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| What I read as a teen changed my life. |
Having been brought up in a strict but godly Amish (later 'Beachy Amish') family and community, I already felt grounded in my faith, but I found Bender's articulation of it riveting and life-changing.
In his widely acclaimed 1942 lecture at the American Society of Church History, later published as The Anabaptist Vision, Bender described the faith of our spiritual ancestors as being about three major convictions, 1) the church is a body of people committed to taking the teachings of Jesus seriously, 2) the church is a voluntary community of believers who deeply care for and support each other, and 3) the church is a witness to peace and non-violence in every dimension of life, no exceptions, even at the price of persecution.
Some of my enthusiasm for this kind of re-visioning of a sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement may have bordered on the naive and idealistic, but I've continued to see Bender's work as a important articulation of what the Mennonite Church aims for.
This was reinforced as I regularly read the Mennonite official paper, the Gospel Herald, as a teen, to which my father subscribed. It contained articles that have continued to influence my faith ever since, including those by H. S. Bender, J. C. Wenger, C. K. Lehman, John Howard Yoder, Myron Augsburger, Don Jacobs, John Ruth, Willard Swartley, Katie Funk Wiebe, Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus, Don Kraybill, John Drescher and countless other writers and authors. I felt more and more at home in a church tradition that I came to see as being about a 'third way', one that was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but respected the contributions and connections of all believers worldwide.
Today I'm less confident that most of my fellow Mennonites are about that church's vision, having become more and more influenced by other fundamentalist and evangelical traditions, and increasingly caught up in a pursuit of power, wealth and prosperity.
For example, I would never have dreamed that so many of my otherwise conservative Mennonite peers would become so caught up in the current tidal wave of American nationalism. Nor that they would defend to the hilt an unrepentant, twice-divorced president who lives a life of unprecedented luxury and who promotes an ever greater expansion of the US military budget, already larger than the total spent by the next ten top greatest military powers.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that conservative-minded Mennonites should have supported the Democratic or any other political party ticket in the last (or any) election. I'm OK with their casting a vote, if they felt they should, on the basis of their belief that the Republican side supported more of their values than the alternative.
But I never expected such strong support for the current hyper-patriotic "America First" agenda. And I can't imagine even one of the Mennonite leaders named above espousing the Trump-inspired nationalistic and anti-immigrant fervor I see today. Not one.
Nor can I imagine any of them labeling people like myself as "socialist", "liberal", "Trump-hater", or "communist sympathizer", all of which I've been accused of in recent months in Facebook and elsewhere. One fellow pastor earlier even suggested I should just go back to being Amish because I wasn't favoring changing our membership guidelines regarding military service.
Having said that, I've sometimes felt equally abandoned by many of my more progressive Mennonite friends in my MCUSA denomination.
Take some of the directions my alma mater, EMU, have taken, for example. One of its major departures from a simple, Jesus following path, for me, was building the largest and most expensive addition to their campus to date, the University Commons sports and student life facility completed several decades ago. Since then, campus renovations and the acquisition of a spacious home for the president on the top of Harmony Heights, large enough for a homeless shelter, have all reflected state of the art, top of the line improvements that to me feel contrary to the goal of educating students for sacrificial service in the global community.
Contrast that with the EMC of just years before my attendance in the 60's, when president J. L. Stauffer lived in a modest house and on an extremely modest income that had to be supplemented by boarding college students and raising chickens in the back yard (his small chicken houses were later renovated and rented to students).
Having said all that, am I about to leave my church?
NO. I'm well aware of having plenty of blindspots and beams in my own eyes to pay attention to. And meanwhile I would love to be reunited with all who have left the Mennonite fold who would be willing to accept, confront and engage with me as a fellow follower of Jesus.
Yet I can't escape the feeling that many of my sisters and brothers all across the liberal/conservative spectrum are not just leaving me, which is of no real consequence, but are departing from the radical vision of their 16th century Anabaptist forbears, who represented a truly upside-down and worldwide movement of believers.
Having said that, I've sometimes felt equally abandoned by many of my more progressive Mennonite friends in my MCUSA denomination.
Take some of the directions my alma mater, EMU, have taken, for example. One of its major departures from a simple, Jesus following path, for me, was building the largest and most expensive addition to their campus to date, the University Commons sports and student life facility completed several decades ago. Since then, campus renovations and the acquisition of a spacious home for the president on the top of Harmony Heights, large enough for a homeless shelter, have all reflected state of the art, top of the line improvements that to me feel contrary to the goal of educating students for sacrificial service in the global community.
Contrast that with the EMC of just years before my attendance in the 60's, when president J. L. Stauffer lived in a modest house and on an extremely modest income that had to be supplemented by boarding college students and raising chickens in the back yard (his small chicken houses were later renovated and rented to students).
Having said all that, am I about to leave my church?
NO. I'm well aware of having plenty of blindspots and beams in my own eyes to pay attention to. And meanwhile I would love to be reunited with all who have left the Mennonite fold who would be willing to accept, confront and engage with me as a fellow follower of Jesus.
Yet I can't escape the feeling that many of my sisters and brothers all across the liberal/conservative spectrum are not just leaving me, which is of no real consequence, but are departing from the radical vision of their 16th century Anabaptist forbears, who represented a truly upside-down and worldwide movement of believers.
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