Blog

Steve Kriss
skriss@mosaicmennonites.org

We had a good time together in California, the 6,000 or so Mennonites who gathered at San Jose 2007. Youth sang hymns late into the night on the city’s efficient light rail. We heard new Mennonites like Phoenix pastor Shane Hipps tell his story of becoming Anabaptist first in the head, then in the heart. Brother George Makinto from Los Angeles lead the adults with grace and ease in multilingual worship. A team from Eastern Mennonite University produced creative and high quality video for youth and adults all week. It was a time of hopeful interaction.

But it was also a sobering week. I was struck by how many of us were white with gray hair. I was the youngest of the ten who sat at my round delegate table. While there were reportedly more young adults present than ever before, I wondered in the midst of our discussion what kind of future our church might have when the average Mennonite is 54 years old. As experienced leaders (all old enough to be my parents and with the departure of moderator Roy Williams, all EuroAmerican and from the Midwest) navigated our delegate discernment, Jim Schrag called for an audacious church. It was a buzzword that sounded more like the word choice of a California surfer than our staid MC USA executive director and it caught the attention of the delegates. What would it take to be an audacious church?

Audacity suggests both boldness and an element of surprise. In listening to Conrad Kanagy’s report about Mennonite Church USA demographics at San Jose, we need to recognize that the research suggests a serious decline. To find a hopeful future, we’ll need to make audacious choices that recognize two things that we heard at San Jose 2007—the rapid growth of African American, African, Asian and Latino congregations and the loss of young adults within the church as a whole.

The anti-racism reports from denominational agencies thinly mask the embarrassing realities of racial/ethnic tokenism within most of our institutions. Young leaders frequently find themselves on the margins of engagement and decision-making even when present at the table. I am convinced that by opening the church and its institutions beyond token additive presence to persons under 30 and racial/ethnic leaders, we’d find surprising new structures that lean toward relevance, sustainability, and flourishing. We need the creative audacity of those leaders to transform our ways of doing and being into a real future. We need those transformative insights now, not in a decade after the average Mennonite Church USA member is over 65.

I have seen the capacity of audacious leaders. From Philadelphia where my colleague Aldo Siahaan was amazed at what it felt to be part of the larger Mennonite Church USA community for the first time while bridging Anabaptist values to Indonesian immigrants at San Jose, to the call from mostly urban leaders who desire an end to disciplining and expelling congregations because of dissonance with the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective to San Jose Junior High conventioners who raised $4000 to share with Anabaptists in the Congo.

Audacity assumes that our future begins now, not tomorrow. Our future is not small-town homogeneity but increasing heterogeneity in familiar places as well as vibrant Anabaptist visions from the coasts, borders, and cities. Our lack of recognition of this heterogeneity is already embarrassing. Inadequate language translation as was the case at San Jose 2007 marks us as ill-prepared for the present as well as the future. Reading Scripture and singing occasionally in other languages is not enough to move into our heterogeneous future. We’ll need to be more intentional about how we include those among us who speak not only Spanish but Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Indonesian, Garifuna, French, Vietnamese, Hmong, Cherokee, German, and Amharic.

Audacity within our denominational structures involves the risk of confronting the limitations of continuing administrative activity from Elkhart and Newton. I cringe at the realization that it seems we’ve already embraced a future for our denomination in which we’re working mostly from small cities in the Midwest, ignoring early MC USA transformation commitments to bi-coastal presences. Have we deemed coastal locations too expensive without counting the costs of a future that ignores urban, multi-ethnic, bi-coastal realities?

Mennonite Church USA institutions are largely bound to tradition and practice that seemingly ignores the deductions of Kanagy’s report. We’re too often stuck asking increasingly irrelevant questions like whether persons are from MC or GC congregations or living in fear of the possibilities of diminished human resources and capital. We make safe, inaudacious choices. Audacity suggests a sense of fearlessness that we don’t often gird ourselves with as process and consensus oriented Mennonites.

At San Jose 2007, we heard good stories and witnessed some difficult facts. These stories and facts suggest both deep needs and wonderful possibilities. I don’t want to incite a doomsaying fear, but invite us to recognize the dream of audacity that we glimpsed in California together. Do we have the courage and wherewithal to be shaped and reshaped by young leaders and leaders from our growing racial/ethnic community? The future of our church depends on this willingness to be transformed now beyond the difficult institutional shuffling that has been our merged denominational history and into new generations and new representations of what it means to boldly live out our calling. Viva el llamado.

Photos by David Landis

I came to work with Franconia Conference with the understanding that I was going to be scouting into the future and working into it. That role for these last 18 months has included a lot of conversations and travel and has evolved beyond scouting in many ways. However, after listening, engaging, traveling and writing, I believe that I am glimpsing into our shared future. In many ways what I have come to understand came through clearly in snapshots of a weekend visit in Washington, DC and Harrisonburg, VA in February.

These snapshots have literally kept me awake at night for the last weeks, wondering and imagining how we might get there and yet knowing that we’re already on the road whether we admit it or not. It’s a future that excites me and forces me to think and rethink, to struggle and embrace the moments of hope that manifest along the way. It’s a future that in many ways is already here.

The future is all about the connections. This isn’t new information to me, but its live and active now in a way that I haven’t felt or known before. It’s the live connections of running into an Eastern Mennonite University student who attended the youth group at my home church in DC’s Union Station. And knowing from facebook.com what she’s been up to that week. It’s meeting her friend from India who’s visiting Washington for a month while I am talking with a pastor who leads a primarily African-American community that is incarnating a new Anabaptism in the city’s hardscrabble Anacostia neighborhood. These encounters are no longer anomalies and my colleagues who are a decade younger than me are unimpressed by them. They expect these connections to span geography and ethnicity in ways that I am still sometimes stunned by or enthralled. These global connections are no longer surprising and offer unending catalytic possibilities while at the same time altering the expectations of such encounters. The exoticism of connecting with persons from across the globe that has characterized much of our mission relationships in the past is slowly fading into an expectation of global connectiveness that simultaneously privileges and trivializes that same connectivity. We’ll expect to run into friends in random places and to have transformative conversations with persons quite different from us from around the world. These connections will be held together through a wide array of technologies as well as increased international exposure and travel.

The future will include a struggle for traditional EuroAmerican Mennonites to embrace possibilities, responsibilities and roles. It’s an ongoing struggle for me and for many young EuroAmerican leaders to understand what to do with power and privilege and how to consider empowerment and solidarity. Who are we in this global age if we are anything more than an ethnicity? What does it mean to live Anabaptist Mennonite values in urban contexts with extreme disparities? Why is it that our orientation toward justice and peacemaking is pacified by suburban lifestyles and wealth? What does it mean to have the ability to speak to the powers and to shape decisions that affect not only those in our own country but the globe? What happens when the majority of Mennonites no longer represent my own cultural preferences or biases? These were the kind of questions that are emerging for young adults who are serving with Mennonite Voluntary Service in Washington and studying and seeking at EMU. What does it mean to be a daughter or son of privilege? The future will require EuroAmericans to navigate a new way that blends what we know of the past into current and yet unfolding realities. The future will likely require EuroAmericans to ask more questions and to offer fewer quick answers or solutions.

The future will include congregations and individuals who find themselves to be Anabaptist. In my visit with the pastor at Union Station, I spent time listening to someone who is firmly Anabaptist, committed and dedicated, but serving in a church that might include relatively few persons who would own a Mennonite identity. Can our practices of seeking justice, building community, working toward peace and actively engaged worship serve to connect us where beliefs may not quite yet be concordant? Will actions move us toward a shared perspective that’s more harmonization rather than a unified set of beliefs? And what happens when that harmonization is frequently sort of off-key and tonal rather than our modernist embrace of four-parts?

At New Hope Fellowship (a Franconia Conference Partner in Mission), I met a Georgetown law student who began to read John Howard Yoder’s writing and felt compelled to search for a Mennonite congregation in his area. He showed up at New Hope via www.mosaicmennonites.org Were we what he expected that day? I am not sure. On that same Sunday, Ruben who works at Chic-fil-a also returned for his third visit. He’s coming back Sunday after Sunday because he’s learning something that he can apply to his life—and because his friend Matt who works at Chic-fil-a too invited him.

The future will be multilingual, interactive and require translation.

The music at New Hope was sung in English and Spanish that was led by a multiethnic team that included a French speaking African. There was translation. There was back and forth discussion between the congregation and Pastor Kirk Hanger, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. The sermon featured interpretation of the Good News and the difference between good history and good news is its relevancy for the day. Pastor Kirk serves essentially to translate in many ways between the cultures and between the text and the time. The future will include translation sometimes by headset, sometime by incarnation, sometimes by words. We’ll learn to speak in ways that bridge cultures and work past presumptions.

Nuestro futuro como Menonitas es mestizo. Our future as Mennonites is mestizo. It’s a mixing of cultures and values. It’s a chaotic sense of connectivity that will lead us forward around creatively shared questions and hopes rather than shared beliefs and standards. Our future will require EuroAmerican Mennonites who know the faith as tradition to find ways to connect around shared Anabaptist values rather than shared cultural practice. It will include seekers of all racial/ethnic traditions who stumble into Anabaptist perspectives whether through relationships, reading or the web.

On a CD (that was burned for me by a friend from Blooming Glen congregation) that I listened to on the drive down to DC, a song by an Irish group suggested that there’s something beautiful out there that we are waiting to see. In these few days inside and beyond the beltway, I have seen snapshots of our mestizo future. I have scouted into the future and I believe it may well be something quite beautiful to behold and live. May we have the courage, grace, fortitude and wisdom to be on the path to get there and to live into it now.

I’m working with the fourth immigration case that has taken me to an office in a building overlooking the mall between the National Constitution Museum and Independence Hall. On my last visit, the receptionist remembered that I had been in the office on my birthday. We went back to the counsel office and I listened as another immigrant who is part of a Franconia Conference congregation tell her story. I promised the lawyer that I accompany only complicated cases. He agreed.

This has been an unexpected portion of my work in leadership cultivation and building intercultural relationships within Franconia Conference. It’s a role I readily embrace for the most part. I interned with an immigration lawyer who worked with Mennonite Central Committee in New York. I have a photo of New York City hanging in my hallway taken from Ellis Island to remind myself of the first view of the city that my own great-grandparents likely had at the turn of the 20th Century when they got off the ship from Hamburg, Germany.

These visits to the immigration lawyer are increasingly frustrating. Our economy demands and thrives on the work of immigrants, documented and undocumented. Meanwhile, we have constructed a complex system of laws and rules that make the system nearly impossible to navigate for both employers and immigrants. Initially, I would concede that the laws are simply complex. But more and more I believe that they are at the very least ridiculous but more likely unjust.

I believe that it’s best to work within the law rather than against it. I acknowledge that at least Paul and probably Jesus required submission to the law of the empire to a point. However, as our global economy moves at lightning speed, we’ve got to figure a way to at least respect the “alien” who lives among us, whether he’s pumping our gas or performing heart surgeries, whether she’s cleaning our toilets or running a multinational business.

Last spring, I attended a Philadelphia rally around the Day without Immigrants. I encountered brothers and sisters there from more than one Franconia Conference congregation. I saw Latino men wearing hats that suggested they’d worked with Mennonite-owned companies. Our hands are not entirely clean. If it wasn’t possible for an undocumented immigrant to land a job in Philadelphia within 48 hours of arriving, they’d stop coming.

A Mennonite Central Committee worker recently suggested that Mennonites are good at cleaning up after messes, but less willing to figure out why we keep getting into them. Now into my fourth accompaniment situation for immigrants who are part of our congregations, I am compelled to respond differently to this situation. Sure, I can keep sitting in on these interviews and spend all of the birthdays of the rest of my life listening to the awkward situations and quagmires of process that are immigration realities. However, I am not content to continue accompanying our sisters and brothers to Center City law offices or to suggest that the situation is so complex that we can’t begin to address it in real ways either.

My great-grandparents left Austria-Hungary sometime before World War I in search of a better life in Pennsylvania. They brought their faith, their hopes and their fears from the hills of what is now Slovakia. They found work quickly as a construction worker and a maid. They helped start churches. They built a simple home. They made ends meet by selling vegetables and garlic from the garden. I believe in the possibilities of multi-ethnic US America as did they, as do the immigrants who are finding their way to our cities and small towns and our congregations.

The situation in our communities is changing quickly. Who would have ever guessed that a sign in front of Franconia Mennonite Church would invite persons to Spanish language Sunday School? We are in this together with the toil of immigrants and the dreams of our own immigrant forebearers. These days, the alien is both among us and is us. While we respect the laws of the land, the words of Christ provoke us to embrace immigrants whether documented or not as brothers, sisters, friends.

In that embrace, may we gain the courage to address the ridiculousness of our immigration system and to call for reform that will allow our sisters, brothers and friends to be treated respectfully here in our own land that still claims to be ready to receive “the tired and the poor and the huddled masses yearning to be free.”