Anabaptist vision series: The vision lives

John L. Ruth, Salford

As a freshman at Eastern Mennonite College in 1950, I was too immature, and too preoccupied with a girlfriend, to pay much attention when Goshen College Professor Harold Bender came to lecture. I didn’t know he thought that our Franconia Conference “customs and traditions” had “preserved…more nearly the ancient Mennonite forms of worship, doctrine, and church government than any other American district.”

I did get serious a half-year after first hearing Bender when at the age of 20 I was zapped, by casting lots, with an ordination for a mission station at Conshohocken, just outside of Philadelphia. A week later, to my joy, my girlfriend agreed to marry me. Dropping out of college, I got a job at the Mennonite-sponsored Herald Bookstore on Main Street, Souderton. There I found a book by Harold Bender and bought a copy of History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference by John C. Wenger. I was intrigued with his take on the meetings of the Franconia Conference, where only ordained men voted.

He wrote that the sessions were “not intended to be inspirational,” but to consider “the problems, needs, and difficulties with which the several congregations are confronted.” I saw that myself, starting at conference 13 years after the Wenger book had appeared. I had to agree that “little is done” at conference to start “constructive projects for the future.” Instead, “If there is any one thing which impresses a visitor…it is the grave concern there manifested lest the church become entangled with the world.”

I had sensed myself that we had a valid tradition of unusually practical obedience to Christ. But was it the whole Gospel? Not according to my experience in mission outreach in Conshohocken, or lively discussions with fellow-student Tony Campolo in our philosophy classes at Eastern Baptist College. Were we Mennonites more concerned with defending the faith than sharing it?

Happily, when I got a copy of what would become known as Bender’s Anabaptist Vision address, I found the threefold banner it lifted – discipleship, mutuality and love – very inspiring. Since those days, Bender’s vision of what our heritage has to offer has not only stood the test of time, but is relevant to the new situations the old conference mentality didn’t address. That is why Chris Nickels, Sandy Drescher-Lehman and Dennis Edwards, in the last three issues of Intersections, could apply the triple motifs to their own work. Discipleship (following Jesus), community (Bender’s old-fashioned word was brotherhood) and love (peace), is indeed how our heritage teaches us to do church.

This is not a trivial or marginal or obsolete vision. Emergent church leader Greg Boyd from Minneapolis spoke at a meeting of Mennonite leaders in Columbus, Ohio, saying that the power of what we call the Anabaptist Vision gave him “goose bumps.” You Mennonites, he testified, have by heritage a vision as current as tomorrow. “People are waking up to the truth that the Kingdom of God looks like Jesus and that the heart of Christianity is simply imitating him.” Chalk one up for “discipleship.”

Boyd continued, “Millions are waking up to the truth that followers of Jesus are called to love the unlovable, serve the oppressed, live in solidarity with the poor, proclaim Good News to the lost and be willing to lay down our lives for our enemies.” Whoa! Non-Mennonites discovering what Bender called “love and nonresistance”? Boyd added, “Multitudes are waking up to the truth that the distinctive mark of the Kingdom is the complete rejection of all hatred and violence.” We have something “distinctive?”

Then comes a real kicker. These multitudes are looking for somebody to share “tribal identity and historical rooting.” In fact, “A central feature of their outlook is ‘the longing to live in a story that is bigger than oneself,’ in other words, “a tradition they can align with.” Looking at our Mennonite fellowship, that sense of a covenant community over time is what gave him goose bumps. “You have this treasure,” he told his Mennonite audience. “Are you going to share it?”

The sometimes tattered “banner over us” as Mennonites bears the noble triple motif: Discipleship, community and love. These are not the invention of Harold Bender, but the practical embodiment of the Kingdom. Let that threefold ensign wave!