Reports from the Listening Committee

A strong spirit of common commitments, looking more for helpful insights and wisdom than critiquing for the best approach and analysis, is how I sensed the mood. Yet to offer commentary on what I heard – particularly since all of this was essentially in plenary sessions – requires me to highlight what I judged to be significant. To do that in a way that is in some congruence with where I am coming from seems to call for a bit more prefatory comment.

First, I do not quite share some of the presuppositions that have served as starting point for our reflections this weekend. Though it is becoming increasingly common to speak about being Anabaptist as more inclusive than to use the word Brethren or Mennonite, I still balk at the too easy assumption of common understandings of what we mean, whether the meaning is to recall what the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century did and thought, or whether the meaning intended has to do with common assumptions of a kind of theological stance today. It is still advisable to recognize our different points of reference than to assume we mean the same thing.

Characteristic of the Radical Reformation movement was an appeal to inviting persons to accept the gospel voluntarily, to try to persuade them rather than to coerce or to presume conventional assent. When he realized the treasure he had discovered, as Felix Manz once described what happened to him, it prompted him to pass on the message to others. In that sense the early Anabaptists were missionary. In parts of the Low Countries the Anabaptist movement had grassroots popularity for a short time; otherwise one thinks of pockets or clusters of Anabaptist groups. But aside from the way the Hutterians made mission trips from Bohemia back to Augsburg and southern Germany, there were no real endeavors to be missionary across the linguistic communities of Western Europe, nor to the trading fields abroad, as did the Catholics of the south European countries.

The data that I know about does not really enable me to get a picture of the life of Anabaptist congregations over the space of several decades, in order to understand how their congregations actually formed and grew or declined. We are beginning to learn more about the way in which other streams of the Reformation spread through the impact of traveling preachers and circulating tracts, and we are learning more of the long centuries of struggle by minority churches in the German principalities to practice their faith. In short, the similarities of those Lutheran and Reformed communities, when in the minority with those of Anabaptist and other radical groups in trying to form and sustain congregations, is to me about as striking as the unique features of the Anabaptists. I learned to think more critically about that movement to some extent through the way in which I was forced to differentiate among free church groups and persons in the Soviet Union during their times of persecution.

More recently, as I have noticed the way in which a martyr mythology from the sixteenth century serves sermonic purposes, I have grown increasingly troubled by the idealization of the martyrs that distances them from our own realities. After all, the martyrs of the sixteenth century in the West were usually killed by persons who also claimed the name of Jesus Christ, who thought they were protecting the purity of faith against the inroads of heresy or apostasy. The telling of our martyr stories has required us to highlight the dark side of the other Christian communities in order to highlight the witness of the martyr. That becomes increasingly difficult to justify at a time when we see the marks of the true church in those other Reformation churches and the Catholic church, and we find ourselves needing to find the way of penitence for the walls between Christian sisters and brothers that we have erected.

The fact of massive martyrdom in the twentieth century where those who were killing Christians – including many, many thousands of Anabaptist-Mennonites – were doing so as explicit enemies of Christ, should really cause us to recognize the witness of such martyrs. From my own Russian Mennonite tradition, the blood of those martyrs does speak more directly and compellingly to the heritage I am called to build upon. So not to name them in preference to using sixteenth martyrs as models is something I cannot really agree to. In mission terms as well, the ways in which churches were formed in the USSR, where they were built up again after having been closed, provides serious learning models. The Soviet Mennonites also persisted in reaching out to the tribes of northern and eastern Russia and Siberia until the missionaries were stopped in their tracks. Their grandchildren were the ones to resume those efforts during the past decade of renewal. These are some of the understandings that shape how I read what we are attempting to do in North America and where we might look for guidance.

Second, by way of preface, when listening to how we have been talking about the new and the old, and what seemed to be assumed about our churches in North America, I began jotting down a few things I noticed and did not notice. Several times we began contrasting the memories of our youth years in the church versus the current generation of young people for whom we provide program. Yet there has been very little explicit reference to the histories of evangelism of the churches participating here. Is there a history of what you have done? Do you know it in general terms and in critical terms? Why is it that I do not naturally know that story? We did some introductions in earlier years, but what I am referring to is a sense of the major turning points in our evangelism efforts, as a kind of habitual way of talking so that we recognize what programs or goals we have been committed to and whether we gave them the necessary time intended before we switched to another approach.

I wondered to whether it would help us to articulate what we think is the benefit of presuming a common story? That is probably where we might go into depth about the sectarian model or the replacement models that Stuart Murray presented as categories, where he was illustrating from the Britain he knows and implying that we needed to specify how that works in Canada and the United States.

Now let me attempt to spell out some of the main features of Stuart Murray’s presentation, not so much to restate his points as to suggest what I thought he seemed to be doing and what could be helpful.

First, one of his most persistent emphases reminds me of the helpful book title Beyond Good Intentions. That is, Stuart kept reiterating the importance of thinking carefully about the churches that we seek to form. That included being conscious about sticking with a particular mindset on the ecclesiology we seek but also a readiness to adapt to the cultural forms within which persons in so-called postmodernity might be able to understand. He offered up to nine points to consider – such as whether the church should be need-oriented or commitment-oriented and various social and economic issues, such as the jubilee theme and peace and justice concerns, that should not becoming mere add-ons later.

Second, Stuart was urging us to think about the world of American Christianity as one that has already become, and will likely continue to become, rather marginalized to what really molds culture and thought. Hence the specific forms of witness he highlighted, which would help us keep straight what the gospel is really about, included:

1. To try to explain the gospel as if it is unknown rather than to exhort to a decision, presuming that they already know the story. I have a vivid memory of an Orthodox priest in Moscow in the early 1990s who turned to the congregation of the curious and the seekers with a short homily. He introduced them to God the loving Creator as revealed in Scripture. And he spoke of Jesus Christ as someone who lived in Palestine, who walked about teaching and healing, announcing a new kingdom of justice; as someone who was put to death, but who did not stay dead but rose victorious and promises us hope eternal if we believe in Him. There is forgiveness for sin. God loves the whole world including us Russians. And next week he would tell us a bit more about St. Paul about whom they might have heard and how much he has helped us to come to know God.

2. Stuart advised us further to tell the gospel as well as live it, wondering what it would take for us to be irrepressible.

3. The classic guilt and worries about the afterlife themes do not connect with people in North America when their concerns are more about alienation, loneliness, and purpose for living at all.

4. He advised us to seek relationships outside the church, though he did not make it that specific that we would regularly gather in the local pub "where everyone knows your name."

If I were to put it differently, Stuart was not really asking us to be as like the Anabaptists as we know how to be, but rather to be like the Anabaptists in taking the gospel seriously, which might lead us to changes and associations that require effort.

At the end of his second lecture he summarized by listing four features that need to be important for churches in a postmodern culture. These were: (1) allowing for doubt and dialogue, (2) embracing spirituality and thinking carefully about which spirituality we embrace – one that leads toward deeper encounters with the "unknown God" that we do know from revelation, (3) working in narrative mode, and (4) forming community that involves friendships, not merely meetings. What struck me was that he was challenging us to address the problems inherent in our own believers church model of being church. For example, the believers church model presumes more than it should that belief is a requirement for belonging. Would we agree to a more relaxed approach to membership rules, to love people into the kingdom, as some used to say? Stuart called us to move from being bounded churches to being centered churches. Several picked up on this, but I do wonder whether we are taking as seriously what sort of letting go he really has in mind. As part of the Mennonite denominations that are trying to integrate, I am very aware that we are now encountering major resistance to including within the denomination all those churches that were part of the former denominations simply by trusting their claims to confess the central Christian convictions. The voices calling for stronger boundaries, for litmus tests that all must go through, are becoming stronger and persistent. Those wanting a bounded church may think that it is the way to assure faithfulness. Stuart’s framing of things forces us to see how that is a fearful response, how it hinders the planting of the kind of churches we seek in the emerging North American culture.

In his third presentation, Stuart called for congregations to relate ecumenically and to take denominational commitments seriously. That suggestion runs very much counter-culture to present attitudes among us. My question is this: is the drift in our churches too strongly centered on the local congregation?

Finally, let me comment on the Anabaptist Church Planting Survey discussion. When contrasting some of the group discussion reports with the key points from the findings, I ended up pondering the interplay between concerted attempts to "plant a church" and the stories of how new churches emerged out of some engagement with a community. Part of that pondering has to do with our habits of looking for learnings that can serve as generic or universal rules of thumb, like a science of church planting. I noticed two things that seem to be true in generalizing terms. Concerted denominational efforts at focused mission endeavors do matter, especially in terms of common commitments to assist in new church starts. The sense of a program does foster more effort. At the same time, the realization of God being at work in God’s time seems to require regular reminders, commitment to prayer and waiting, and adapting to what is the real need (allowing the local persons to subvert our plans in exchange for what may really matter more).

One point to underline was the different ways in which Steve Clapp drew attention to the challenge of relating a new church meaningfully to a specific heritage, to a denomination. Not only does the church planter need to explain the story, creating narratives that tie the new group into it, but the denomination dare not be sloppy in keeping in touch, keeping addresses up to date. And there needs to be a sense of a continuing story of how God is leading. We need to know that what Gladys Maina shared Saturday evening during the "Church Planting Stories" session – about how God caused the miracles in Muncie – is now part of the story of the network of churches and the denomination to which that new church belongs.

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