chance for her “to ask for forgiveness from the children of Gaza.”
Both Braun and Entz said they were also motivated by the verse in the New Testament in which the Apostle Paul tells Christians to rejoice with those who are rejoicing, and to mourn with those who mourn.
“We want to give people a chance to come together to grieve what is happening in Gaza,” Entz said, adding that the pain felt by the Jewish community will also be recognized and acknowledged.
“We are mourning all who have died and are dying, both Jewish and Palestinian,” added Braun.
Before planning the service, which will feature songs, prayers and sharing, organizers first reached out to the local Palestinian community to see if anything was planned for Wednesday. When they learned nothing else was in the offing, they decided to go ahead.
“This will go on the record as one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has seen, and I want to go on the record as having done something about it,” said Entz.
The church is located at 218 Home St. Everyone is welcome at the service, Braun said, including people from other faiths or of no faith at all.
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John Longhurst
Faith reporter
John Longhurst has been writing for Winnipeg’s faith pages since 2003. He also writes for Religion News Service in the U.S., and blogs about the media, marketing and communications at Making the News.