Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Lindy Backues

Book Review: How to Change the World, One Penny at a Time

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“How to Change the World, One Penny at a Time: The Story of Claude Good and the Worm Project” (208pp. illus. Masthof Press, 2021, $14.00)

This book serves as a tribute, not only to Claude Good and the “Worm Project,” but also to the book’s author, Dawn Ruth Nelson. While writing the book, Dawn Ruth Nelson was diagnosed with cancer; fellow writer, Beverly Benner Miller, finished the book when Dawn could no longer continue the project. 

This book offers fascinating insight into mid-twentieth century, rural, Pennsylvania, Mennonite life, especially for those, like me, who are uninformed.  Claude Good began life with plenty of challenges, including a difficult family life. But even from his earliest days, he (and his wife, Alice) seemed to be followed by a wonderful sense of call and purpose.

© 2021 Masthof Bookstore and Press

This call and purpose saw them both overcome not having opportunity to go to high school, yet eventually each earned a degree at Eastern Mennonite College (Harrisonburg, VA). Claude even continued to receive a graduate degree in sociology at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and pursued theological studies.  In 1960, with additional training from Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Goods, sponsored by the Franconia Mission Board, settled in the remote town Chicahuaxtla, Mexico. Chicahuaxtla was home to an indigenous native tribe, the Triqui. 

The Goods raised their family (three daughters and two sons) in the village for the next 25 years (without electricity for ten years). Over that time, the New Testament was translated into three Triqui dialects.

The Goods (and the Blank family, who joined them in 1961) found themselves occupied with a great deal of makeshift primary healthcare work, as medical facilities in the region were scant.  Yet the fruits of their work, such as conversions, baptisms, and the beginning of a small church in 1974, were evident.  Sadly, social and political unrest caused the Good family to relocate to the US in 1985. 

Claude continued to helped with translation of the Triqui Bible while also doing ministry in local Franconia area churches.  Alice finished a Master’s in Education and became a chaplain at several retirement communities.  They settled into Souderton (PA) Mennonite Church, and it seemed as if the Goods might have finished their direct ministry in Chicahuaxtla.

But, in the early 1990s, “The Worm Project” began.  The Goods had long been aware that digestive problems, specifically intestinal worms, were a major health problem for the Triqui.  Claude discovered that, by simply including Albendazole tablets into their diet, the intestinal worm challenge would largely be abated. However, these tablets were not readily available to the Triqui people.  When one reads Claude’s reflections from that time, it almost seems that at the age of 69 he had finally found his life’s calling.

The rest of the book details how “The Worm Project” took on shape.  Claude gave himself tirelessly to this project, with efforts that achieved great things, not only for the village of Chicahuaxtla, but throughout the world. In the end, Claude’s wide network of collective work brought a good deal of recognition to him and his humanitarian work, centered on the fight against intestinal worms throughout the globe. 

The book ends with Alice’s death in 2008 and Claude dying peacefully in 2019, at age 90. 

A story like this points out that even an impressive, challenging, worthy, first 25 years of ministry can still be preliminary preparation for an even greater work to follow.  For Claude and Alice Good, that certainly seems to have been the case.

To purchase a copy of the book, click here. Proceeds from the sale of this book will go directly to The Worm Project to purchase medicine to treat even more children from parasitic worms. 

More information about The Worm Project is available at their website. 

The Faith and Life Commission Gathering – Cultural Place, Identity, and Mission

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The Faith and Life Commission of Mosaic Conference provides space for pastors and credentialed leaders to build ties of friendship and support between each other.  We convene quarterly in order to discuss scripture and to hear stories of how we might interpret and apply those scriptures. We also pray for each other and our congregations in light of our reflections. We seek to develop relationships of mutual trust and accountability, deepening our convictions and the involvement we have in the congregations we lead.

Over the course of this past year, we have taken a look at the theme of local mission, breaking it down into several sub-themes: sexuality and gender (February 2020), national and political identities (May 2020), socio-economic status (August 2020), and pastoral identity (November 2020).

This February, we gathered virtually to discuss how local mission relates to our cultural identity and to our positions within our communities. We also examined how our identities might make things more challenging for us to minister effectively there.  

Through Zoom, we broke into groups of 4-5 people and reflected upon John 4:4-26 in light of that topic.  Given Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, we asked ourselves the following questions:

  • How did Jesus’s communal, cultural, and religious identity as a Jew impact his ability to engage with this woman?
  • How might that interaction have been different had they discussed things outside of a Jewish town, instead of a Samaritan town?
  • How can sense of place and identity found in our own ministry contexts bring about unique challenges and opportunities in our attempts at missional involvement?
  • How might we better equip people in our ministry contexts to become more aware of the challenges and opportunities presented by our cultural identities and positions within our communities?

With these questions before us, my group recognized that our ministry sites experienced significant change over these past several decades. Many of us now find ourselves in congregations nested in suburban contexts with a lessened sense of community and an increased capacity toward mobility. Such a context has considerable impact upon how our church members now relate to each other.  

We paused for a fresh look at the idea of “place” and the role it plays for our church members and their identities.  Several in our group noted that they often still consider their locations as agricultural, even though the actual surroundings are increasingly suburban.  Many of our church buildings are located on pieces of land that once were farms, but are now located next to shopping malls, business districts, or within suburban housing developments.  Church members often no longer live near our churches, and many drive significant distances to attend church services.  

Our group noted, however, that things were not so simple: not all of us minister in the same context.  One in our group ministers within a retirement facility, where residents are not mobile but instead come from a variety of cultural and religious traditions.  

Our group noted, however, that things were not so simple: not all of us minister in the same context.

The retirement home is very different from the more mobile, but culturally homogenous, nature of many churches. We wondered how we might better live as Anabaptists, valuing who we have become and our history, given our current contexts.  

In Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman and our discussion, we realized we need to rethink what it means to be church today.  We closed in prayer, provocatively challenged, increasingly aware that we need God’s help with this issue and with the renewed leadership roles it places before us.

Finding the God of Justice: My Spiritual Journey

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by Lindy Backues, Philadelphia Praise Center

My spiritual story begins just outside of St. Louis, Missouri, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River.

I grew up in a predominantly white, midwestern town of 40,000, where most everyone looked like me.  I did not grow up in a Christian home. My parents espoused what was, at that time, “typical” midwestern values, however, so they were not completely antagonistic to religion.  We simply were not religious.

As a teenager, I applied to the YMCA as a bus counselor in a neighboring city, East St. Louis, Illinois.  This was a historically black, urban area, deeply scarred by decades of systemic and cultural racism. My experiences there drastically altered my perspective on life. I later served as a swim instructor.  I worked almost exclusively with African American kids. By and large, these young children, who wanted little more than to play and to learn to swim, were delightful in their glee as they participated in these programs.  I became quite attached to them and also got to know their families.

The undeniable racism they experienced became obvious to me.  Most young white boys in my area would not have been aware such racism even existed.  My still deeply rooted sense of justice first took shape at that YMCA in East St. Louis.

A side-effect of this was that I developed disdain for local churches in my area, since the racism there was palpable. As a teenager, I was becoming increasingly convinced (primarily by way of my father) that religion was unnecessary and something smart people discarded.  I went through my high school years and onto college with these attitudes.

In 1982, toward the end of my time at the University of Missouri, I experienced an unexpected spiritual conversion.  I attended a church service with my mother (who had recently rediscovered religion and I went along to appease her).  In a miraculous encounter, I became aware that the God of justice – the God of the biblical story – also did not like racism (nor did God like sexism, nor depletion of earth’s resources).  I did not plan for this to happen; it simply did. At the tender age of 22, I found myself ushered into a version of the gospel I still find appealing.

Being given such a radical but limited epiphany of God’s kingdom, I headed off to seminary to deepen my theological understanding.  In 1988, I graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary, receiving a Master of Divinity degree, with a focus on biblical studies and anthropology.

After seminary (and getting married in 1985), my wife and I moved to Indonesia. We lived there for the next 18 years (our daughter and son were born there).  We became deeply involved in economic and community development in a predominantly Muslim area, located in the province of West Java. Along the way, I added a Master’s degree in Economic Development and a PhD in Theology and Development Studies.

In 2008 we relocated to South Philadelphia and I began teaching at Eastern University.  We joined Philadelphia Praise Center (PPC) at that time. A few years later, I felt myself nudged by God to receive official licensure as Outreach Minister for Philadelphia Praise Center, something that has brought my official credentials into line with this long march God had led me on.

Loving Our Muslim Neighbors

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by Esther Good

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris, France in November, and in San Bernardino, California in December, many have struggled with the question of how we should relate to our Muslim neighbors. Tensions have remained high, exacerbated by the election season, and the answer to this question has reared its head in the form of some ugly anti-Islamic sentiment, including harassment and acts of vandalism against mosques in the Philadelphia area and around the country. Several congregations in Franconia Conference have asked this question in a different way: How can we relate to our Muslim neighbors in a way that is Christ-like?

LovingMuslimNeighbors
Photo by Preston Sean Photography, orig. published by Mennonite World Review, Sept. 16, 2013

Philadelphia Praise Center (PPC) is one congregation that has a long history of interacting with its surrounding Muslim community.  Shortly after PPC was first started in 2006, Pastor Aldo Siahaan, himself an immigrant from Indonesia, reached out to the Imam of a group of Indonesian Muslims and offered them the use of the church building for evening prayers during Ramadan.  They didn’t accept his invitation that year, but called back the following year and asked to use the space, beginning a longstanding friendship between PPC and what is now Masjid Al Falah.

Lindy Backues, an elder at PPC, joined the church when he and his family were deported from Indonesia after living there for 18 years. “I’ve been ‘sent home’. I know what that feels like,” he says in response to national comments against Muslim immigrants. “I don’t want to send Muslims ‘home’.  They’re my friends. So at PPC, we’re trying to be different—to reach out to visitors and guests and the sojourner in our midst. In the process of receiving the other, we become who we are, because God received us when we were the other.”

Salford Mennonite Church also has a longstanding relationship with its Muslim neighbors which began when Salford reached out to them in friendship after the events of 9/11.  Out of that gesture began a close relationship with a family from Lebanon who lives nearby. And in turn, that family has walked alongside and assisted Salford as it has resettled Muslim refugees from Iraq and Iran.

After recent Islamophobic rhetoric hit national news, Salford contacted the Imam of North Penn Mosque.  “We had a meeting to express that as Christians we desire to have a relationship with him and his community,” says Joe Hackman, Lead Pastor.  “We want to let them know that we’re there for them to offer support in whatever form they might need. As Anabaptists, we know what it is to be persecuted because of our faith. So it makes sense that we would want to protect other religious minorities who are experiencing persecution.”

lamp-and-peace-sign.jpgFor Doylestown Mennonite Church, which has recently become a co-sponsor for a Muslim refugee family from Afghanistan, the decision to reach out was simply an act of love, says KrisAnne Swartley, Minister for the Missional Journey. “This is just a way for us to live out faithfulness to Jesus.”

The Bible is full of verses regarding loving our neighbors. In Mark 12 as Jesus is questioned by the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem they ask what the greatest commandment is, to which Jesus answers in verse 30-31, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” It is great to see Franconia Conference churches living their faith by loving their neighbors.

Esther Good is a member at Whitehall Mennonite Church.