Tag Archives: Following Jesus conversation

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, Holy Spirit

A Pentecostal Theater Large Enough for This Marriage

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Kingsview & Co blog post barn imageFor a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offeredresponses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’ve been posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. As touched on below, this post completes my participation.

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If I dare put it this way, I’m grateful to J. Terry Todd for offering, in “Following Jesus to the Altar: One Pentecostal’s Reflection,” a Pentecostalism large enough for my marriage. This marriage, of a former atheist and semi-former charismatic, has called for a large room–even, in Todd’s language, a theater. And in relation to the Pentecost-related matters Todd addresses, as much my marriage as my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has set the stage for my experiences and perspectives. The story:

As a teen, I attended a church camp. I had by then decided that adopting atheism was the most ambitious, dramatic way I could declare independence from traumatizing aspects of my Mennonite church community.

Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.

It had taken over this church camp. So there I was, theoretically atheist. Yet underneath the atheism I was also, as Todd introduces his experience, “bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name.”

What happened next could be described almost word for word as Todd does:

Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit.  I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise team’s soaring vocals.  I, I’ve seen God do it, and I know / it’s working out for me. / It’s getting ready to happen. The entire assembly chanted the song’s refrain, again and again: It’s getting ready to happen, it’s getting ready to happen.  I wasn’t kneeling at a structure but standing, walking, rocking on my heels at the “altar,” a space that in most Pentecostal settings encompasses the center front of the church, stage left and stage right as well.

My moments of tarrying, or waiting expectantly, involved both the fervent hope for a divine encounter with the Holy Ghost, and a struggle with my willingness to surrender to the experience. And then it happened . . .

But precisely there our experiences sharply diverge. For me it most definitely did not happen. I felt crushed under the dreams of those praying over me, laying hands on me, issuing ecstatic utterances through which I grasped, though without understanding the words themselves, that they were entreating the Spirit to enter recalcitrant me.

“Just let go,” they pled. “Let your tongue go even if it makes no sense. Say nonsense words and then the Holy Spirit will come to fill them with meaning.”

So I did. And a sort of half feeling of sort of half being filled with something arrived but deep down I knew: I was doing my best to be filled with the Spirit but not managing actually to be filled by other than my own quest to be “good” for those who wanted me to be filled. Still I yielded. Eventually I eked out some nonsense words. Joy erupted. For several days I convinced myself It had happened: I had spoken in tongues; I had been baptized in the Spirit.

Only for a few days. Then as I noted no underlying transformation of my troubled self, I admitted the truth to myself: I had tried but failed to open myself. Whatever had happened had been my effort to go along with the expectations of the crowd.

Years later I was to find paths toward following Jesus and experiencing the Spirit. Part of what it took was concluding that what had befallen me back then was external coercion blending with my inner need. I had experienced true hunger but not necessarily for what I was being offered at that camp.

In mid-pilgrimage I met a woman. She was Joan, still a teenager, in her first year at Eastern Mennonite University, where we met when I was a senior. She had been raised American Baptist. She had found much to treasure in her tradition. But there were hungers not yet met in her teenage self. In her world too the charismatic movement made its transgressive appearance, undoing patterns and spiritualities that had long seemed settled. She was blessed. She still connects with friends from the days she sang in a traveling choir with her charismatic mentors and friends.

Eventually, of course, the former-but-sometimes-still-atheist and the charismatic decided that one thing amid their confusions was clear: They should marry. When they announced this oil-and-water merger to their respective friends, there was no joy in either camp. There was gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, smearing of ashes on brows. This was a variant of Thelma and Louise rollicking their way off a cliff.

So here we are, forty-some years later. We have survived partly by becoming more like each other. What our friends couldn’t always see–nor actually could we ourselves, who realized we might have lost our minds–was that we would also, hoary though the concept is, complement each other. So I am often enough the skeptic but experience Joan as offering guard rails that keep me from, ultimately, plunging into the ditch of cynical disbelief.

And I think she would testify to the ways we mutually nurtured each other when at moments of severe distress in her circle of loved ones the charismatic word was sometimes a toxic pray harder, trust God more, get out of the Spirit’s way even if that forces you to lie to yourself about what is actually happening here. During one potentially fatal crisis, it was also not her charismatic mentors but that boring old-fashioned leader, an American Baptist pastor, who knew precisely the words of divinely inspired grace and wisdom to offer.

Within that journey we find ongoing blessings as we nurture children and grandchildren in a world turned wilder than many of us might have anticipated even a few years ago. We go to church. We engage Scripture. We do things good Christians and Mennonites do. We take seriously the Mennonite Church USA understandings of the Holy Spirit offered in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective article 3, which concludes that–

The Holy Spirit enables our life in Christian community, comforts us in suffering, is present with us in time of persecution, intercedes for us in our weakness, guarantees the redemption of our bodies, and assures the future redemption of creation.

But buffeted by traditions we have long experienced as sources of both strength and shadows, we have not majored in jots and tittles of Holy Spirit doctrine. Nor have we found that the somewhat middle-of-the-road MC USA take on the Spirit exhausts the wildness of the wind and the tongues of fire that blow and alight where they will.

This means I take in Todd’s report more as testimony and inspiration than as theological tome–although I appreciate and affirm the theological nuances he offers us and the many ways they resonate with Joan’s and my lived experience. I particularly am moved by Todd’s ability to show us three things:

First “is the experience of worship as a theater of divine encounter, a space of intense emotion and intimacy where God meets us at the altar.”

Second is “transgressive space”:

As a theater of divine encounter, the Pentecostal (or renewalist) altar can be a “transgressive space,” a term Gastón Espinoza has used to describe the altars at Azusa Street, the 1906 Los Angeles revivals that helped put the Pentecostal movement on the Christian map.

Third is the “freakiness” that this can catalyze and empower. Todd documents an amazing array of Christians and peoples and experiences that can all, in their frequently contradictory ways, fit in the theater. As he describes matters, “The altar where I first experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a transgressive space, which is why I use the provocative language of ‘flying the freak flag’ to unabashedly embrace Pentecostal ideas and (especially?) actions that might puzzle or even repel others.”

That grips my heart. That shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other. And have been found by the Holy Spirit who turned even our marriage into a wing of that theater of divine encounter.

Yes, J. Terry Todd:

That prophecy makes me dance with joy at the altar, as I await this Third Pentecost, grateful for the radically relational pneumatology that undergirds it.

Somebody shout Hallelujah, please.

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This post completes my contributions to the “Following Jesus” conversation. It has been a rewarding journey. Meanwhile “Following Jesus Is a Liquid Dance,” J. Terry Todd’s engagement with his respondents (which includes comments on my post above), provides an eloquent and heartfelt wrap-up to a valuable year of mutual learning for the twelve of us involved. Let Todd have the last word:

As embodied souls we are here for a time such as this. Some of the roadblocks to the flourishing of all God’s people are novel – a climate emergency on a global scale, the possibility of nuclear destruction, along with the usual human litany of greed, war, murder, inequality, and exploitation.

How do we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land?  Well, it’s not all dependent on our singing, thank God since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Maybe it’s the Spirit that plays and sings through us. Glory! In a prophetic phrase attributed to Montanus, “Behold, the human being is like a lyre, and I [the Spirit] fly over them as a pick.”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and participated in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist history, Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Mennonite history

Pondering Across Two Traditions Both Shadowed and Hallowed

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Barn image, Michael A. King Kingsview & Co post For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

Robert Millet’s winsome portrayal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took me first back to my growing-up years. As has been true in the case of many traditions I’ve responded to, my early formation in Anabaptist-Mennonite communities and theologies predisposed me to view the Mormons, as we then knew the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with suspicion. I was taught by my tradition that Mormons were a cult. They based their views on the false foundation of the Book of Mormon claimed by then-New Yorker Joseph Smith to have been written on mental plates derived from an angel.

Mormons, it was said, falsely believed that they were the highest, most faithful version of Christianity due to their founding ultimately by Christ in New York  long after the other traditions. They believed in polygamy and tried to convert others to this lifestyle and problematic beliefs.

There are similarities here with Anabaptist-Mennonites. We often have seen ourselves as restoring the true church of Christ. We rescued the church from wrong directions taken from about the time of the Emperor Constantine and across the centuries of Catholicism and of Christendom (church and nation intertwined) expressions still partly maintained by the Reformers.

Mennonites also, it seems to me, have sometimes been careful to interpret our own history in ways that favor our preferred understandings of ourselves. This may be one reason some of us have favored a “monogenesis” view of having emerged largely from 1525 Zurich when Conrad Grebel rebaptized a number of other Anabaptist leaders. This can enable at least some carving away of the more shadowed historical details. In contrast, a “polygenesis” view that Anabaptists emerged from multiple streams and settings makes it harder to say well this is Anabaptism but that wrong turn is not.

For example, perhaps the most troubling dynamic in Anabaptist history emerged at Münster in Germany in the early 1530s. Anabaptists attempted to impose a theocracy on the city through what came to be known as the Münster rebellion. Jan Matthys was one of the noteworthy Anabaptist leaders until the bishop they had exiled besieged the city, killing Matthys and others. For a time the Anabaptist rebels still held considerable sway, as this paragraph from the Anabaptist encyclopedia GAMEO (Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online) summarizes:

The 25-year-old John of Leiden was subsequently recognized as Matthys’ religious and political successor, justifying his authority and actions by claiming visions from heaven. His authority grew until eventually he proclaimed himself the successor of David and adopted royal regalia, honors, and absolute power in the new “Zion.” There were now in the town at least three times as many women of marriageable age as men, so he made polygamy compulsory,[3] and he himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded Elisabeth Wandscherer in the marketplace for refusing to marry him, though this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Meanwhile, most of the residents of Münster were starving as a result of the year-long siege.

For centuries thereafter, Anabaptist-Mennonites have wrestled with this. Are Münster and its leaders part of Anabaptist history? Or an aberrance to be bracketed out?

I pay attention to this example because it illustrates the complexities of my own tradition’s history and because there are  striking overlaps with Mennonite takes on Mormonism. Perhaps finding a path that didn’t affirm Münster or other thought-to-be-mistaken Anabaptist streams contributed to what I experienced growing up: Certainly Mennonites were not prepared to cede the one-true-church or the highest-expression-of-the-church mantle to Mormonism. This contributed, I’d guess, to the Mennonite tendency to form in its members the often-stereotypical perceptions I’ve summarized.

Eventually I went to college and seminary. I learned more nuanced understandings of other traditions. However, I have less often encountered sensitive interpretations of Latter-day Saints history and beliefs. It has been a privilege then to participate in conversation with such a generous sharer of his tradition as Robert Millet. And I want to spend some more time in, precisely, affirming Millet’s interpretations rather than questioning them.

Before I proceed, however, I do wonder if Millet would be willing to comment on the common perceptions–or surely often misperceptions as Millet has in other responses movingly reported–of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (When I invited Millet’s commentary he in fact responded generously and comprehensively.) Perhaps hinting at a kind of polygenesis of Mormonism, the Latter-day Saints offer, as I understand it, a preeminent (and non-polygamy-affirming) but not sole expression of Mormonism.

I note Millet has not mentioned the stereotypical takes on his tradition; I’d expect that’s intentional. Why focus on what may be misinterpretations when given the opportunity to write not so much a defense as a proactive statement of the visionary principles that guide the Latter-day Saints of today? Still, it would be informative to learn more of how Millet might address critiques of his or other Mormon branches. It would also be valuable to learn how Millet, who as highlighted below affirms Scripture, views Church of Jesus Christ specifics. For example, what is the role of the Book of Mormon, which I’d imagine few other traditions are prepared fully to embrace?

But turning beyond the shadows, I am struck that Millet helps me make sense of something of a turning point in my own impressions of the Latter-day Saints. Some years ago I was letting Spotify’s algorithms take me hither and yon. That particular night I was tempted to say the algorithm was Holy Spirit, but I doubt Spotify has itself achieved this though who can say how the Spirit may use Spotify!

At any rate, I was in something of a troubled mood and looking for the comforts of music. There were hints of this in various songs. But suddenly I stumbled across a version of “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by The Lower Lights, about whom I knew nothing. I got goosebumps. I turned up the sound. I let the music fill my home and soul. I looked for more Lower Lights music and found many gems.

Then I looked up the group’s background. I was startled to learn that they are . . . Latter-day Saints. That caught my attention. What a clash between what I had been taught and what I was experiencing. I don’t want to claim there was a major theological impact, though once I knew about the Latter-day roots I could hear Latter-day influences in some of the songs. What really tugged at me was that above or beneath whatever the theological overlaps or differences might be, The Lower Lights were blessing me. My heart opened as it rarely had before to paying attention to Latter-day Saints’ gifts.

Then came Millet, who helps us understand core Latter-day Saints commitments and helps my mind continue the journey The Lower Lights have already helped my heart make. I see much for Mennonites to honor in Millet’s “Walking in His Steps: How Latter-day Saints Seek to Follow Jesus” summary:

Millet emphasizes the Latter-day commitment to search the Scriptures daily. As Millet summarizes, “There is a power inherent in scripture, a power unlike anything else we may read or study.” Meanwhile, at our best (which we don’t always manage), Mennonites are committed to believing as we do because we take the Bible seriously as a guide to daily living. We emerged from visionary leaders and communities that sought to read the Bible for themselves. They became convinced that the Jesus they found in this Bible was to be followed even when teaching such radical precepts as adult baptism or that enemies are to be loved.

Mennonites are perhaps not as known for being a praying people as adherents of some traditions. In fact, when I looked for prayer in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, I couldn’t find an article on it. I did find prayer appearing in footnotes, for example in the article on the Holy Spirit, in a note summarizing that “the Spirit of Christ is in the midst of the church in its gathering for prayer and praise.” I see Millet as speaking well for Mennonites in his descriptions of how Latter-day Saints practice being a praying people.

Millet describes Latter-day commitment to serving and loving others as Jesus did. This is in effect a Latter-day variant of one of the five core commitments of Mennonites I summarized in my post on Mennonites.

Latter-day Saints are deeply committed to church attendance–and this includes emphasizing community. As Millet puts it, “Christianity entails more than prayer, fasting, and searching the scriptures–more than an individual effort to live the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As vital as personal devotion and individual effort are, Christianity is fully lived out only in community.” In turn a core Anabaptist-Mennonite precept is that we are to live not primarily as individual Christians. We are to journey as followers of Jesus who through adult baptism commit ourselves to live as members of the body–or community–of Christ.

Many thanks, Robert Millet, for these valuable admonitions and for contributing to my own personal pilgrimage toward grasping the treasures in your tradition.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, justice

Jesus as Social Revolutionary: Engaging Farris Blount’s Prophetic Invitation

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Blog post from Kingsview & Co by Michael A. KingFor a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Thank you, Farris Blount, for an accessible yet multi-layered overview of the Black Church in A Tale of Many Options: Following Jesus in the Black Church Tradition. The “many options” of your “tale” of the non-monolithic Black Church tradition captures well both central emphases and the many variations.

Your first words fit well with my own take on Anabaptist-Mennonitism and other traditions:

As many of my colleagues have noted during this series on following Jesus from diverse Christian traditions, there is no uniform structure or pattern to such a task. Following Jesus is primarily informed by the context of a people and the needs, desires, and goals of that people.

Rightly emphasized are ways denominational theologies, church models, and forms of following Jesus arise from particular geographical, cultural, and social locations. Amid much that overlaps with ways given situations have shaped my and my tradition’s forms of following Jesus, it’s vital to note your stress on the historical mistreatment and marginalization of the Black Church. Because so much rides on one of your core paragraphs, let me quote it in full:

The historical mistreatment and marginalization of African-Americans can explain how many Black Jesus followers have understood that to follow Jesus means working towards the liberation of all those who are oppressed, particularly Black people. Such a perspective has been molded first by our historical experiences. Our Black Christian forebearers could not understand how a loving and redeeming Savior, who sought to restore our relationship with God and free us from the penalty of sin through His crucifixion, could support the brutal institution of American slavery. Throughout history, African-American Jesus believers could not make sense of how some people could worship a God on Sunday that made humankind in God’s image and declared that this creation was good (Genesis 1) but then treat Black people like second-class citizens unworthy of rights and resources on Monday. Because of these realities, Black Christians have argued that the Jesus we serve laments with us as we process through the trauma that racism creates and fights alongside us as we work to create a world where all God’s creation can thrive. In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.

I‘m a member of a tradition born amid persecution and death so significant that the massive classic, The Martyrs’ Mirror (assembled by Tieleman Van Braght in the 1600s), tells story after story of Anabaptists chased down, burned, drowned during the Reformation. I was ridiculed as a first-grader for not bearing toy guns in a school play because my peace-committed Mennonite parents forbade it. I feel in my bones the traumatic potential of mistreatments and marginalizations. I resonate with your statement that “In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.”

However, precisely because for me and many in my tradition the age-old persecutions involved primarily beliefs, not race, I struggle fully to understand. I imagine beyond a certain point I can’t grasp the depths of trauma intertwined with slavery and racism persisting both in historical memory and still so often actively inflicted today.

Then add the complexity of how African-Americans have themselves, as you report, found their way through that history and present racisms:

However, despite the myriad ways in which the Black Church tradition echoes this commitment to justice in following Jesus, such a commitment does not reverberate through the halls of every Black congregation. In fact, the disagreement between how African-Americans should respond to discrimination can be explored through a polarity that Lincoln and Mamiya call “the communal and the privatistic.” If striving for equal and fair treatment of Black Americans in all areas of life is considered a “communal” approach to the Black Church tradition, then the privatistic approach is one in which there is a “withdrawal from the concerns of the larger community to a focus on meeting only the religious needs of its adherents.” While communal approach advocates echo that following Jesus involves active engagement against oppression, privatistic approach proponents contend that following Jesus is all about an individual public declaration of belief in Him and a resulting shift in behavior (i.e. no cheating, stealing, etc.). Communal believers see Jesus as a liberator that desires for us to experience some Heaven on Earth right now through just relationships and equitable policies, while privatistic believers see Jesus as someone who came chiefly to liberate us from sin and its penalty – eternal separation from God.[1]

It makes sense, as you describe Black Church diversities, that this polarity of the communal and the privatistic would name and form alternative expressions of Black Church experiences. The polarity is also strongly applicable to other traditions. I grew up in what I’d consider a privatistic form of church. I remember its members criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. for focusing on social justice rather than, as these Mennonites believed was more crucial, bringing about change through inviting Jesus into our hearts as personal savior.

In contrast, some Anabaptist-Mennonites have emphasized communal approaches. I’d understand Mennonite Church USA to be trending in this direction in its statements and resources on “Undoing Racism” introduced with these sentences: “Racism, antipathy and alienation stand in the way of Christ’s kingdom of love, justice and peace. As missional communities we will seek to dismantle individual and systemic racism in our church.”

Crucial to my own quest to follow Jesus was Vincent Harding, whose journey included speech writing for Martin Luther King Jr. (such as King’s historic “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence“) and significant involvement with Mennonites. He increasingly became a critic of Mennonites (for reasons likely related to the privatistic side of the church) yet also at one point with first spouse Rosemarie directed a Mennonite service unit in Atlanta. In the 1970s he changed my and my wife Joan’s life when in a presentation at Eastern Mennonite University, our alma mater, he urged Mennonites, so often agrarian, to become more meaningfully involved in cities and communal concerns. His invitation catalyzed our spending some 14 years training, working, and living in Philadelphia.

I’d see the privatistic/communal pendulum going back and forth in Anabaptist-Mennonite circles depending on era, given congregations, denominational variations, and so forth. Interestingly, this might be illustrated through how our Following Jesus conversations have been received. I’ve been sharing my posts on Facebook and elsewhere. When I posted my response to Pietist Christopher Gehrz, one FB commentator observed that “I too have heard Mennonite leaders opine about how Pietist sentiments can lead to a me-and-Jesus instead of an us-and-Jesus mentality. I find those comments suspect. It ignores, suppresses and denies the reality that each of us is an individual with an irreducible inwardness. . . .”

Another commentator hoped that valuing the inward, privatistic aspects of Pietism as I had summarized them was not an either/or. This person stressed what Blount is calling the communal, wondering, “Is the Bible primarily addressed to whole communities of God’s covenanted people or is it primarily intended for our personal devotions?” The commentator answered that we pray not “My” but “Our” Father in the Lord’s prayer. This is in contrast to, say, coming “to the garden alone” or walking the Jericho Road as “just Jesus and me” (as two songs put it). 

I said that “As I understood the Pietist summary to which I was responding, indeed both/and not either/or!” Your own answer, Farris, is that

I am not condemning such an approach to following Jesus. On the one hand, there are spiritual practices, such as prayer and scripture reading, that should undergird the life of a believer, no matter what one believes it means to follow Jesus. These practices give us the strength to keep serving and following Jesus amid life’s difficulties. On the other hand, Black Christians who have dedicated themselves to fighting for justice have sometimes done so at tremendous personal sacrifice.

Well said, and a nudge to any of us—personally or at the level of our traditions who may be tempted to overinvest in the privatistic at the expense of the communal. Many thanks for making the stakes clear.

The week this was first published we confronted yet again the violence shredding our culture, too often on behalf of White supremacy, and Black shoppers dying simply for being in a Buffalo grocery store when a teenager, incited by hate-filled ideologies he had no trouble finding and feeding on in today’s political and media contexts, set out to kill as many as he could. Amid such horrors, you issue an invitation that ultimately has implications for all of us:

However, I do not believe we can avoid the fact that Jesus was a social revolutionary if we look at the scriptures and His engagement in His world. And if that is the case, we in the Black Church tradition who call ourselves Christians and attempt to model the life of Jesus, must ask ourselves – what am I willing to sacrifice and give up to follow the Jesus that came to give humanity life and life more abundantly right here and right now?

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, inspiration, love of God, Pietism

Stirred by Tender Pietism

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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In his stirring rendition of “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” Christopher Gehrz illumined for me the reality that a fair amount of what I’ve experienced as just part of my heritage is indebted to Pietism. I needed barely to  read more than that one of my favorite hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” has Pietist roots to grasp this.

This intrigued me enough that I pursued Gehrz’s fuller comments on the song writer, Carolina Sandell, learned that she is his favorite hymn writer, that she engaged in bride (of Christ) mysticism, and that

Still more controversially, she inherited the Radical Pietist and Moravian interest in the divine feminine. The first draft of “Thy Holy Wings” asked God to spread “warm mother’s wings,” and a hymn inspired by the martyrdom of Swedish missionaries in Ethiopia implored God to “tenderly hover” over Christ’s witnesses on Earth, “Embracing their cares like a mother.”

Reading this took me to my childhood as an often-lost missionary kid trying to survive both the beauties and bafflements of life in Cuba and Mexico. By the time I was 12 the crosscurrents of the missionary experience and my escape into secular inspirations like science fiction had me flirting with atheism. Yet repeatedly a backdrop of hymns and gospel music playing most bedtimes on a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder brought comfort amid pain.

Many a troubled night I’d listen to songs like George Beverly Shea singing “Tenderly He Watches.” Here the controversy of feminine images for God is dialed back. This is done perhaps intentionally and as Sandell herself sometimes seems to do (not least as in “Heavenly Father” children safely to God’s “bosom” are gathered). God remains in such renderings a male who watches over me not as but “like” a mother, a “mother watching o’er her babies.” Still the tenderness is explicitly and implicitly palpable, and it strikes me how often Pietist-flavored hymns leaven the sternness of traditionally patriarchal faith expressions.

When I aged into a culture-shocked teenager trying to make sense of college in the U.S. after leaving Mexico just months before, key to my surviving the tough days was lying many an evening on the couch watching the reels turn on what was now my more advanced stereo Dokorder tape recorder. I would put on the most tender hymns I knew. Shades of Sandell.

Which then takes my heart and memories back to the scores of hymns offering God’s tender care that healed my wounds way back then, bless me still today, and surrounded the bed of my dying mother-in-law Mildred. As she faded, her daughter and my wife Joan, along with our three daughters, sat by her bed singing such hymns. We accompanied the tracks playing on an old Ipod I had loaded with hundreds of hymns and gospel songs for Mildred to go to sleep to in her retirement community much as I had as a boy.

Many of the songs,  in fact, were precisely the same ones I had listened to in Cuba and Mexico, plenty of them with that Pietist flavor. I had resurrected them by buying lost vinyl records on Ebay and laboriously transferring them to the MP3s that eventually ended up on my and Mildred’s Ipods.

All of which is to say this: I certainly have long loved such hymns. But it was Gehrz who helped me more fully understand that through them I was experiencing aspects of a Pietism that did indeed help save my life.

I need to rethink some of my own personal history and my Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage in light of Gehrz. I’ve under-credited Pietism. I’ve long been reasonably aware that strands of piety did heavily influence the communities within which I was most primally shaped. I’ve been less aware that these pieties were not just floating in the Anabaptist-Mennonite air but were a gift from sources such as Sandell and the many others Gehrz identifies, including Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Franck, and more.

Citing Roger Olson, Gehrz observes that “if there is no Pietist movement, we might nonetheless discover what Olson calls ‘the Pietist ethos’ in Lutheran, Wesleyan, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed, and other churches represented by other participants in this conversation.” Indeed.

Gehrz himself names what I might otherwise worry a tad about from within Anabaptist commitments to social ethics. This is the possibility that piety can so turn inward as to forsake the outward. I’ve heard Mennonite preachers worry, precisely, that the more Pietistic hymns can generate a me-and-God as opposed to us-and-God or God-and the-world Christianity.

Gehrz, however, makes the case that as with “Francke (1663-1727), personal conversion to Jesus Christ sparked social action.” And my own experience suggests that the tenderness that watches o’er the troubled ones of us safely in God’s bosom gathering can be a key source of returning to the world healed enough to care for it.

Thank you, Christopher, for this tender report, on behalf not only of your own tradition but our many traditions enriched by it, of a week in a Pietist’s life.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, and the church, Evangelicalism

Feeding the Hunger He Couldn’t Name

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

What a poignant, moving story of pursuing something he doesn’t know how to name David Gushee offers us in “One Account of a Baptist Way of Following Jesus.” Yet one thing becomes clear to his younger self once raised Catholic as he tries out a Sunday morning service, a Sunday evening service, a Monday night Bible study at a Southern Baptist church: In this paradigm young David is not a Christian. So he does what needs to be done, all the way through full-immersion baptism, and it “takes.” His life is changed.

This is a simple, compelling, almost archetypal report on a classic evangelical conversion experience. This is much the same paradigm even I, raised Mennonite, encountered growing up. It’s what I longed for. Except as reported earlier, in my case it didn’t take. If it had, I might well be writing now more as an evangelical than an Anabaptist-Mennonite. But it didn’t.

So I was curious indeed to see how Gushee, whose writings and communications suggest ample overlap with Anabaptism and other more-social-justice-than-evangelical influences, journeyed from then to now. Before leaving “then,” Gushee offers this compelling summary:

Thus the way of Jesus in this first primitive introduction involved both gift and task — the gift of a staggering sacrifice to atone and forgive me for my sins (I was aware that they were abundant), and the task of learning how to become a faithful servant of a new Lord — no longer my wretched self-curved-in-on-itself, but Jesus Christ. This latter project, it was soon clear, was demanding, open-ended, and lifelong — one never arrived, one was always on the way, there was always more to learn, more growing to do, more sin to repent, more Bible to read and (better and better) understand, more people to (better and better) love, more millions to evangelize… and of course more Sunday School classes, church services, youth choirs, Bible studies, and mission seminars to attend.

I would not hesitate to put forward this basic paradigm of what it means to follow Jesus as foundational for me and far preferable to many available alternatives even today. Christianity as receiving the ultimate gift (of God’s saving love in Christ) and undertaking the ultimate task (of reorienting one’s life to serve Christ with everything). If one wants as close to a near-consensus Baptist vision of discipleship as might exist, I think that is it. I think it tracks with centuries of Baptist history, would be recognizable in most parts of the global Baptist world, and still deeply inspires the vision of many Baptist churches and Christians today.

But of course Gushee is not done. He names complexities, such as that

The conversionist paradigm fits badly with a developmental-staged faith that often better reflects people’s life experiences. Personal discipleship training needs to watch out for perfectionism and guilt-mongering. A social, ethical, political vision is needed and not just a personal one. Theology matters and not just a few scripture nuggets and lots of personal-experiential religion.

And he names changes in the Southern Baptist tradition since his joining days that leave him more drawn to the global Baptist expressions. The Southern variant, he reports, “became part of the Religious Right from the 1980s forward and a huge part of what became #MAGATrumpvangelicalChristianity, which has little if any family resemblance to the serious Jesus-as-Savior-and-Lord Baptist Christianity that I cut my teeth on in 1978.”

So here he and we now are, yearning for what no longer is, imagining Baptists returning “to that long-ago message. God’s love to human beings has been expressed in Jesus Christ. The best possible human life is to serve him as Lord.”

As I said, Gushee’s story is a moving one. His trajectory is a meaningful and powerful one. And I suspect he may be deliberately using the often-minimalist rhetoric of someone like Jesus, who offered cryptic parables and sayings combined with the stark “Follow me” invitations that changed lives.

I’m actually not sure if I wish for Gushee to have offered more. Every effort these days to “answer” the riddles Christianity is mired in seems to create more riddles and rage, not resolution.

Still I keep wondering how David the Christian leader who emerged from the lost boy envisions both honoring the historical emphases he values and dreaming onward, including, as he observes, toward a ” social, ethical, political vision.”

I‘m thinking here of the likelihood that countless Baptists could name salvation experiences similar to Gushee’s and affirm with him God’s love expressed in Jesus whom they serve as Lord. But, as he notes, it’s complicated. I don’t know their Christian brand, but I happened to notice while biking, as I ruminated on this response, a lawn sign that named a local politician while citing John 8:36 and celebrating freedom. Another sign along my bike route promised no hate in that home. It wouldn’t surprise me if both sign posters would affirm God’s love as expressed through Jesus Christ their Lord.

Based on signals coded into many public expressions these days, such that championing freedom tends to take one in this political direction and repudiating hate in that direction, it also wouldn’t surprise me if the signs involve commitments to different visions of living for Jesus.

I’d imagine Gushee, whom I first became aware of as he called Christians not to support torture as a tool in the “war on terror,” has passionate views on how God’s love is operationalized. He hints at this in proposing that much of the Religious Right has lost family resemblance to the Baptist Christianity he joined in 1978.

I’d love for him to say more, including about how the upheaval within and across Christian denominations and traditions both in the U.S. and globally is confounding assumptions and values once seemingly more settled. How often these days I myself wonder, and how often I hear others articulate it, if I’m still a Christian when what multitudes now see that entailing seems for so many so disconnected from historic understandings of serving Jesus as Lord.

In my own Mennonite context, I’m struck that until recent years the Anabaptist conviction that the body of Christ and its visionaries offers alternatives to the earthly principalities and powers made eminent sense to me. I believed that God’s people might be trusted to prophetically challenge the often unjust structures, institutions, ideologies, elemental spirits, or socioeconomic patterns of our day, to echo the Apostle Paul or more recently such a scholar as Hendrikus Berkhof (writing on Christ and the Powers, 1953).

Now I wonder more than I once did. Sometimes these earthly powers seem to enact enough goodness to make sense of Berkhof’s proposal that though fallen they can be dikes against chaos. Sometimes they challenge evil perpetrated explicitly in the name of Christ.

Other times the powers remain as evil as ever, in need of ongoing confrontation in, precisely, the name of Christ. Yet growing numbers of us who cry Lord, Lord (Matt. 7:21-23) seem more interested in being allied with the powers or even constructing ourselves into powers. Meanwhile others who cry Lord Lord advocate for alternative communities of love and justice that can seem evanescent indeed when we too are riven by competing visions of what the Lord is calling us toward.

Within such dynamics, including the worry of some that civil war lies ahead, I still believe much of what I and some (not all) in my Anabaptist-Mennonite community have long believed. Yet I wonder more than I once did how we Christians, whatever our tradition, are getting it wrong as well as getting it right. I wonder what that may mean in this tumultuous era and the turbulence likely yet to come.

I hope you’ll continue speaking to us about such matters, David even as I’m thankful indeed for all the speaking you’ve already been doing.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, baptism, Evangelicalism, grace, Mennonite, salvation

Collaborating with Grace, the Gift from Beyond

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

It’s interesting to note that Wesley Granberg-Michaelson joins the significant number of “Respectful Conversation” partners reporting having made some sort of journey beyond or at least through evangelicalism as part of embracing their current tradition. I’d count myself among such. Though I was born into the Mennonite church and raised by Anabaptist-Mennonite parents, whether what we believed in was Anabaptism or an evangelicalism tinged with fundamentalism was often unclear.

I resonate, then, with Granberg-Michaelson’s report that he started out evangelical, going back to a conversation in the kitchen with his mother when he was just four. There is indeed appeal in accepting Jesus before going to the dentist to make sure to be saved in case Jesus returns more quickly than young Wesley returns from the dentist.

I made the same move as Wesley except oh, maybe 100 times, and it just never seemed to take. I never seemed to become unqualifiedly saved. I remember when I was maybe 12 overhearing my mom say to my dad something along the lines of “If he doesn’t do it by the time he’s 16 he never will.” To this day I’m not sure if “it” was accepting Jesus, but I think it was. That only added to the pressure and caused maybe another 50 efforts to become saved.

But thoughts and feelings that seemed not to belong to saved people would always return shortly after a few days of the sainthood that would validate that Jesus was now in my heart. For me the solution, if such it was, to the quandary came from choosing in my twenties to try out whatever it meant to follow Jesus. I’d aim to follow Jesus whether or not I always believed there was a Jesus to follow and whether or not I had any confidence that Jesus was in my heart.

In light of that, I feel almost a twinge of envy that Granberg-Michaelson can report that the Reformed tradition “chose me.” There is gift here, the gift of feeling that Someone has chosen you which is moving and affirming in a different way than if it was primarily you who did the choosing. As Granberg-Michaelson summarizes, “Grace comes solely as God’s initiative, as pure gift. Faith is never an achievement or personal accomplishment.”

I mostly concur. And I think we Mennonites influenced by the individualism often linked to evangelical influences can be reminded by Granberg-Michaelson of our tradition’s from-the-start convictions that the walk toward and with Jesus happens as we become members of Christ’s body.

Each of our traditions can also find gifts in the summary of the Reformed tradition as confessional, covenantal, committed to the conviction that the world belongs to God, aware that sin is real indeed yet so is the journey from “guilt to grace to gratitude,” and ecumenical.

Those of us who are grandparents, as am I six times over, may also find blessing in Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony that “When I sit with my two grandchildren on my lap, my Reformed theology gets undone.”

My Mennonite theology gets undone too, though this did send me down a side-trail that may nevertheless deserve a touch of exploration:  wondering how any of us help next generations see gifts in our traditions as religions and denominations and traditions are in so many ways coming undone.

Some of my grandchildren are being raised in ways connected to Christianity, even sometimes Mennonite-flavored. Others less so. In-laws range all over the faith–or lack thereof–map. When we get together, we can’t assume that, say, Mennonite is our common understanding.

Even so, how surprising, and moving it has sometimes been to learn that even grandchildren as young as two pay attention for example to prayer at meals and regardless of their particular background will often propose or even personally initiate prayer. This includes the youngest, whose heart has somehow instructed her to put her two index fingers together and close her eyes as a gesture of prayer.

I suspect at least two factors come into view here. One is that indeed the communal emphases of our traditions hold insight. We are formed together, not simply apart and not entirely by larger cultural influences even as traditions increasingly atomize.

The other is that we do need somehow to take into account Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony to not only chasing grace ourselves but also being chosen and blessed by it whether or not we’re fully capable of understanding it. This takes me back to his thoughts on covenant.

On the one hand, I remain a committed enough Anabaptist-Mennonite that I don’t fully embrace his conviction that covenant includes infant baptism.

When an infant is baptized in a Reformed (or other) congregation, theological critics will complain that he or she has no choice in the matter. But that is precisely the point. Christian faith is carried communally; it’s personal but not individualistic.

I see the power of this understanding and in that sense am drawn to it. Still I’d prefer to look for ways the communal carrying of Christian faith Granberg-Michaelson rightly emphasizes does not preclude reserving baptism for the adult or at least adult-in-training believer consciously committing to the journey with Jesus.

Here I see some analogy with my marriage commitments. I could not have become the married person I am apart from community and “covenantal relationships of love.” And I respect that marriage arrangements vary across cultures in enriching ways. Yet I’m grateful to have had the privilege of intentionally–though certainly not in full understanding of what I was doing!–committing myself to another through sickness and in health until death does us part.

On the other hand, and as I ponder through the prism of my grandchildren, I see much to celebrate in Granberg-Michaelson’s report:

So, I don’t regard my prayer in the kitchen as an autonomous, individual act of free will, but as part of a mysterious movement of grace transmitted imperfectly but certainly through covenantal relationships of love. Believing and belonging are intertwined, and not always sequential.

Amen. Maybe the Mennonite in me can see adult baptism as collaborating with the grace which comes as gift from Beyond. Many thanks, Wesley, for leading us so meaningfully from guilt to grace to gratitude.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology

Drawn with Randall Balmer and Episcopalianism Toward That Enchanted Universe

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

Reading Randall Balmer’s post on why he left evangelicalism to become Episcopalian reminded me that way back when, as a young Christian committed to my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, I was also experiencing a hunger for spiritual resources I wasn’t fully finding (perhaps partly due to my own blindnesses) in my own communities of faith and worship. Though I wouldn’t today support everything I encountered back then, it was a gift to experience a number of “Aha, there is more!” explosions caused by such resources as these:

My late and beloved professor of pastoral care at Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary, Vince DeGregoris, introduced me to Carl Jung through Jung-inspired courses on “The Psychodynamics of the Gospels” and “Psychodynamics of the Old Testament” also shaped by such texts as Walter Wink’s The Bible in Human Transformation: Towards a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Augsburg Fortress, 1980) and Transforming Bible Study: A Leader’s Guide (Abingdon, 1980). Though I didn’t entirely embrace her Gnostic-trending view of Christianity, this also took me to June Singer and her Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology (Knopf, 1972).

Frederick Buechner showed me in The Magnificent Defeat (Seabury, 1966), Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (Harper & Row, 1977), and many other books that there are ways to preach the heights and depths and poetry of the Bible in ways not dreamed of–at least as of my experience back then–in my tradition. Lord, Teach Us to Pray: Christian Zen and the Inner Eye of Love (HarperCollins, 1991), by William Johnston, offered fresh visions of prayer.

Amid the swirl of such influences, I found a book by Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation (Paulist, 1976). Although to my knowledge only Kelsey, an Episcopalian priest, belonged to Randall Balmer’s current tradition, Kelsey symbolizes for me the fact that such resources powerfully complemented ways I had, if only due to my own limits, experienced absences in my tradition. A form of Christianity based on if Jesus said it, then do it, can be drawn toward primarily literal, practical, ethics-focused expressions of faith.

There is considerable power in such expressions which continues to inform and inspire me. Yet humans are complicated indeed. I longed for ways better to understand my inner dynamics and the depths of the human condition, to make sense of clashes between the practicalities and disciplines my communities of faith called for and and my own lived realities.

Through the resources from traditions more oriented toward this, including those leaning “high church” and not least Episcopalian, I found some of my longings met. Rather than leaving Mennonites behind, such materials allowed me to embrace what seemed to me to work while drawing on complementary voices from beyond.

My early years were also shaped nearly as much by evangelicalism and fundamentalism as they were by my own tradition. In that sense some of the factors that led Balmer to leave evangelicalism contributed to my aches for something more than my heritage was giving me.

So my story is a variant on what Balmer reports, as he tells us of formally departing his “evangelical subculture” within which his own father had long been a pastor to become an Episcopalian and to feel “as though I had come home.” Amid differences in our journeying, I do see much to appreciate here. And I experience Balmer as yet one more voice articulating some of my own hungers as he speaks of finding at Trinity Church something he wasn’t sure of, but it “seemed sacred to me and very much unlike the cavernous and (yes, I’ll say it) soulless spaces all too typical of evangelicalism.”

And so, reports Balmer, even as he honors his father’s ministry and memory and is “on the whole . . . grateful for my upbringing,” he’s come to

love the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, the reverence of the liturgy, the soaring descants of the Anglican musical tradition and prayers that typically do not include the phrase, “Lord, we jus’ wanna.” I’ve come to regard the Episcopal Church, along with museums, symphonies and the natural world, as one of the few remaining repositories of beauty in this life.

I remain enough of an Anabaptist-Mennonite shaped by an emphasis on signs pointing beyond themselves, but not quite to the point of sacraments that might be seen as including the beyond within themselves, that I don’t feel as strong a pull toward Balmer’s sacramental view. Yet I’ve glimpsed its power in settings like his and value his descriptions of it.

Balmer’s references to the mysteries of faith intertwine with treasures I gleaned from the writers I mentioned at the outset. There is quite the appeal to his decision that “I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at play that I cannot begin to understand, much less explain—not least of which is the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.”

Perhaps also due partly to my Mennonite formation with its view of the church as the community of believers rather than a reality founded on, say, Peter the Rock, I confess to smiling along with Balmer’s take that Matthew 16, with its report of a Jesus founding a church on a particularly frail human, is a rare New Testament attempt at humor or at least irony. Yet I also share with Balmer the concern to respect those, such as Roman Catholics, who might view matters quite differently.

Thank you, Randall Balmer, for helping us experience with you the pull of following “Jesus along the Canterbury Trail.”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, communities of discernment, MC USA, Mennonite, Mennonite Church USA, Teachings of Jesus

Amid Complexities, Five Things Many Anabaptist-Mennonites Emphasize

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. This post is my main presentation on my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. (Links to responses, and my responses in turn, are here.)

* * *

Yes, I will summarize five Anabaptist-Mennonite emphases. But I don’t dare try before addressing complexities of doing so when so many groups stress so many different things.

We can link some Anabaptist-Mennonitisms back to Swiss Anabaptism. Even as approaches to Anabaptist origins and contemporary implications vary (as historians contest whether “polygenesis,” “monogenesis,” or some blend best explains Anabaptist beginnings), noteworthy was the 1525 Zurich move by leaders such as Conrad Grebel and George Blaurock to rebaptize each other. They and others called for rebaptizing adults committed to a “believers church” and by 1527 produced the Schleitheim Confession summarizing early Swiss Anabaptist beliefs. They also contributed to a believers church shadow: if only believers belong in the church and are to rightly live Jesus’ teachings, there is potential for endless schism over who is the true believer.

* * *

Today, among many Anabaptist-Mennonite groups, some include the name Anabaptist, some Mennonite, some neither. Yet they are broadly part of Mennonitism, whether in North America or worldwide. Mennonites gained their name as disciples of the 1500s former Roman Catholic priest, the Frisian (Netherlands) Menno Simons. Other Anabaptist groups, such as Church of the Brethren, Brethren in Christ, Hutterites may have varying links to Mennonites but involve different branchings-out of Anabaptism.

Then there are the Amish.  Though they diverged in the 1600s, their roots are Swiss Anabaptist. The Amish are part of my family lineage some generations back. Despite their split from branches of Anabaptism with which I’m most connected, their plain and simple living commitments make their own contributions. The Amish have sometimes intertwined with Mennonite streams as wings of Mennonites and Amish have migrated back and forth. Thus for example someone like my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw could tell of how, after her family was put out of its Mennonite wing, they attended Conestoga Amish Mennonite Church.

* * *

The point is not the details but that one could go on and on about who believed what, belonged to whom when and for how long, evicted one group or joined another. As addressed in my response to Orthodoxy,  long unfolding Anabaptist-Mennonite diversification seems only to have gathered momentum in Mennonite Church USA, to which I belong. This has led to MC USA losing nearly half of its members since its formation in 2002. Despite the goal—heal divisions and merge two prior denominations—MC USA faces continuing challenges, and the merger split off MC Canada from what had been a binational church.

As touched on in response to Orthodox writer David Ford, a significant though not only factor heightening tensions has involved LGBTQIA-related decisions. I once pastored a congregation the denomination later excommunicated when it was perceived to have moved too far toward inclusion; I was saddened when delegates of another congregation I was then pastoring voted for eviction. In 2015 I was an MC USA seminary dean when the university to which it belonged navigated both internal divisions and the wider denominational tumult in moving toward a more inclusive hiring policy. In 2015 and beyond, many congregations and some conferences—regional and/or affiliative clusters of congregations into which MC USA is subdivided—shifted loyalties to different entities or left MC USA entirely.

* * *

So what do Mennonites believe amid ongoing wrestlings? Key is the 1995 Mennonite Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective and its summary of 24 principles MC USA formally affirms. But what of Anabaptist-Mennonite streams that have left MC USA or in some cases never joined?

For example, CMC, formerly Conservative Mennonite Conference, now labeling itself an “evangelical Anabaptist denomination with headquarters in Irwin, Ohio,” offers alternative statements of faith on theology and practice.

LMC—“A fellowship of Anabaptist churches,” formerly Lancaster Mennonite Conference—was until recently largest of MC USA’s conferences. Now LMC states commitment to the 1995 COF but doesn’t mention in summarizing Anabaptist-Mennonite history its departure from the denomination of which it was once such a large part.

Acronyms such as CMC or LMC in place of Mennonite matter. They signal preference to emphasize evangelical and/or Anabaptist over Mennonite components.

Evana Network emerged amid 2015 MC USA controversies. Evana (abbreviating “evangelical Anabaptist” theology), speaks of embracing the 1995 COF but also various confessions of the Mennonite Brethren (yet another denomination) and CMC even as it asks members to commit to requirements as “defined in our covenant” and expects congregations to belong to a Congregational Covenant.

Statements Evana embraces vary in emphasis and details. For example, the 1995 COF speaks of a “fully reliable and trustworthy” Bible even as CMC affirms Scripture as “without error in the original writings in all that they affirm.” Evident here a century later are ongoing effects of Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies.

Then one could ponder Anabaptists emphasizing a Jesus manifested in social and communal ethics versus Jesus as personal savior. In The Absent Christ: A Theology of the Empty Tomb (Cascadia, 2020), Justin Heinzekehr describes a God “mediated to the world in and through material relations.” Reviewing in Brethren in Christ History and Life (Aug. 2021), pastor Zachary Speidel says that for Heinzekehr, Christ’s absence makes space for the sacred “to be inseparably bound up in ethical relationships with . . .  others.” But Seidel underscores Jesus’ presence: “When I speak of ‘Jesus,’ I speak of my Savior, my Lord, my Friend, and my Shepherd.”

* * *

When I was pastor into 2008 at Spring Mount Mennonite Church, we faced such larger dynamics but also complexities in our immediate setting. To remain viable, given the congregation’s dwindling to 35-some participants, we needed to welcome persons from diverse backgrounds. Pointing in microcosm to increasing diversity of Anabaptist-Mennonitism, often growing most quickly in cultures and settings beyond North America or within the U.S. beyond earlier ethnic and racial enclaves, eventually about half the congregation came from diverse settings. These ranged from Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations to “Nones” sometimes having no prior faith commitments.

What beliefs might we hold in common? After 11 years of wrestling with this, I preached in my final months sermons summarizing five values Anabaptist-Mennonites often emphasize while still embracing many affirmations of other Christian traditions. (These values overlap with the fine summary of seven convictions provided by the Mennonite World Council but were intended to be even simpler):

The first involves “No other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11).  That introduces value 1: The starting point for Anabaptist-Mennonite understandings of God, the church, and all life is the New Testament and the Jesus Christ revealed in it. If we find understandings in Scripture, church, world, or our lives that conflict with New Testament teachings about Jesus’ Way, we give Jesus priority.

This is why the Sermon on the Mount is key to daily living. Jesus repeats, again and again, “You have heard that it was said. . . . But I say to you. . . .” Here Jesus reshapes the lives of followers—including Anabaptists—by teaching radical understandings of how God works and what God expects of us.

Value 2: God’s kingdom or realm comes first. This Anabaptist-Mennonite teaching has 1500s roots. Back then church and state often intertwined in what is sometimes called Christendom. Being baptized as a baby into your state church made you Christian. As radicals reforming the Reformers, the Anabaptists concluded Jesus taught that infant baptism doesn’t make you Christian. Rather, to be Christian is to make an adult decision to follow Jesus.

When you decide to follow, you become a citizen of God’s nation. You put God’s realm first. If your earthly nation, society, community, or even church asks you to violate the teachings of Christ and ways of God, you obey God .

Value 3: An Anabaptist-Mennonite church is a believers church. A believers church is made up not of people born into it but who have consciously decided to follow Jesus.

That decision is momentous. Only those who grasp the meaning and cost of following Jesus should be baptized, Anabaptists claimed. This was how Anabaptists, meaning “rebaptizers” as their enemies named them, came to see adult baptism as important enough to die for when Christendom entities ordered them to stop

Though as evident above this can catalyze division, the dream is that you and your co-believers will form alternative accountability structures helping you discern Jesus’ Way and find wisdom and courage to live it.

Value 4: Anabaptist-Mennonites are committed to love and nonviolence. We believe this because Jesus taught and modeled it, even dying on the cross and forgiving those who put him there. This means together cultivating a personal lifestyle of loving enemies and forgiving those who hurt or offend us. This has generated Mennonite contributions to conflict transformation. It means we can’t in good conscience follow Jesus and kill other people. So in theory (not always in practice) we don’t participate in war even if the alternative is prison, as Mennonites faced in World War I, or conscientious objection, as I registered for during the Vietnam War.

Value 5: Anabaptist-Mennonites embrace wholistic mission. We share Christ’s love with souls and bodies. The saving news of the gospel must be shared. And Jesus wants the bodies of God’s children, of those blind, captive, oppressed as he put it in Luke 4 and the “least of these” as he named them in Matthew 25, to be cherished. This means caring when injustice, racism, poverty, hunger, nakedness befall any of God’s children or creation itself and has led to such service organizations as Mennonite Disaster Service and Mennonite Central Committee.

These five values are neither exhaustive nor speak for all Anabaptist-Mennonites. Many treasures and shadows, or ways Anabaptism might correct other traditions or be corrected, await other venues (and are touched on in responses to Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Lutheranism). Yet I hope I’ve hinted at our complex, sometimes tormented, sometimes spine-tingling history and beliefs.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, discernment amid differences, God, grace, loving viewpoint enemies, Teachings of Jesus

Can Mennonites and Lutherans Experience Grace, Faithfulness, and Even Fun Together?

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Can Mennonites and Lutherans, once bitter enemies, have fun together? Though the journey is challenging, that’s a question Mark Ellingsen’s take on Lutheranism in “Lutheranism: An Evangelical Catholic Way to Follow Jesus” stirs for me.

Noting that, as was true for Anabaptists, the label Lutheran was originally applied by critics, Ellingsen wants to highlight such names as “evangelical” and “catholic.” He explains that Lutheranism incorporates many strands, including Pietistic, Confessional, or the “Neo-Confessional” he names Evangelical Catholicism. He also stresses that most Lutherans can at least agree “that the Christian life must be rooted in God’s grace.”

Where does my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition fit into this? I resonate with John J. Friesen’s take that we owe much to Lutheranism—which helped create space for the Anabaptist rejection of Roman Catholic indulgences, commitment to the Bible (sola scriptura) above tradition, belief that Scripture should be accessible to the common person rather than only privileged priests, and the ensuing affirmation of the priesthood of all believers.

As Ellingsen notes, “Lutherans . . . join with most Protestants in embracing the idea that all who are baptized, all who follow Jesus, are priests. Christians who follow Jesus are priests, for they have been dedicated to living lives in which they perform the sacrifice of dying to their sin and rising to serve Christ and the neighbor (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, p.53; Ibid., Vol.36, p.145; Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXIV.26).”

On the other hand, casting a shadow Ellingsen doesn’t address, Luther became a vitriolic opponent of Anabaptists. How did this come to be?

Through establishing Lutheranism as a state church. As Friesen summarizes, “When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible.” Anabaptists rejected models in which church and state together policed the boundaries of acceptable Christianity.

In contrast, Anabaptists, purveyors of the Radical Reformation, believed that the commandments of Scripture and particularly the teachings of Jesus trumped the state if church came into conflict with state. Surely, thought Anabaptists, there was conflict  if the church demanded, contra Jesus, killing enemies, swearing oaths, infant baptism not optional but coerced, upholding civil order and established norms if they blocked following Jesus. Surely there was almost unbearable conflict when not only did the state go against Jesus’ teachings but the very Martin Luther who celebrated grace countenanced the possibility that the state should execute Anabaptists for sedition and blasphemy.

Although they based it more on New Testament practices than a formal take on the priesthood of believers, Anabaptists, and their Mennonite branch, were also often more radical in blurring the line between laity and clergy. I experienced this as a seminary graduate trained in an American Baptist seminary (where Lutherans were classmates) whose professors advocated a moderate setting-apart of ordained ministers within a larger commitment to the priesthood of all. My first pastorate was at Germantown Mennonite Church, oldest Mennonite congregation in North America, established in Philadelphia in 1683 by Mennonites and Quakers. By 1980s a faithful remnant of some 25 congregants was expressing commitment to the priesthood of all through a leadership team that included ordained but unpaid ministers plus several congregants. As a paid minister, I would stretch the pattern.

My first Sundays careful attention was paid to where I stood when preaching. At the front of the historic building was a raised platform and pulpit many congregants’ saw as too prominent, evidence prior generations had strayed from true radicality. With heart pounding I went to the pulpit instead of the humble portable lectern. Whoever was right or wrong, the resulting controversy had roots reaching down to the early days of Anabaptism, not to mention Lutheranism.

But as with all human traditions, Mennonites are complicated. The same understandings that could be understood as discouraging trained professional priests/pastors exercising authority over Christians also generated structures that sometimes straitjacketed individual freedom of conscience. There were reasons for this; as Astrid von Schlacta observes, “Yes, sola scriptura implies that the meaning of Scripture does not depend on interpretation by a priest. Yet Anabaptists believed that collective interpretation of the Bible by the community of believers was indispensable.” True enough. But then in the name of the community others in the community, often themselves paradoxically following the authority of the leaders they trusted, might ban those they considered out of bounds.

This has led to circumstances in which Mennonites seeking to be “without spot or blemish” have generated communities that have policed boundaries of the quest, excommunicated congregants perceived to be non-repentant sinners, and risked crushing grace under law. In her memoir The Merging (DreamSeeker Books, 2000), my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw tells how her parents helping establish an early 1900s Sunday school. In that Mennonite context, this was perceived as violating church norms. Mumaw describes the day the bishop came to put her family out, an event which cast lifelong shadows over the family, including her younger brother who was my father:

Attendees were warned to discontinue their involvement. Those who continued attending there were finally excommunicated. Limerick Sunday school was closed. All persons who were put out of church were to confess that they had sinned in order to be  reinstated. Some would only confess they had disobeyed a conference decree. I still remember that chilly morning when the little Bishop with the cold sharp eyes came driving up our lane in his boxlike Model-T Ford. I think it was the time he had come to tell my parents that the people who kept on attending Limerick after they were told to stop were going to be put out of the church. And that included my parents. The people who went through this experience were deeply hurt.

This takes me back to Ellingsen and the gospel of grace. One could underscore the shadows of Lutheranism. One could claim, as I’ve heard Mennonites do and sometimes done myself, that Lutheranism purveys a cheap grace. One could suggest, and I see some value in this, that those who wrap their commitments around faithfully following Jesus, often rooted in the Gospels, may experience formation complementary to that of those who particularly celebrate sola fide and sola gratia, frequently rooted in Pauline epistles.

But after 500 years, Lutherans have asked forgiveness for persecuting Anabaptists. Ellingsen underscores that there is an ethical component to Luther, who believes “you only sin bravely when you do not give into concupiscence, when you boldly live a sacrificial, sin-denying life (live your baptism), but do so with the awareness that even then you are still sinning, that all good done is a function of God working in and through you (Complete Sermons, Vol.4, p.367).” And Ellingsen paints moving word pictures of the gifts of grace:

When you live in a family, with a lover whose love works on you, the loved one does not have to tell you what to do to please him/her.  You just sort of know.  True human love is spontaneous.  Imagine then what God’s love can do to you.  In fact, when you are in love (fall in love – note the passivity) it is like an ecstatic experience.  You lose yourself.  Should we not expect it to be that way in the arms of Jesus?  This is another reason why Lutherans claim that there is no need to teach Christians how to follow Jesus.  It will just happen spontaneously when you are living with Jesus. 

Here I still want the Mennonite formation that says human commitments are never fully whole so that, like couples who may not always feel love but want to receive and offer it nevertheless, we need teachings and a community that create disciplines of right living—whether or not these spontaneously emerge. On the other hand, how those Limerick Mennonites yearned for a more ecstatic church than the one offered by the cold-eyed bishop. How importantly Lutheranism, drawing on the Pietistic strand Ellingsen embraces, reminds us that with

awareness that everything we do is a sin, it follows that the best Christians can be is simul iustus et peccator (100% saint and 100% sinner) (Romans 7:14-18; Luther’s Works, Vol.32, p.111; Ibid., Vol.27, p.230).    This is a freeing insight, as it entails the awareness that we are loved by God, even despite all our sin and selfishness.

And how helpfully we can collaborate on the Way. As von Schlacta sees it,

The Anabaptists were part of the Reformation and shared basic convictions with Lutherans and Reformed. Yes, sola gratia means we do not attain salvation through works. But living the faith was important for all. The Anabaptists called this discipleship. For Luther it was “new obedience.”

Perhaps together, then, amid grace and forgiveness for the sins evident in both (and all) traditions, we can say a celebratory yes when Ellingsen asks, “Can the rest of the catholic tradition also embrace the freedom, spontaneity, and fun which Lutherans often associate with following Jesus?”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Lutheranism was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, depression, discernment amid differences

Is the Actual Body of Christ the Wafer? Blood? Community?

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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In her “Respectful Conversations” post on Roman Catholicism, Christina Wassell (interestingly enough an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism) foregrounds the Traditional Latin Mass as the hub around which her commitments revolve.

Wasell also underscores the centrality of the Mass when pressed (in the reply section) on having less to say about Catholic social ethics. Concluding a commentary on ethics that values primarily “boots on the ground” service, she stresses that we must meet “our Lord. . . . in the Eucharist first, and our service must overflow from that fount of life if it is to do any good.” (She also responds more fully to conversation partners here.)

This provides a focus for my Anabaptist-Mennonite commentary on Wassell’s post. Because differences between understandings of “the Mass” versus “Communion” or “the Lord’s Supper” go back to the beginning of our 1500s separation.

Catholics, Anabaptists believed, wrongly affirmed transubstantiation, the actual transformation of bread and cup into Christ’s body and blood, as a kind of divine magic.

Anabaptists, and that sub-stream of them called Mennonites, affirmed communion as an ordinance, a practice taught by Christ to become for his followers a sign of remembering him and being empowered to live in unity as Christ’s body.

The Schleitheim Confession (1527), a very early Anabaptist statement of key understandings separating Anabaptist from other Reform and Catholic precepts, makes no mention of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper (described as “concerning the breaking of the bread”). The focus is on remembrance of Christ and on unity in faithfulness as defined by Anabaptists. Only faithfulness, grounded in the Apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 10 teachings, makes one worthy of sharing the bread.

Certainly the Lord matters here. But the key worry is whether those who share the bread are in true community:

So it shall and must be, that whoever does not share the calling of the one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body together with all the children of God, may not be made one loaf together with them, as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ.

The next century, in a classic Anabaptist effort to follow the literal teachings of Jesus, the Dordrecht Confession, a key 1600s Mennonite confession, echoed this. Dordrecht stressed that we are to remember because remembrance is precisely what Jesus taught in instituting communion at that first Lord’s supper.

Then Dordrecht reminds us that if Christ loved us to the point of purchasing through suffering and death our salvation, we in turn are

admonished to the utmost, to love and forgive one another and our neighbor, as He has done unto us, and to be mindful to maintain and live up to the unity and fellowship which we have with God and one another, which is signified to us by this breaking of bread.

From birth on, my Anabaptist-Mennonite family and communities formed me broadly within such views, which remain evident in current confessions of faith.  Communion was then often a source of fear and trembling. If one is to be worthy of communion, one must be in right relationship with one’s Christian brothers and sisters. Otherwise disaster may ensue. Along with many Mennonites, I found worrying indeed Paul’s admonition that

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then. . . . For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died (1 Cor. 11:27-30 NRSV).

Communion can make you weak. Ill. Dead. When I was eighteen I learned at last how one of my father’s most precious loved ones had died. He had been hospitalized in the 1950s for depression even as many Mennonites saw depression as entailing spiritual failure. This peace-committed Mennonite farmer then said he felt better, checked himself out, took a shotgun to one of his fields, and shot himself. A family take was that he had a very sensitive conscience.

The Mennonite emphasis on communion as something one had to be worthy of likely brought failure to the fore for him. How would he be good enough to partake? What of the anger at this son? What of that forbidden desire? Failure everywhere, lurking in secret or not even consciously accessible feelings and thoughts.

When I read Wassell against that backdrop, I experience  grace. I see why a significant number of Mennonites have sought to broaden the Mennonite understanding of communion, to treat it as means of grace in addition to remembrance of a sacrifice we must in turn earn the right to recall through right relations with each other.

I see why communion is becoming more common for many Mennonites. Once often reserved in Mennonite churches for rare services involving soul-and-conscience-searching and sometimes reaching out to sisters or brothers in Christ one feared one had sinned against, communion is now practiced in some churches more often, sometimes even weekly. I participated in the decision one congregation I pastored made to shift from communion twice a year to . . . every quarter!

Wassell helps explain such shifts as she speaks to intertwining experiences of personal and spiritual failure such as broke my loved one:

Desperately aware of our need for grace, we pray at each Mass (as the Centurion did), “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” We only receive our Lord kneeling in humility, and on the tongue. Only the consecrated hands of the priest feed Him to us, taking such reverent care not to drop a single crumb, as each crumb is the whole of the body, blood, soul and divinity of the Lord.

On the other hand. Wassell reports seeking the “Transubstantiated Body of Christ.” Her reverent treatment of “each crumb” as “the whole of the body, blood, soul and divinity of the Lord” fleshes out that view. As does this:

All faithful Catholics assert that what happens at Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary. The priest is there in persona Christi, or as a stand-in for the one true priest, Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man. He offers the bread and the wine, each in turn, to show the separation of body from blood on the cross which resulted in Christ’s death. When the priest says the words Christ spoke at the Last Supper, that bread and wine becomes Christ as perfect victim, offered for your sins and for mine in the mystery of the Eucharist.

I don’t want to take harsh issue with this. Wassell helps me grasp, as a good witness does, the appeal of such faith. I also see why such an understanding takes her to the traditional Latin Mass. I see why she’s disappointed in informal Mass and worship practices that foreground priest as person. I even see why she yearns for the priest’s facing backward in the traditional Mass to spotlight Mystery rather than humanness.

Yet here I also realize how deeply formed by Anabaptist-Mennonite commitments to plain meanings of Scripture and to community I am. I struggle to find Catholic understandings plainly articulated in Scripture, which does seem to me to undergird Schleitheim and Dordrecht emphases.

Meanwhile the austere, impersonal sermons and leadership I often experienced among the must-be-worthy-of-Jesus leaders of my youth (always men) left me cold. The more removed from the quotidian and the personal and even the informal faith practices were, the more I found them meaningless.

It was in the embodiment of the holy in the frail, the flawed, even the sinful, the “this-is-who-I-really-am” testimonies of leaders and community members, that I finally felt faith was possible.

I want my tradition to express significant aspects of the treasures Wassell loves. I want more grace in my community of faith. I also want to experience the presence of the Lord along the lines described in a 2003 report on Catholics and Mennonites in dialogue. Amid celebrating much in both traditions, the document affirms for Mennonites the “body and blood of Christ and recognizes again that its life is sustained by Christ, the bread of life.” It adds that

The key lies not in the elements as such, but in the context as a whole, including the communion of the gathered congregation, the prayerful aspiration of each individual, and the spiritual presence that is suggested and re-presented with the aid of appropriate symbols and liturgy.

I want to honor the body and blood of Christ as Wassell helps me to do. I also want to experience the Lord’s Supper as much in the troubled, tormented, yet often lovely relationships and practices of my people, my part of the Body of Christ in which I seek the holy even as grace empowers me to seek the body’s healing when I have helped to break it.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Roman Catholicism was first published.