Intersections

(click the header to read all stories)

Read the articles online:

• Intentional Interim Ministry: Giving room for the Holy Spirit to move– Lora Steiner
• Faithfully following: Bearing beautiful fruit– Jessica Walter
• Sharing vision, values and people: First Conference-based intern set to learn and serve across the pond– Gay Brunt Miller
• Global shared convictions series: A peace worth looking for- Blaine Detwiler
• A half-century of service: Remebering Kenneth L. Seitz, Sr.
• Washington congregation moves toward partnerhip: Showing the community love– Lora Steiner
• With these signs from our God: Following God’s leading to Blooming Glen– Mary Nitzsche
• Bumpy or smooth, treacherous or straight: Following where the road may lead-Jim Ostlund
• At this time and in this place: Not led in a “straight line”-Gay Brunt Miller
• Liberty Thrift & Home Furnishings: Celebrating “10 Years of Blessings and Treasures”-Brian Jones
• Extending our services: Souderton Mennonite Homes and Dock Woods Community Affiliate-Russell Mast
• Discovering God’s Leading: Quakertown Christian School expands-Phil Swartley

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Jessica Walter, Salford
jwalter@mosaicmennonites.org

That the Lord so clearly called us to this 20-year term of church planting in Mexico City we could never doubt. This certainty is what carried us through many testing times and experiences.
Kenneth L. Seitz

I’ve heard many different people say that if you want to make God laugh you should tell him your plans. Many of us are planners by nature, we want and are supposed to know where we are going, how we will get there, when we will go and what we will do while we are there, among other controllable variables. However we simply cannot plan for everything…sometimes it rains on our beach vacation, sometimes our ideas flop.

In the winter of 2006 I found myself at the edge of a vocational cliff. I could either continue on the path I was walking, the one that made sense financially and was easy to plan, or I could leave the graduate program I was in and pursue what really inspired me.

It didn’t make sense for me to leave mid-semester to pursue ministry but it also didn’t make sense to me to stay on a course that left me unmotivated and unhealthy. Therefore after listening to the internal nudging of God, coupled with the external signs of affirming friends, family, pastors and “coincidence,” I left what made sense and took a running dive off that cliff.

Sometimes we feel a strong urge by God to do what is contrary to our plans or to what makes sense with where our life seems to be heading. Something that requires a leap of faith…like leaving a promising graduate degree program in School Counseling to pursue working for the church. Or picking up your family and moving to Mexico City to minister among strangers. Or planting another church after experiencing the pain of having one fail.

Some people call this strong urge from God a calling, others are not so comfortable with that term, but following God’s lead and taking these leaps require a sense of faith. Taking the leap cultivates faith that the direction you are being led towards, though contrary to any of your plans and perhaps contrary to the plans of those near and dear to you, will bear fruit.

In this issue you will read about people who have and are following their callings despite what, at times, made sense to them. You’ll read of men and women willing to commit to love and walk with a congregation through the often tumultuous space of transition…only to leave once the transition is moving toward health and begin the process again with another congregation.

You’ll read of three newly credentialed leaders who traveled confusing and sometimes tough roads never guessing that God would lead them to their current ministries. You’ll read of new and successful leaps of faith in established Conference Related Ministries. You’ll read of a couple coming to the marriage altar pursuing hope despite all life experience to the contrary. And you’ll read about a young woman about to take a leap of faith of her own to learn and grow in another country.

My own leap of faith has led me somewhere I never imagined…here; writing, collecting and assembling the stories of an amazing group of people who are bound together by a shared pursuit to following God’s leading. Becoming a story collector and teller is nothing I could have planned but what a beautiful fruit it has been.

The stories in the following pages tell us of the unplanned and amazing fruit that has and is already springing from acts of obedience to God’s leading. While some are too new to tell exactly what the fruit will look like, all of these stories share the common thread of faithful followers listening to God’s call, the voice of the Spirit heard internally and externally, and following that lead through the good times and the difficult.

The Fifth of the Seven Core Convictions that Mennonites Share

The Spirit of Jesus empowers us to trust God in all areas of life so we become peacemakers who renounce violence, love our enemies, seek justice, and share our possessions with those in need.

Blaine Detwiler, Lakeview
detwiler@nep.net

As weddings go, this one was by far the most frenzied I have been part of.

I had begun meeting this couple months earlier. They wanted me to marry them. For the groom it was a second time. His first wife had abandoned him and their five children in search of the loves and the excitement of night life the local bars afforded her. He struggled mightily with work, cooking supper for little ones, sports schedules, homework, laundry piles, lonely days and tiredness. He lived on weak coffee and cigarettes. He admitted there were times when the rifle in his closet would be an easy answer.

She had never married. She had never been asked. In her family girls just didn’t. Instead a woman hooked up with a man…for as long as it lasted. And when it was over she took her children and moved on. To another place, another chance, another man. For as long as it took.

When he asked her to get married she hardly saw the point of it. But he persisted none-the-less. At our sessions together she wandered back and forth with stories of previous loves and how odd it was to be thinking of a wedding. Of making vows. Of what a wedding actually was…and what you did there. She said at the end of our time that she wanted it to work…but that she was stricken with doubt. After all, men had been parading in and out of her life for a long time. Why should going to a church and making promises in front of a whole lot of people end that parading pattern? But she agreed to buy the dress and move forward.

He was more confident. I am not sure why. He had little reason to be confident of anything given what his life had offered thus far. But oddly, he was. They would live in his house with his children and hers.

The day of the wedding brought the excitement you would traditionally expect. There was the usual fanfare. The arrival of the groom with his children resplendent in their tuxes and bows. The bride hid herself downstairs with her ladies so as not to be seen by the groom and be jinxed.

Now, you expect that a wedding will bring with it a certain decorum. A solemnity tinged with beauty, grace and fine dress. But many of the guests were not used to the formality of a church service. For some it was merely a stop on the way to the local VFW where a reception was planned. For others a wedding was merely a strange curiosity to observe. Guests arrived in their sports cars and loud trucks.

The piano in the corner brought the assembled crowd to some order. Some order. Flower girls were the first to make their entrance. They were cute as they dropped their petals and then stood in the front waiting, fidgeting, fussing and then pushing. Bridesmaids came next and stood guard over the fussing. Then the bride in her new dress came walking down…her hands trembling. She stood beside her groom. The piano stopped but the “holy hush” never arrived. I began to speak, loudly, to be heard over the din, “Good afternoon, friends and neighbors!”

I learned something about peace that day. As a Mennonite I more quickly see peace as a Beatitude…as a placard reminder that peacemakers are blessed by God. And my memory can well rehearse the many historical stories of our tradition…that you can have peace but it often comes with a great cost. And that peace is something we carry with us. What I began to catch a glimpse of that day I spotted in the eyes of the both the bride and groom as they stood there in front of me…in the middle of irreverent racket.

As I asked her to repeat after me, “To have and to hold from this day forward,’” her voice began to crack. “For better, for worse, for richer for poorer…for the rest of our lives,” words which for me are merely a job became for her a rush of tears…of wishes and hope. The road of his life was littered with pain. But he was not looking back, not this day.

At the altar of “I do’” you could see in his dark eyes a pursuit. That for him, for them, peace was worth looking for.