Why is it that we start out life with the prospect of living a thousand different lives, but we end up living only one? mused Clifford Geertz, the famous cultural anthropologist. Indeed, why is it that we have lived this particular life, the one peculiar to our own development and identity? In some mysterious way, Christians would say, Providence has something to do with the shape and direction of our lives. But still it is worth pondering how different our lives might have been if, at any juncture along the way, they would have taken a different turn. Geertz’s conundrum came to mind while I was pondering the life and work of John Ruth—and his significant influence on me . How different would my life have been had I not attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, after four years of schooling in Mennonite colleges? How different would my life have been had I not then become involved in Franconia Mennonite Conference, and there met this plain-coated, worldly wise man named John L. Ruth, educated at, of all places, Harvard University? My original intention was to spend a year at Eastern, then transfer back to Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries (now Seminary). But life sometimes intrudes in our plans, and for a variety of reasons I stayed all three years at Eastern. And while there, my wife Suzanne and I participated in the life of several Franconia congregations—and eventually I was employed by Franconia Conference as a staff person. Franconia Conference became my "AMBS"; it was there that my Anabaptist identity was formed, my theology of church matured, and my earliest thoughts about ministry and leadership developed. It was in this conference that I discovered a different way of being Mennonite. Different, certainly, from my Mennonite upbringing in Lancaster County where I was more influenced by fundamentalism and evangelicalism than, certainly, Anabaptism. It was different still from the Mennonitism of the Midwest where I went to college. Franconia, more than either of these other locales, seemed to me then to have kept the vision vitally alive of a nonconformed Christianity, committed to virtues of peacemaking and community accountability. Certainly there were pressures then in Franconia to assimilate into a generic, American evangelicalism. And the wealth of many of these Mennonites in southeastern Pennsylvania can entice conformity with the American mainstream. No doubt those pressures to acculturate have only increased in the years since I moved away. But it was in no small measure due to the influence of key Franconia leaders that this vision was kept alive before and for the people of Franconia. Among such leaders have been Bishop John E. Lapp, Richard C. Detweiler (both a bishop and moderator of the conference and later president of Eastern Mennonite College—now University—and Seminary)—and John L. Ruth, preacher, college professor of literature, peoples’ historian, and storyteller. I had known of John Ruth before, since my uncle Bob Byler was a classmate of John’s at Lancaster Mennonite High School in the 1940s. But I came to know John personally when in the late 1960s Suzanne and I attended the small, family oriented King of Prussia Mennonite Fellowship, which met in John and Roma Ruth’s home. Sunday mornings were always an adventure there, not least John’s sermons. I had never heard preaching quite like John’s. If all the world was John Wesley’s parish, all the world was fair game also for John’s preaching. He could range from literary illusions to comments about current events to stories from the history of Franconia Conference to . . . well, yes, sometimes imaginative expositions of Scripture. It wasn’t clear to me that John put much preparation into his sermons. Rather, they seemed to spring forth from what was on his mind and heart at the time, fed by his rich memory and fertilized by his keen imagination. But what an imagination! John also knew a thing or two about hymnody, having written his dissertation on American hymns, and he cared about how hymns were sung. That, too, caught my attention, since I had been a music major in college. My favorite John Ruth story from that era, strangely, doesn’t involve John directly. Some months after we started attending King of Prussia, John had a sabbatical year, which he, along with his family, took in Europe, to research Anabaptist origins. While the Ruths were out of the country, the J. Lester Graybill family from Orrville, Ohio lived in their house and Lester studied at Eastern Baptist Seminary. But the house church fellowship continued to use the Ruth residence for Sunday worship. One Sunday when we arrived for church, the Graybill family informed us that one part of the roof was leaking. A storm was forecast for the next day, and the Graybills were concerned that significant damage could result if nothing was done. As a fellowship group, we conferred. And it seemed to us that we had a classical case of a neighbor’s ox in a ditch, which justified work on the "Sabbath." But it wasn’t our neighbor in distress—it was our pastor and his family, thousands of miles away, blissfully ignorant of this situation. And it wasn’t an ox in a ditch, but a leaky roof on a house. So we disbanded worship, ripped off the deteriorating shingles, and began to reshingle the roof—a task that several of us had completed the next day before the storm arrived. How different would my life have been had I not had mentors like Richard Detweiler and John Ruth? And how different it would have been for them had they not been shaped by this "strange" group of Franconia Mennonites who still believed that conference mattered, that in that context congregations held each other accountable? This particular constellation of congregations was "in it together," and no congregation should veer too far to the right or the left or change patterns of belief and behavior without conferring together in the body of believers. How different this was from the American congregationalism and individualism that was eroding much of the rest of the Mennonite church. In a way that I’m not sure John realized at the time, John became a spiritual and theological mentor, showing me that Mennonites offer a "Third Way" which is neither liberal nor conservative but biblical and communal, committed to Jesus’ way of discipleship and peacemaking in the world. He also played a critical role in my decision to leave Franconia Conference. When Mennonite Publishing House gave me an invitation to join their editorial staff, I went to John for advice. I had been editing the Franconia Conference News, and John served as a consulting editor and proofreader. He knew what potential I had for editorial work, or lack thereof. When I consulted John, he encouraged me to take on this new challenge. Because of John’s formative influence in my life, albeit during a brief but critical time, I was pleased to have been part of the small group of Franconia leaders who first met with John to talking about freeing him from his professorial responsibilities at Eastern Baptist College (now Eastern University) to work fulltime at his story gathering, writing, and film making (on this, see John Sharp’s Introduction). And because I owe John much personally, I was also delighted to be asked to write this foreword. A festschrift is typically a collection of writings by colleagues and former students in honor of a scholar and published upon retirement or some other highwater mark in his or her academic career. This book doesn’t quite fit the usual pattern. John appears well and has no intention of retiring anytime soon. And although he has been a teacher all his life, in the best sense of that word, he has not been involved in the academic world since the mid-1970s. Further, the contributors to this volume, for the most part, aren’t former scholarly peers or students of John’s. Yet in some way they have all been shaped by John and have seen him as either a colleague or a mentor or both. How different also would the lives of these contributors have been if they had not learned to know John and be influenced by him? To pay him tribute, and to keep the conversation going with John and others, the contributors to this volume offer essays on themes which were and are near to John’s heart, such as communal identity and belonging and telling our stories. Identity and memory are integrally related, John has taught us. If you know who you are and are possessed by what you have to say, you’ll find a way to say it. Too often, though, we’re not aware of what influences us, both the good and the bad. It is to our great diminishment as a people and individuals to not know our own stories, to fail to see what it is that our own people have to offer, to not appreciate our own heritage. The more intensely you are who you are, he believes, the more others will appreciate it. The great issues of our time have to do with identity and coherence and how you order "your family," about which Mennonites should have something to say. John hasn’t wanted to waste time arguing for the right to engage in the arts in a tradition skeptical about them; life is too short for that, he has said. Just do it, is his advice to other Mennonite artists. Too many of the "persecuted cries" of young artists who feel rejected by their Mennonite people are just a cover-up for poor art. He also doesn’t believe we should just put a positive spin on our own or our people’s story: That is only propaganda, a model defied by the example of Scripture, disclosing as it so often does the good and the bad about God’s people. Creativity, for John, lies in the ability to accept your peoples’ scruples and make your point anyhow. John’s gifts with language and storytelling, using a variety of media, are well known. His greater gift, it seems to me, is his keen perception. He has been able to see what other people have not been able to glimpse: in nature, in community life, in the people around him, in history, in literature. A mundane example: Having attended Lancaster Mennonite High School, John once said he was always impressed with the large hands of Lancaster Mennonite farmers. And he held up his palms as if to imagine his hands might be like that. But his point wasn’t about anatomy. With this image he was saying that Lancaster Mennonites’ great strength is their practicality, their activism, their dedication to hard work—they get things done, even if they’re not always reflective about their activity. John will point something out to the rest of us that we didn’t see on our own, and having had a John Ruth-induced epiphany, we’ll nod in recognition: "Of course, it was there all the time. Why didn’t I see that?" Well, perhaps we weren’t looking, or perhaps we weren’t attentive enough. More likely, we lack the depth perception John has, and we couldn’t see it even if we were looking straight at what John is seeing. John’s other great gift is his passion for life and for his convictions and calling. One Saturday he came to a ministers’ breakfast meeting in Souderton all excited because he had just gotten a new video camera he had wanted for quite some time. He told us of plans to use it to capture on film the stories of a ninety-something man in the conference who had a razor-sharp memory of his childhood and younger years. But another minister at that breakfast meeting had to break the bad news to John: This old man had just died. And John put his head down on the table and wept for what never was going to happen, for what was lost forever, except in his memory. I heard recently about a youth group asked by their adult leader to share their perceptions of the adults they know. After some reflection and discussion, the youth concluded that adults don’t have many friends, are bored with life, and lack passion! How telling of so many adults! But none of this is true for John. This volume suggests he has many friends. He certainly isn’t bored with life. And his passion for life and faith and telling the stories of his peoples’ faithfulness and unfaithfulness has, indeed, been an inspiration to us all. How different would our lives have been had this man who grew up along the Branch Creek not accepted the call to be a "preacher" and a storyteller and a peoples’ historian? How different would we all be if John had not impressed upon us the need to know and tell our own story? Thank you, John, for responding to the call, and for your encouragement to us to hear God’s personal call upon our lives, too. —Richard A. Kauffman The Measure of My Days orders:
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