"NOT ONLY A BORROWER BUT A LENDER BE"
Mennonite Piety in Dialogue with Charismatic Christianity

Alan Kreider

For years I was on the Mennonite "away team": After growing up in a Mennonite congregation in Goshen, Indiana, I went away—first to graduate school and then, after a stint of teaching history at Goshen College, to England as a Mennonite missionary. During my time "away" I worshiped with a wide variety of other Christians, and I learned much from them.

I especially was shaped by two months in a monastery, where I discovered riches in prayer that uses fewer words and in worship that finds joy in the communion service.

I was also formed by my encounter with Christians of "charismatic" piety. Many people who are discovering Anabaptism (that branch of the 1500s Radical Reformation from which Mennonites have descended) in England today come from charismatic traditions. I have learned much from them about God’s unpredictable reality and about worship that is emotionally expressive and prayer that is expectant.

Four years ago I came "home" to Mennonite America, and have since then been a member of a Mennonite congregation in Elkhart, Indiana. I have brought home my learnings from liturgical and charismatic Christians: form and freedom in worship are both important to me. And I have observed that there are many North American Mennonites who, like me, have drawn insight and sustenance from these traditions.

Often, I find, people (or whole congregations) are drawn to either one or the other: to form (using printed orders of service and written-out prayers) or to freedom (unprogrammed, spontaneous worship). Congregations tend to draw richly on one or the other of these strands. So Mennonites, who more than a century ago borrowed four-part singing from other American Christians, are once again being blessed by borrowing.

Borrowing is good. But do those Mennonites in America shaped by the Swiss-German Mennonite stream, myself included, have treasures in our traditions of worship and prayer that are worthy and worth sharing? Do we have now—or have we had in the recent past—practices that have been life-giving for us, and that we can offer to Mennonite brothers and sisters from other ethnic groupings? Do we, in our relationships with people of other Christian traditions, have something to offer as well as receive?

In talking to Christians—both liturgical and charismatic—and in reflecting on my own experience I have come to sense: the Germanic Mennonite piety I grew up with in the 1940s and 1950s did hold treasures of worship and spirituality; and these were certainly present in other Mennonite communities of that era. Here were good gifts of God, and they formed us as a people who were distinctive, self-giving, earthy, and reverent. I have known many Mennonites in the past 60 years who have sought first God’s kingdom and justice and who have lived lives of risky peacemaking.

They did these things because of Mennonite practices of worship and spirituality, not despite them. It’s not that Mennonite piety was without flaw and didn’t need to learn from others. The Mennonite borrowings in the past centuries (four-part singing, the devotional life, Sunday schools) indicate that we have needed others; in the same way, the current attraction of Mennonites to pieties that are charismatic or liturgical demonstrates that we need others today, too.

But we need to understand our own traditions and value them. How did our parents pray? What disciplines and practices did we learn as we grew up? What was the ecology of Mennonite worship that produced CPS workers in mental hospitals or the spirituality that produced business people whose word was their bond? What scarce, God-given resources in our own tradition might we squander if we don’t stop, ponder, and appreciate?

Worshiping and praying with charismatic Christians who enthusiastically espouse Anabaptist convictions has stimulated me to ask these questions. I have found much in the piety of my charismatic friends that I value. Sometimes I have found things that are strange to the Mennonite piety of my early years. But other times I have found things are familiar, that we Mennonites also knew about God.

At times I have found among the charismatic Christians things that I believe are close to the practices of the early Anabaptists. Contemporary Mennonites, rather than sixteenth-century Anabaptists or present-day charismatics, are often those flummoxed by the multivoiced, prophetic worship of the Pauline churches (1 Cor. 14.23ff).

But by worshiping with charismatics I also have seen in North American Mennonite piety strengths—spiritual strengths—that have made me appreciate my own tradition (and its frequent Germanic influences) in a new way.

So when I, who had grown up Mennonite, encountered charismatic piety, what was familiar to me? First, the majesty and power of God. As a child I was moved as I joined a full-throated congregation in singing "Before Jehovah’s aweful throne." As I sang I shuddered inwardly. God, as charismatics and Mennonites know, is really present as we worship, and God is not to be trifled with.

Second, the sheer attractiveness and worship-worthiness of Jesus was also familiar. As a child, when we sang "Jesus, the very thought of thee, with sweetness fills the breast," I worshiped Jesus with loving ardor. Later, when I sang praise songs with charismatics, I often found them less worthy aesthetically, but the spirituality was familiar.

Third, as a child I sensed that in God’s presence unpredictable things could happen. Our pastor, John H. Mosemann, preached from well-prepared notes; but he would often, in a fit of inspiration, go beyond his notes in his struggle to find the right words to express the inexpressible. He once wrote to me about his calling:

I had rather stand

A Prophet of my God, with all the thrills

Of trembling, which must shake the heart of one

Who, in earth’s garments, in the vesture frail

Of flesh and blood, is called to minister

As Seraphs do with fire—than bear the palm

Of any other triumph. This my joy

The Lord fulfilled.

Was John quoting someone else in this poetry, or was it his own? In either case, it was true of his life and ministry. I can recall knowing: God’s Spirit is alive, and worship brings us into the presence of a God who shakes foundations and changes worlds. And there, sitting behind John as he preached, was song leader Walter E. Yoder, thumbing through the hymnal to find just the right hymn to enable us all to respond freshly to the proclaimed Word of God. In charismatic worship I have at times experienced the same heaven-sent serendipity.

However, among some charismatic Christians I have also found things that have been unfamiliar to me, and some of these have challenged me. Charismatic piety, as I have encountered it, is affective; it is much more frankly emotional than the piety I grew up with. This can become self-indulgent, but at its best it has formed Christians whose lives and worship overflow with gratitude to God. For many of my friends, "Thank you, Jesus" is not a cliché.

Out of this gratitude surprising things can come. One is uninhibited witness. Another is extravagant financial giving—charismatic Christians in my experience have given with a spontaneous, sacrificial abandon that has taken my breath away.

Yet another is the sense that God can do big things. It was charismatics, not Mennonites, who planned and carried out the "Reconciliation Walk," in which between 1996 and 1999 hundreds of Christians walked from Germany to Jerusalem to apologize to Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians for the bloody First Crusade.

And it has never been clear to me why we Mennonites, whose Anabaptist forebears were eager to restore New Testament Christianity, have been so cautious about the practices, repeatedly attested to by the New Testament writers, of prophecy and tongue-speaking.

Yet as I moved among charismatic Christians, I realized that Mennonites had strengths, too, strengths that were rooted in our worship and our spirituality.

These strengths are evident in Christ-like people. My charismatic friends were often deeply impressed by the Mennonites they met—by their love, by their integrity, and by their self-effacing service. Reflexively, these Mennonites made community. Many Mennonites have learned, from an early stage in life, that there is no salvation except in communion with the brother and the sister.

And their commitment to being a justice-making presence among the oppressed can be exemplary. It is Mennonites, not charismatics, who for over 40 years have maintained an office in East Jerusalem and programs in the West Bank and Gaza, providing advocacy and economic collaboration for the Palestinian people. And Mennonites often recognize that they do these things because Jesus is central to their understanding of life and the world—Jesus is to be followed in life as well as worshiped.

What are the practices of worship and prayer that have undergirded these self-giving, communitarian, Christ-centered people? If those of us who are Mennonite wish to continue to be a church that produces this kind of people, I believe we will need to talk about things that our reticence makes us reluctant to discuss: the way we have prayed, how we have experienced God, the spiritual disciplines of our community.

We need to sift our memories, to ask ourselves what was life-giving in the spiritual worlds in which we grew up, as well as what was dry and boring (or manipulative and abusive). We need to listen to the whole story. Inevitably there will be things that we will need to repent of, perhaps by borrowing newly from charismatic or liturgical Christians!

But I sense that we will also find living water in our own wells. I have said what some of these sources were for me as I experienced them in childhood worship; they have shaped my life, and I praise God for them. I can also think of individual and communal spiritual disciplines that I experienced as life-giving.

I think of my dad, every day beginning his busy schedule by reading the Bible and praying. This disciplined, daily reading of the Bible, often in conjunction with "lesson help" or denominational devotional materials, shaped the "devotional life" about which Mary Schertz has written elsewhere in this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine.

I think of youth classes in Sunday school, in which we not only learned about the Bible but also memorized large chunks of it. We tested our memories through competitions (in which the girls always outperformed the boys!). I think of the hospitality of my parents’ home and many other Mennonite homes. People on Sundays ate in homes, everyone at the table eating the same food, rather than in restaurants, making individual choices from menus.

I think of prayers at table. My charismatic friends have often commented on the way Mennonites at table don’t simply say a routine blessing; we really pray! I think of the commitment of Mennonites, quite commonplace when I was a child, not to work on the Lord’s Day. When weather threatened the hay crop or deadlines loomed, our neighbors might work on Sunday, but not Mennonites, who knew they didn’t need to work without ceasing.

I think of the spiritual disciplines of community. Our friends in England were astonished by the way we assumed, on the basis of ample experience among North American Mennonites, that Christians don’t hire professional movers, but rather show up en masse to help each other move.

Undergirding all these practices is the assumption that reinforces everything else in the Mennonite spiritual ecosystem—it matters quite as much how we live outwardly as what we experience inwardly. Our spirituality is embodied, enacted, lived out.

These memories prompt questions. I don’t fully understand how all this worked for Mennonites; we did not produce books on spirituality that explained things. Our carefully inculcated humility led to a reticence, even an embarrassment, about religious disciplines and experience. I don’t remember people talking much about ways of praying, or about the joys and conundrums of prayer. I don’t recall testimonies, so common among charismatic Christians, about God’s faithfulness in answering prayers.

So our Mennonite gratitude, which was real, was for God’s general generosity in giving us the bountifulness of the earth, the graciousness of Christ, and the goodness of community; rarely was it for God’s specific interventions which fomented coincidence and elicited praise.

I have also often wondered how Mennonites have survived as a people without fully recognizing the power—so evident in the New Testament and so precious to liturgical Christians—of Christ’s presence when his followers gather at the communion table.

But I do know that God was present to us Germanic Mennonites and gracious to us. God gave us experiences of worship and prayer that at their best were suffused with life and grace. These, I have realized as I have associated with charismatic and liturgical Christians, have shaped me profoundly.

Now that I have come home, I often thank God for ways in which other Christian traditions have blessed me. I will always be a charismatic Mennonite and a liturgical Mennonite; I will always be drawn to both form and freedom.

I anticipate watching with fascination as those of us rooted in the Germanic Mennonite stream learn from the new Mennonite churches in the Unites States and those in many other parts of the globe (often charismatic), and from the liturgical traditions as well.

Indeed, I think we need to learn from all these traditions. In a postmodern climate, worship that draws upon charismatic or liturgical piety—or better still that integrates them!—will have a better chance of communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ to children of Mennonite parents as well as to children of non-Christians.

I am an advocate of borrowing, but not borrowing that represents a careless repudiation of the Mennonite past. I want to be a Mennonite who passes on to the next generations the genius of my particular branch of the Mennonite tradition. I want to pass on to the next generations a Mennonite ethic of peacemaking and simplicity, but I want to pass on more than that. I want to pass on a Mennonite spirituality that has helped many people to live as disciples of Jesus and that, by God’s grace, can be a gift to other Christians.

—Alan Kreider is Associate Professor of Church History and Mission at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana. For 26 years he was a missionary in England serving with Mennonite Board of Missions. His most recent book is Composing Music for Worship (Canterbury Press, 2003), coedited with Stephen Darlington.