A Divided Kingdom?

The Divided Kingdom, à Church of Latter Day Saints.

 Legacies of Division

 It has been a busy month – the Wenger Mennonites, Sam Mullet’s guilty sentence for in-faith hate crimes and an informative roundtable with AIMM representatives and church leaders from Burkina Faso and Congo / Zaire.  What do all three of these events have in common?  They all deal directly with the Mennonite culture’s legacy of division.

    This morning (being Sunday, 23 Sept), I lay in bed listening to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)’s broadcast of Krista Tippett’s interview with Focus on the Family president Jim Daly and Gabe Lyons, founder of “Q,” an Emergent Evangelical group.

    Tippett focuses on three topics – namely the efforts by Daly and Lyons to create a new, impactful and yet more caring and human face of Evangelicalism, on their outreach to gays, pro-Choicers and Muslims (the perceived traditional enemies of Focus on the Family and faithful Evangelicals everywhere) and the controversy this new leadership has generated between generations within the American Evangelical movement.  (For instance, Daly indicates that 65% of Evangelicals under the age of 35 support the concept of gay marriage – currently an almost violently divisive issue in Minnesota’s current electoral cycle.) 

The Jesus Tribe

    The Jesus Tribe:  Grace stories from Congo’s Mennonites 1912-2012 by editors Rod Hollinger-Janzen, Nancy J. Myers, and Jim Bertsche, all of AIMM, is a refreshing, and frank, account of the establishment, growth and self-sustaining work of the Holy Spirit within the context of the growing Congo Mennonite community.

    The story of the Congo Mennonites is perhaps one of the most dramatic and compelling narratives since the Russian Mennonites’ struggle for survival from 1917 - 1954.    It is a story of faith, courage, danger and sometimes loss – every bit as important and informative as A.P. Toews’ Book of Russian Martyrs.  In fact, it is through books such as The Jesus Tribe that the story of modern evangelical faith begun in the Martyrs Mirror extends to include the mission stations and missionary works our grandparents considered to be an essential aspect of their daily active faith and church missionary commitment.

    The Jesus Tribe helps to answer many basic questions held by members of these churches such as:  Does this all make any difference?  Why should I support and pray for the missions?  and How can I relate to Christians from other cultures? 

Consensual Governance

Daughters of Zelophehad, courtesy Wikiimages.com

    I have come to look forward not only to the old favorite Scripture readings in church, but often even more to the more esoteric ones I would otherwise be inclined to skip or gloss over.  Rev. Joetta Schlabach of Faith Mennonite in Minneapolis, Minnesota, delivered one such offering in her examination of the text Numbers 27: 1-11, Those Audacious Daughters of Zelophehad. 

English:  Numbers 27: 1-11 (NIV), courtesy Biblegateway.com

    In summary, as the nation of Israel was preparing to enter the Promised Land, a census had been taken in order to divide up the land amongst the male-headed households.  The daughters of the deceased Zelophehad were to find themselves disinherited from an equal portion of the land due to their father’s death and appealed to Moses that despite being female, they should in fact be allocated the proper portion due to their deceased father who had died faithful to the Lord.

    For our purposes, Schlabach’s sermon also contains three major observations pertinent to traditional Mennonite cultural organization and self-governance (though not necessarily unique only to the Anabaptists). 

Mennonites and Wilderness

Mennonites and Wilderness

ne Wiltness

      Faith Mennonite’s sermon on 02 September was “Learning from the Wilderness,” (Deut 4:1-2, 6-9; Mark 7:1-8; 14-15, 21).  Dan Leisen and Gerald Schlabach spoke on their wilderness experience at the International Boundary Waters, a popular national wilderness area that excludes all forms of modern convenience that do not run on muscle power alone.  I took two observations away from this presentation – both men departed from my traditional understanding of the Deuteronomy passage as pertaining to the development of the interior life of the individual and of the congregation.  Instead, they focused on the rules that allow you to enter the wilderness, such as “Leave no trace.”

    Heidi Wall Burns wrote her masters’ thesis at Iowa State on changing perspectives of “wilderness” in United States’ literature – indicating and exploring shifts between fear and terror to Romanticism and Exploitation to Preservation.  Leisen and Schlabach would seem to be representative of the latter.

    Similarly to American culture, the Mennonites have gone through many different periods of fear and romanticism regarding wilderness.  The 1860s and 1870s were decades of unrest in the frontier amongst the Cherokee, Sioux and other Western tribes – the Custer incident occurred as late as 1876 – two years after the initial immigration of Russian Mennonites to Nebraska and Kansas.  The Sioux Uprising of 1862 enabled Federal troops to evict the tribes from treaty lands in southwestern Minnesota, further opening up space for Mennonite expansion into that area as well.

Cautious Friends

    A good Mennonite friend of mine from Buhler, Kansas, posted the attached video onto her Facebook™ Timeline.  

Matt Slick commentary on Roman Catholicism

   Obviously, I have disclosed that I fellowship with a Roman Catholic group on Saturday evenings when in Chicago (no – I am Mennonite, not Catholic).  I fellowship with them because I enjoy the method by which they delve into the scripture readings for the service and because I have found within the Roman Catholic church a continued, obstinate dedication to old Mennonite values such as Communitarianism, Pacifism, Social Outreach, personalism or Pietism in one’s relationship to Christ, and Grace – especially amongst the orders (Franciscans, Jesuits, Vincentians and the Poor Claire’s).

   Having similarly attended numerous fellow Evangelical services, I have found myself all too often discouraged that while many churches share a commitment to Biblicism and the Evangelical message, I have left too many of these services feeling that the fruits from that service were negative, judgmental or counter-productive – or just as often, having experienced what I often refer to as Evangelical-lite – meaning that I experienced Truth but was leaving the service still spiritually hungry.  I have found certain Roman Catholic services and a few Evangelical Free Services to be a better mix for my own personal spiritual needs and “character.”   So I am a bit ecumenical by nature.  (Clarification, in saying this, I am stating that I believe that each individual has different needs and will find those needs met in different settings.  The characteristics and needs of the New Testament churches were likewise greatly divergent and relative to their situation.)

   That is not to say that I agree with fellow Catholic Christians regarding infant baptism – but even in that regard, I have found my former understanding of their theology to be a bit over-simplified and am comfortable that a Roman Catholic who has completed the Catechistic process to be potentially every bit as much the adult believer as are Mennonites.  That being said, I have wondered about the very close political ties between groups such as the Southern Baptist Conference and certain Anglican, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches – how can they, and we, cooperate so closely when the latter three churches also practice or do not exclude infant baptism.  Our Mennonite churches in Congo / Zaire are part of the same ministerial structure as the pedo-baptists.  How can one group be judged so harshly and the others just as easily forgiven?  I have not yet received a great explanation in that regard.