Steve Kriss

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.

Stephen Kriss
skriss@mosaicmennonites.org

My first Sunday in Indonesia, we attended Jakarta Praise Community Church. It’s a community of about 5,000 worshippers who gather on Sundays in a large auditorium in Jakarta’s Central Business District. It’s a JKI (Jemaat Kristen Indonesia) congregation, part of the global Mennonite family through Mennonite World Conference. We arrived late and had to line up at the door, ended up sitting with around 200 or so others in a foyer and watched the service through the open door and by closed circuit TV. It was really unlike any Mennonite congregation I’d ever attended before, both in size and techno-savvy.

I traveled to Indonesia before Christmas to attend a Conference on the Peace Church in the Asian Context and to connect with partner congregations in Indonesia. I visited with Troy Landis from Franconia congregation and Andre who attended Philadelphia Praise Center. I met with Dan and Jeanne Yantzi who are members of West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship and talked with former Mennonite Central Committee interns Nofika and Henny. It was a real privilege and gift to see the vibrancy of Franconia Conference connections literally on the other side of the world.

Before my trip, I stopped at the Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville (Pa) to purchase some gifts of hospitality. I took small fraktur prints by Roma Ruth, redware pottery and quilted potholders, symbols of Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite life. I carried them carefully to Indonesia, exchanging them for intricate batik cloth and bright Balinese prints. I returned knowing a few more words in Indonesian and with a deeper understanding of the complexities that our Indonesian brothers and sisters face as they worship and work both in Indonesia and abroad.

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country and the fourth most populous nation in the world, after the United States. It’s scattered across hundreds of islands and bears the scars and the fruit of years of interaction with other cultures, from Indian to Arabic, to Dutch, Japanese and US American. It’s an amalgamated nation in many ways, constructed from a plurality of island cultures and tribes. I was overwhelmed by islander hospitality frequently.

The Mennonite Church is present in various incarnations in Indonesia. Our relationships in Franconia Conference with the emerging Indonesian Anabaptist community on the East Coast have been primarily forged through ties with GKMI (Gereja Kristen Muria Indonesia), an Indonesian-originated Mennonite movement that connected with the Dutch. However, we continue to build new relationships, discovering the resonance of Anabaptist perspective with a people who have faced persecution, are committed to justice and peacemaking and searching for God in the midst of migrations.

Dutch Mennonites wondered whether those of us who would become the originating community of Mennonites in eastern Pennsylvania really needed to be migrating from their European homeland. They questioned the need, but continued to support their brothers and sisters as they streamed out of the continental interior to find places of freedom in William Penn’s colony. Indonesian Christians face much the same situation as those colonial migrating Swiss-Germans, a generalized anxiety from past persecution and occasional hostilities that remain. They sought a freedom from that persecution and anxiety in the same way, seeking passage to Philadelphia.

There is a deep resonance with our history and a deep hope for our future as we work together. Though the situations are not the same, the contemporary situation for Indonesians in the United States echoes Mennonite history. When I told the story of Indonesian Christians to the sons and daughters of Russian Mennonite émigrés in Canada, they immediately asked how it would be possible to help, insisting that its our responsibility to help persons facing persecution or the possibility of persecution to escape before it’s too late.

This Christmas Eve in Indonesia, the current president invited Christians to the government palace for dinner as an act of reconciliation and recognition. In Washington D.C., the Franconia Conference connected emerging Indonesian congregation was invited to gather at the Indonesian embassy. There is indeed a move intended as a reminder in Indonesia that the nation is open to its religious minorities, both Hindus and Christians. However, the current political climate is deeply affected by interpretations of both secularization and fundamentalism, much like the United States. It’s hard to predict future outcomes.

As Sunday evening worship began at a small Mennonite congregation in suburban Jakarta, the adhan (Muslim call to prayer) bellowed from a speaker on a nearby mosque. It was loud and overwhelmed the small space. It was the first time that I have ever been preparing for Mennonite worship as the call to prayer also beckoned. The gathered congregation didn’t notice it really and continued to move toward Christian worship. I was the only one distracted by the newness of the situation.

There are many things that I bring back from my encounters with our Indonesian brothers and sisters, but what stands out most is the vibrancy of faith and witness in the midst of religious otherness. The message of the Good News remains in the midst of fear and uneasiness. The message of the Good News continues to call to us . . .even in the midst of the adhan.

Steve Kriss
skriss@mosaicmennonites.org

We were sitting in a train, knee to knee with two college students from North Jersey who had taken the summer to trek through Europe, side by side with two Moroccan women in traditional garb who were traveling with a teenage boy with bright and eager eyes. We conversed back and forth with the Jersey students who were finishing their trip across Europe with a quick jaunt into Morocco.

The students spoke loudly in our small compartment that barely accommodated the eight of us with all of our travel gear. The wide-eyed Moroccan teenager seemed to be listening to our conversation in English. I noticed that he clearly understood the phrase “9-11” that was spoken by my New Jersey friends. For them, it wasn’t anything in particular that they were discussing, just a mark of dates, time and change.

My Moroccan travelmate understood the words and maybe its implications for our shared life together. Many of the 9-11 hijackers were from Morocco. In our small compartment, we talked together and eventually the barrier between Moroccans and US Americans was broken as my colleague David Landis tried to use some Arabic and the teenage boy tried to use some English.

We were traveling on a train through the Moroccan desert; three Mennonite guys, three Moroccans, and two students from North Jersey who took breaks to smoke cigarettes between the cars. We barely spoke each other’s languages but were excited to break barriers by writing words and speaking slowly. My North Jersey friends didn’t seem to get the idea of speaking slowly.

The train stopped for some unknown reason and it got hot in our cramped and confined space. As the Moroccan women fanned themselves with paper, one of us opened our backpacks to reveal water and cups. We offered to share. Our New Jersey companions who know better than to take food or drinks from strangers declined. Our Moroccan compartment-mates were willing to receive. We shared water, bananas and cookies. We smiled and laughed together and drank from the same plastic cups. It was communion across language and boundaries. In this small hot space, the reign of God had come to earth.

The train began to move and slouch southward, stopping again for undetermined reasons under the blazing African sun. Our Moroccan friends opened a bottle of water to be shared this time with us. It was easier to share my own food and drink than to receive the water poured into a plastic cup for me. But I drank, gratefully, hopefully. Travel and engagement is more than giving, it’s also about vulnerability and receiving as well.

In that train under the blue cloudless North African sky, we shared together. It was nothing heroic, but we ate bananas and cookies, drank water and communed over broken Arabic, English and smiles. Cynical former NY Times writer Chris Hedges suggests that one thing he learned from his dad who was a pastor was that in times of crisis and confusion, sometimes you have to make and serve the coffee.

In remembering 9-11 and in knowing all of the hype about security and terror, I wonder if one of the best things we can do is to eat and drink at each other’s tables. These are the little things that Carmelite nun Therese of Lisieux suggests point the way to the Eternal moving us beyond boundaries (South African theologian David Bosch suggests that mission is ultimately about crossing boundaries) of fear, to discover the possibility of shalom/salaam/peace in this dry and thirsty season and find water turned to wine, cookies to the bread of life.

To see more photos by David Landis from Morocco this summer (click).

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.”