This Is My Story, Part I

Harold S. Bender made the point that love
for enemies and returning good for evil were
an integral part of the church's mission.

Regina Harlow, an ordained member of the Church of the Brethren, and I were recently asked by the Brethren-Mennonite Heritage Center to share our stories around four themes, peace, covenant community, alienation from our surrounding culture and being a neighbor in a world of need. She grew up Old Order Mennonite and I was raised in an Amish community. This is the first of my four short presentations at the Sunrise Church of the Brethren October 17.

I was born in a very rural northeastern part of Oklahoma in 1939, just two months before the German invasion of Poland that set off WWII in Europe. When I was four my family moved to Anderson County in eastern Kansas, after years of Depression and dustbowl drought. My father, then in his late 30’s and with 8 children—me being the youngest—avoided the draft with a farm deferment, and the tragedy of a world at war seemed really remote and distant, even though I remember times when an airplane flying overhead triggered fears of an invasion by Japanese or German bombers!

But I don’t remember hearing much talk about the war back then, but do remember some of the excitement about it finally being over six years later. And I don’t remember hearing much about pacifism or about our Amish church’s stance on loving our enemies based on the Sermon on the Mount and demonstrated by Jesus’s response to evil and violence, but there was never any doubt in my mind growing up that followers of Jesus should never, ever, take part in training for, or engaging in, the killing of fellow human beings or destroying their land and property. 

My father subscribed to publications like the Herald der Wahrheit, (Herald of Truth) published by and for Amish communities, as well as Mennonite papers like the Gospel Herald and the Youth Christian Companion, which supported pacifism and occasionally ran articles about Christians taking up the cross rather than taking up arms. And I also heard stories about the horrors of war through some veterans who had experienced it first hand, and who became friends with us while wiring our house and farm buildings for electricity when we moved to Virginia in 1946. One of them loaned us a set of books that were an illustrated history of WWII. I was horrified.

As a teen I ran across H. S. Bender’s the Anabaptist Vision, in which he made the case that for our Anabaptist forebears, loving our enemies and refusing to resort to violence in the face of attacks, was a central part of our faith, and represented a kind of witness the whole world needed to hear and heed. I was greatly inspired by that vision. 

When I left my Amish community and went to school at EMU, then EMC, and became a part of Virginia conference Mennonites, I thought I was joining the church of peace advocates like Harold Bender and John Howard Yoder back in the day. It took me awhile to realize how much Anabaptists of all shades, across the board, including the Amish in my own community, had been influenced by a kind of Pietism in which a primary focus was being prepared to escape earth and get to heaven, rather than praying for heaven to come down to earth to recreate the peace and shalom God intended, and in which Christians were to be about peacemaking and justice-promoting. 

I realized that even so-called peace churches had become more focused on experiencing an inner, personal peace rather than about practicing the kind of restoration and reconciliation represented by Jubilee justice--and on the kind of shalom in which nothing is marred and nothing is missing, and in which peace is far more than just the absence of war.

Today I grieve over the hostility and polarization in our world and in our nation, more than I’ve never witnessed before, and over the many church divisions I’ve seen in my lifetime right here in our community. And I agonize over our silent support of the US spending more on our military budgets than all of the next ten top spending nations in the world, and where most of us have more of our money going to support military budgets than missionary budgets.

But my prayer remains, with all of God’s people, “Let there be peace (with justice) here on earth, and let it begin with me, and with all of us together, Mennonites, Brethren, Protestants,  Catholics, all of Jesus’s followers and people of goodwill everywhere.” 

This is a part of my peace story.