Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Samantha Lioi

Spring Training 2012

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Franconia Conference credentialed leaders from up and down the east coast met on Saturday, April 21, at Towamencin Mennonite Church for the first annual Spring Training, a time of equipping planned by the conference as part of a commitment to continuing education.

The day focused on interculturalism and included times of worship, table conversation, resourcing, and, of course, food!

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Morning Session #1 (1:02:37)

[podcast]http://www.mosaicmennonites.org/media-uploads/mp3/Spring Training Session 1 (low).mp3[/podcast]

Morning Session #2 (43:29)

[podcast]http://www.mosaicmennonites.org/media-uploads/mp3/Spring Training Session 2 (low).mp3[/podcast]

Afternoon Session #3 (57:37)

[podcast]http://www.mosaicmennonites.org/media-uploads/mp3/Spring Training Session 3 (low).mp3[/podcast]

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View the photo gallery

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Long Haul Hope: Ash Wednesday Thoughts

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Ash Wednesday thoughts on wilderness, identifying with Jesus, and the tenacity of a few Colombian human rights workers

by Samantha E. Lioi

(This blog has been edited for length.  Download the full article here.)

Driven by the Holy Spirit, Jesus is in the wilderness with a lot of people these days.  It’s crowded, and the scarcity of resources keenly felt.  Even so, it is a place of surprising and dogged hope.

Last July I traveled to Colombia for two weeks on a Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation.  A truly international group of us – from Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ethiopia, India, and Illinois – became a team who would learn from, accompany, and support the CPT Colombia team and their partners, especially leaders of peasant-farmer or campesino organizations struggling to remain on their land or return to it.

Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness.

More than 5 million Colombians have been driven from their homes by armed men paid by international companies who will strip the land of resources until it is barren, then move on to take more.  Colombians who have done small-scale mining on their ancestral land for generations have been driven into a wilderness of displacement, into life as refugees in their own country.  They have organized to advocate for themselves, their communities and their livelihoods, continuing day after day, month after month into years to call for what is right, to demand that their land, their dignity, and their lives be respected.

Since July, I haven’t found very many words to speak about my time in Colombia.  But when I remembered Lent was coming, one of the Ash Wednesday texts from the second letter to the Corinthians reminded me of the Colombian human rights workers.  And it’s also talking to us.

Now is the time to be reconciled, it says – to God, yes, and to each other.  Now is the day of salvation, that is, holistic well-being and abundant life, peace between parent and child and man and woman and paramilitary and campesino, and peace between peoples and nations.  This is the hope of our faith.

So about hope.

Here in the U.S., especially among Anglos, despair is a very different choice than it is in Colombia.  If we give up hope, if we are no longer able or willing to care, if we become paralyzed by the horror and injustice of the truth of so many people’s lives, and if we become overwhelmed by the weight of evil in the world, nothing happens to our homes or our livelihoods.  Something happens to the kind of people we are – our character, our integrity – but we do not, in choosing apathy or hopelessness, immediately put our lives at risk.

It’s not that I never experienced fear while I was in Colombia. But my experience of being vulnerable to violence felt so minor compared to the fear of our Colombian partners that it mainly served to help me understand my U.S. passport-privilege more deeply.  Unlike some of our partners, I have no idea what it feels like to receive threats to my life and the lives of my family members, season after season, because I am telling the truth and calling for justice. Recently, the high-profile community of Las Pavas, whose people have returned to their land, has been accused of never having lived there to begin with, and are being prosecuted for invading and occupying private land – victims and survivors turned into criminals.  No wonder one finds Jesus among them.

When I came back home and resumed my day to day U.S. life, I asked myself a lot of questions: Why do this work explicitly as a Christian, when Christians are failing to act like Jesus left and right?  Do I really believe the kingdom of God is coming?  It seems far away.  The wolf lying down with the lamb and not eating it?  Really?  Every tear wiped away from our eyes, and no more death? Really?  The end of death?

The end of death?

But as these next 40 days of Lent stretch out in front of us, I still come back, hauling my doubt and cynicism, desiring to follow Jesus into the desert again.  I must believe this craziness.  The Bible itself–crazy and beautiful and comforting and deeply challenging to status-quos everywhere.  A God who brings life out of death.  A God who receives our most disordered, dysfunctional parts and gets them singing.

Almost as unbelievably, our partners in Colombia keep going.  With a faith and hope I wonder at and don’t quite understand, they keep struggling.  They keep imagining a time of justice, living their belief that people are created with the capacity to treat each other with dignity.  How can I quit if they haven’t quit?  What keeps me from being as bold and persistent as they are?

Somehow underneath my temptations to despair and give up, I do believe that all creatures, all that was made, all the universe, was created from love and for love.  That this love is underneath everything, that there is plenty of it.  That there is a pull, a wind, the Spirit of Jesus whispering among us, and perhaps shouting above the din, “Come with me and be awake to your hope and your fear.”  Beneath the sounds of killing and anxious constant motion, and in the spaces of clarity and quiet within us, the voice of a poor Nazarene teacher pulling us into the new things that are coming.

Now is the day of salvation – wholesale healing.  Now is the time to choose life, to choose a practice, something simple that will enable us, at the very least, to be aware of our own resistance to following Jesus.  To return to our God, or at least to admit we don’t know how, for that is a step toward a wilderness that could teach us something.  God, with a great sense of humor, trusts us.

Remarkable.

Hope for the duration, for the long haul – modeled for us by people who could have given up long ago.

Read a more detailed update on the Las Pavas community

Download a pdf of the full article.

Seeds and strings and welcome spaces

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by Samantha Lioi, Whitehall

When Dave Benner was 13 years old, handing out bulletins in his home church of Finland Mennonite, Harold Fly stopped and said to him, “David! Oh, to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord.” This passing comment stuck with him. Welcoming people is important, he thought.

Dave continued to learn hospitality as a gift the church gives in a culture where too few have experiences of welcome they can count on. As a musician who plays banjo, guitar, bass guitar, and mandolin, Dave was creating welcome with church music and worship teams from a young age.

His musical gifts were recognized early on by Leroy Wismer, who brought him to Bowery Mission in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to play guitar in a Sunday night worship service for two hundred homeless men. Though only about 16, Dave was expected to go up front with the men to be available for counsel at the end of the service. “I was scared stiff,” he says, “but my understanding has always been to [offer care] not for results but to plant a seed.”

In the mid-sixties, Dave’s draft board approved an alternative to military service through a Mennonite Voluntary Service unit in New Haven, Connecticut. During this time he met Priscilla, a singer in a women’s quintet performing at a local prison where he also was singing. Thought she wasn’t Mennonite, Dave’s V.S. leader encouraged him to explore the relationship. They married five years later.

Peace co-pastors Duane Hershberger and Dave Benner (right). Photo by Miriam Kline.

In 1970, when Dave was called to serve as Finland’s first full-time pastor, he asked to be permitted to go to school. They agreed he would, and a member of another congregation was willing to pay for his first year at Northeast Bible Institute. Over the years, he acquired explicit and instinctive ministry skills, including learning to notice “the eye drift of a group:” where people looked during a meeting, who they were trusting to lead them.

David needed such skills when, in 1990, he responded to Franconia Conference’s goal to plant 50 churches in 10 years. With six other couples, he and Priscilla and Rich and Fern Moyer started a new community of faith. Shalom Christian Fellowship grew and flourished. With Rich, Dave served as a co-pastor from the beginning, and continued to offer his many musical gifts in worship.  Later, Duane Hershberger joined Rich as co-pastor. Shalom became a place where people could belong—where people who had experienced rejection elsewhere received the space and love to become part of a community.

In 2005, after several families had moved away, Shalom took a 6-month hiatus. Dave and Priscilla visited all around and found nothing quite like their eclectic, beloved congregation. They missed it, and Duane did too. They re-opened as Peace Mennonite Church in May of 2006, trying on some new understandings of leadership until they closed on Easter 2011.

Peace built connections in the wider community through the Clothes Line, a clothing giveaway that is still serving folks in town under Fern Moyer’s leadership. Peace also nurtured ecumenical friendships, joining with four other congregations across denominational lines for a community Lenten series, with each congregation hosting a service and every minister participating in leadership.

David continues to play music far and wide—making open space for relationships to grow. Like many before him and many to come, he’s given time and love and labor, planting and watering, and standing back. This pastor’s path of ministry has been winding and joyful, difficult, disappointing, faithful, worth wondering at—the familiar sounds of God’s creative work.

Communing with each other and the world

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by Emily Ralph, eralphservant@mosaicmennonites.org

Every year, followers of Jesus around the world join together in remembering his death and resurrection through the act of communion. World Communion Sunday is a celebration marking that through his death, Jesus broke down the wall of hostility between people groups and that through his resurrection, Christ formed a new family of disciples world-wide.

Swamp’s children walk around the globe
Swamp’s children encircle and walk around the globe singing “I am the Church” on World Communion Sunday. Photo by Abby Mason.

Whether wearing clothes from countries around the world, as they did at Plains in Hatfield, Pa., or sharing a spaghetti dinner with the church down the street, as they did at Ripple in Allentown, Pa., Franconia Conference congregations spent October 2nd remembering this holy communion with the world-wide church.

“This remains one of my favorite services of the year,” said Sharon Ambrose, a member of Swamp (Quakertown, Pa.). “I find it so meaningful to celebrate with Christians around the world.” In addition to sharing communion bread from other countries and reading Scripture in multiple languages, Swamp’s service focused on expanding circles of concern from the congregation to the world, both locally and globally.

Church elders pray behind the communion table
Church elders pray behind the communion table at Nueva Vida Norristown New Life. Photo by Emily Ralph.

At Nueva Vida Norristown New Life, Pastor Marta Castillo also encouraged her congregation to evaluate how their actions affected believers around the world. “On World Communion Sunday,” she said, “we need to think about how we commune with the Body of Christ that is hungry . . . with the Body of Christ that is persecuted. . . with the Body of Christ that are immigrants.”

Souderton (Pa.) Mennonite Church celebrated with the theme of hospitality from Acts 2, which describes how the early church worshiped and ate together, sharing their possessions. The congregation used a braided bread of different colors to remind them that people from many nations were celebrating the Lord’s Supper with them. As members of the congregation approached the communion tables, they were joined on the big screen by photos of people celebrating communion around the world.

Souderton--world communion bread
Souderton used a braided bread to remind them that people from many nations were celebrating the Lord’s Supper with them. Photo by Alyssa Kerns.

Ambler celebrated more than World Communion Sunday—the congregation also hosted a regional CROP walk to end hunger that afternoon. Ambler’s preschoolers mixed and bagged trail mix for those who would be “praying on their feet” and, with issues of global hunger on their minds, the congregation worshiped around tables. On each table was a cut-out of the earth with facts and quotes about the condition of the world printed on it, said Pastor Donna Merow. “These became part of our silent confession as we prepared for Communion,” she reflected. “We served one another [around the tables] and then enjoyed an international meal together before heading out to walk to raise funds for global relief efforts.”

On World Communion Sunday and throughout the rest of the year, we are being formed as Jesus-followers, joining God’s world-wide mission to invite all people to participate in God’s kingdom. “Marking this day gives us an invitation to remember our sisters and brothers in places far from us,” said Samantha Lioi, associate pastor at Whitehall Mennonite. “Hearing scripture in three languages and being asked to choose from a variety of breads reminds us we are sojourners as Jesus was, not quite at home but creating welcome places wherever we pitch our tents.”

Transforming Mennonites by the Gospel of Peace in 2012

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Samantha Lioi, Whitehall, samanthalioi@gmail.com

“Syrian troops have kept up their assault on the coastal city ofLatakiafor a third day, reportedly killing three people.” — Aljazeera.net

“The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way . . . [according to] the Afghan Human Rights Commission report . . . the victims included a 16-year-old newlywed girl carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops.” — Guardian.co.uk

“Nonviolence isn’t just about not having a gun or not going to war,” says [Jason] Shenk [of Men Encouraging Nonviolence]. “It is an active respect or reverence that I seek to cultivate in all my relationships.” —TheMennonite.org

It’s safe to say our world could use more peace—a greater surplus of well-being, mutual love, and respect. And for Mennonites, people historically known for our teachings and practices of peace, it’s not news that we’re in different places when it comes to owning and living our identity as peacemakers. Though in our worship and everyday relationships, we all desire to reflect the image of God by becoming more like Jesus the Christ, we think about this differently, and our practice reflects these differences. So when I say the Peace and Justice Committee of Eastern District and Franconia Mennonite Conferences is inviting every congregation to a year-long focus on peace—to be introduced at our combined Conference Assembly in November—I suspect we’ll have a variety of responses. Some will think this is exciting and even overdue; some will think it unnecessary, maybe even cliché. There are bound to be questions. What if it’s too political? What if it’s not political enough? Will this really bring us closer to God? Will it help us be more sensitive as we engage in intercultural relationships?

As members of our peace committee met, we imagined the year 2012 as a time to re-educate ourselves, to renew and deepen our commitment to peacemaking. Here is our vision for that in light of Franconia Conference’s three current priorities of formation, intercultural relationship-building and mission:

How do we open ourselves to be shaped by this Gospel? First, we allow Scripture to be inscribed more deeply on our hearts and minds. We hope to see every congregation engage in Biblical study, absorbing and wrestling with the witness of both Old and New Testaments regarding the nature of peace/shalom, our identity as peacemakers, and our worship of the God of peace/shalom. What do the Scriptures teach us about the restoration of broken people and places? About reconciliation? Could we open ourselves to be surprised, scandalized, encouraged by the Bible and the Spirit speaking through it to our gathered communities of faith? Who knows what beauty and new life might break out?

Our second goal is growing into unity and maturity in Christ, who breaks down the dividing walls. We know our conference holds and blesses many different expressions of Anabaptist Christian faith in many languages. How might we welcome that diversity through intentional relationship building? To that end we hope every congregation will make an intercultural connection appropriate to that faith community, with the purpose of learning in relationship more of what it means to belong to Christ together in unity which spans boundaries of gender, economic resources, race, ethnicity, national identity, and beyond.

And when we have done some of that good work, how do we make it public? Our third desire is that, growing from the experiences and learning of the first two goals, every congregation will engage in a peace witness or public action which models reconciliation to people outside our Mennonite Church circles.

The peace committee has also proposed a time during the Saturday afternoon of our joint Conference Assembly for the delegates to confer and share resources around peacemaking in our various contexts. While we’ll hear more at Conference Assembly, in the meantime, you’re invited to talk with colleagues and members of our committee about your own imagining and questioning as you hear this proposal. You can find our names under “who we are” on our home page: http://efpjc.ppjr.org. May our imaginations and our spirits be stirred to love boldly, immersed in the love of God who is not counting sins against us but reconciling the whole world through Christ.

Marked by a celebration of peace, a pole, and a neighborhood park: Urban Anabaptists make a commitment to work and hope in Allentown

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Samantha Lioi, Whitehall
samanthalioi@gmail.com

In one corner of Franklin Park’s blacktop, Heidi Wert and her young friends sat drumming for peace, drawing in others to grab a pair of sticks and beat out a rhythm on white plastic tubs—thumping out their commitment to be agents of well-being in their neighborhoods. Among them was Peter Pettit, director of the Institute for Jewish-Christian Understanding at Muhlenberg College. Mayor Ed Palowski stood talking with folks setting up for the dedication of the Lehigh Valley’s third Peace Pole, the only one in the City of Allentown. The four-sided pillar, bearing “May peace prevail on earth” in Spanish, English, Arabic and German, was a gift to Pastor Tom Albright for his ordination. With his wife Carolyn, Tom gives leadership to Ripple, an eclectic Anabaptist urban worshiping community “moving toward Jesus as our center.” As they learn more what it means to follow Jesus, Tom says, they also learn, “We need each other.” Tom is credentialed by Franconia Mennonite Conference and the group grew out of ministry with Whitehall Mennonite Church, just outside of the city.

This mutual need, mutual honesty and encouragement were clear in the words and acts surrounding this pole on Saturday, as various people of faith gathered in a common desire for respectful relationships which build trust and shed fear in our city. Josh Chisholm of Congregations United for Neighborhood Action (CUNA) stood at the mic with his daughter on one hip, describing where he sees peace emerging. John, one of Ripple’s faithful deacons who lives across the street from the park, assisted with logistics and the pole’s unveiling. Rev. Maritza Torres Dolich of St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church across the alley from the park said she sees peace in the children playing here day after day, and in her conversations with them. Torres Dolich, originally from Puerto Rico, read the peace pole’s message in Spanish on behalf of Allentown’s large and growing Latino communities. Muc Nguyen of Vietnamese Gospel Church spoke the pole’s blessing in Vietnamese, and his friend Luke Martin, long-time Mennonite missionary in Vietnam, spoke the words in German, representing the Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in the region. Lucy, a first-year student at William Allen High School just a few blocks from the park, read an original poem of peace and sang a song of worship that made children and parents move from playing on the swings and jungle gym behind her to stand listening.

Planting this pole of many tongues calling silently for peace in our city will not stop people from shooting at each other or children from calling out hurtful names across this playground. It will simply remind us who commit ourselves to making peace that we too are planted here among the swing set and the spring onions of the community garden. And unlike this pole, we have breath and voice and power to be in healing relationships. It’s true: we need each other, and we need to remind each other that we are held and empowered by the Source of peace.

View the photo album

Samantha Lioi is an associate pastor at Whitehall Mennonite Church and is part of Zume House in Center City Allentown, an emerging intentional community of faith, witness and hope.

Encountering fierce Love, taking the risk to lead

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by Samantha Lioi, Whitehall
samanthalioi@gmail.com

Call is a slippery word in divine-human relations, and there are always at least two in this tango: God can be slippery as we look and listen and follow, and people are pretty slippery when called by God. It happened with all the greats. “But…I am only a boy,” says Jeremiah. Peter falls at Jesus’ knees in the boat crying, “Go away from me, Lord!” Even after much reassurance, Moses says, “Lord, please send someone else.” I get it. To be called is to be responsible. Seriously, visibly responsible. In the good company of prophets and apostles, when I look at my ability to live with integrity, I don’t know if I want all that responsibility.

It’s interesting to me that the biblical folk who come to mind first—and those whose call stories I’ve mentioned so far—are men. They are men whose stories are comforting and familiar as they resonate with my own experience. Maybe I should pay more attention to the women God called. At the garden tomb, Mary Magdalene doesn’t say, “Jesus, I don’t think I can…I’m still processing that thing with the seven demons.” There’s no hedging. In love and joy she runs from the empty tomb and comes shouting to Peter and John: “I have seen the Lord!”

I grew up thinking people who had women as pastors couldn’t be taking the Bible seriously. I was 20 years old and a sophomore in a biblical interpretation class at Houghton College when I was required to think about both sides of this. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I learned that scholars with a bias against women in church leadership consistently defended the translation of Junia (a woman’s name) as Junias (a man’s name) in Paul’s list of greetings in Romans 16, because he calls her an apostle. In this context of honesty about the stickiness and complexity of biblical interpretation, I began to welcome the idea that I, or any woman, could be a pastor. Not that I wanted to be. I felt a general call to ministry throughout college and in the years that followed. But a pastor? Me? No—not interested (read this as I was scared to death). Six years after that class, and after much prayer and conversation with mentors and our small campus-based Mennonite fellowship, I began seminary. I enrolled as an M.Div. student so that, I told myself, I would have the authority to preach—but still without any intention of pursuing pastoral ministry. I loved theology and I wanted to study the Bible in more depth. People I trusted had been telling me to go. It felt like the unavoidable next thing, plunked down in the middle of my path.

A key to my ongoing conversion to the Gospel has been receiving and trusting the powerful, unending flow of God’s love. This deepened during my time in Elkhart and Goshen as a student at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. My new friends and professors showed me grace as I had not known it before. They modeled and encouraged me to accept the underlying good God has woven into the universe, the undergirding Love that will not let us go. I have encountered a fierce Love indeed, and One who can be trusted. It is only in that love that I take the risk of leading others in walking the way of Jesus. And, I practice not taking myself too seriously as I live with the delight and the struggle of feeling things deeply, finding myself frequently moving through deep springing joy and grieving compassion and doubt. Like many of us, I face the temptation to despair, the temptation to do nothing, the temptation to be defeated by the impossibility of complete integrity. So I am as messed up as everyone else—thanks be to God for the freedom to minister in my weakness, and not from pretended worthiness!

Like every other disciple of Christ, I’m called to maturity. Like everyone else, I’m called to die. No wonder I resist the gift and weight of leadership! Yet, at the center of our faith is a poor man from an ethnic minority whom we say is God with skin on. Holiness inseparable from ordinary human living. Flesh and muscle and bone. Bread and wine. A seed that falls into the earth and dies, and is drawn up by water and sun through the soil, and bears much fruit. A long, slow view of pain and hope and saving. And in God’s maddening slowness there is expansive room for healing. There is so much space to become the people we are.

Amazingly, knowing Christ’s church as well as I do, I love it enough to stay. And amazingly, it seems the church is saying the Spirit is empowering me to keep practicing this pastor-prophet-poet-preacher-pray-er thing: in listening, speaking, tugging, laughing, living beside. Resisting God and saying yes, and learning to trust like the Magdalene when I don’t know what that yes will mean. In all of it, called by inescapable Love.

Marked by a celebration of peace, a pole and a neighborhood park: Urban Anabaptists make a commitment to work and hope in Allentown

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By Samantha Lioi

Allentown, PA — In one corner of Franklin Park’s blacktop, Heidi Wert and her young friends sat drumming for peace, drawing in others to grab a pair of sticks and beat out a rhythm on white plastic tubs – thumping out their commitment to be agents of well-being in their neighborhoods. Among them was Peter Pettit, director of the Institute for Jewish-Christian Understanding at Muhlenberg College. Mayor Ed Palowski stood talking with folks setting up for the dedication of the Lehigh Valley’s third Peace Pole, the only one in the City of Allentown. The four-sided pillar, bearing “May peace prevail on earth” in Spanish, English, Arabic and German, was a gift to Pastor Tom Albright for his ordination. With his wife Carolyn, Tom gives leadership to Ripple, an eclectic Anabaptist urban worshiping community “moving toward Jesus as our center.” As they learn more what it means to follow Jesus, Tom says, they also learn, “We need each other.” Tom is credentialed by Franconia Mennonite Conference and the group grew out of ministry with Whitehall Mennonite Church, just outside of the city.

This mutual need, mutual honesty and encouragement were clear in the words and acts surrounding this pole on Saturday, as various people of faith gathered in a common desire for respectful relationships which build trust and shed fear in our city. Josh Chisholm of Congregations United for Neighborhood Action (CUNA) stood at the mic with his daughter on one hip, describing where he sees peace emerging. John, one of Ripple’s faithful deacons who lives across the street from the park, assisted with logistics and the pole’s unveiling. Rev. Maritza Torres Dolich of St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church across the alley from the park said she sees peace in the children playing here day after day, and in her conversations with them. Torres Dolich, originally from Puerto Rico, read the peace pole’s message in Spanish on behalf of Allentown’s large and growing Latino communities. Muc Nguyen of Vietnamese Gospel Church spoke the pole’s blessing in Vietnamese, and his friend Luke Martin, long-time Mennonite missionary in Vietnam, spoke the words in German, representing the Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in the region. Lucy, a first-year student at William Allen High School just a few blocks from the park, read an original poem of peace and sang a song of worship that made children and parents move from playing on the swings and jungle gym behind her to stand listening.

Planting this pole of many tongues calling silently for peace in our city will not stop people from shooting at each other or children from calling out hurtful names across this playground. It will simply remind us who commit ourselves to making peace that we too are planted here among the swing set and the spring onions of the community garden. And unlike this pole, we have breath and voice and power to be in healing relationships. It’s true: we need each other, and we need to remind each other that we are held and empowered by the Source of peace.

Samantha Lioi is an associate pastor at Whitehall Mennonite Church and is part of Zume House in Center City Allentown, an emerging intentional community of faith, witness and hope.

VIEW PHOTO ALBUM