Stephen Kriss
skriss@mosaicmennonites.org
About a decade ago, the scales of Anabaptism tipped to what we’ve taken to calling the Global South. This means that there are more Mennonites outside of Canada, Europe and the United States than within the boundaries of European tradition. While we’ve noted this as the relative success of 20th century missionary efforts, we’ve not anticipated a secondary outcome in the midst of global migration—the rapid reshaping of Anabaptism in the European, US and Canadian contexts by persons from the Global South.
Across the Mennonite Church USA, conferences are feeling the pull of this change as migration brings Christians from different cultural backgrounds into our formerly Eurocentric context. In California, what it means to be Mennonite is defined by Indonesian, Latino and African voices more often than EuroAmerican tradition. In Florida, the balance wavers between Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast (Sarasota) which is predominantly EuroAmerican and Flordia’s Southeast Atlantic Coast (Miami) which is mostly Haitian and Latino. The balance in Mennonite Church USA’s midsection (Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas) continues to shift from the Russian and German immigrant communities of Kansas to rapidly growing Mexican American communities in Texas. Fuller Seminary professor and Mennonite leader Juan Martinez suggests that this pattern might be part of God’s intention to invigorate communities through a renewed encounter with the Good News.
For Franconia Conference, our 300 year history has deep roots in Euro-instigated tradition. It’s only been in the last 100 hears of our history that we’ve moved toward figuring a way toward multi-ethnicity. However, within the last generation that reality has accelerated. At times for those of us from EuroAmerican tradition, this change is disorienting, inviting us to move into unfamiliar spaces of having to explain our position as one among an array of expression.
The challenge in the midst of this shift–which includes Spanish-speakers at Franconia congregation, a significant population of persons from South Asia at Plains, growth in urban congregations like Norristown and a growing network of communities rooted in the recent immigrant experience–is that the shift in the global Christian community is increasingly in our conference meetings, in our Sunday morning worship. While it may be invigorating in theory–in practice it requires a change of mind and heart. The stranger no longer is only someone to be encountered far away but the stranger (those with different surnames, different food preferences, different ways of experiencing God and encounhtering the world) is increasingly a part of us.
This requires much from the EuroAmerican community—a willingness to listen, to learn, to embrace, to empower, to share and to reimagine ourselves as not only part of a globally diverse family, but part of a locally incarnated family of faith with differing traditions and ethnicities that honor God and the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition. It requires all of us to reimagine our ways of leading and being to be one way of doing things—not the only way. This emerging reality invites us to admit that Christ alone is the Way—and that we’ve been called together to represent the possibilities of inbreaking Shalom in which God’s love is made real in the world, through flesh and blood, in the midst of hope and fear.
The opinions expressed in articles posted on Mosaic’s website are those of the author and may not reflect the official policy of Mosaic Conference. Mosaic is a large conference, crossing ethnicities, geographies, generations, theologies, and politics. Each person can only speak for themselves; no one can represent “the conference.” May God give us the grace to hear what the Spirit is speaking to us through people with whom we disagree and the humility and courage to love one another even when those disagreements can’t be bridged.