“What is Mennonite spirituality?” The Irish Jesuit who talked to Dawn Ruth Nelson in 1983 has not been the only one to ask this question. Others also have wondered: since the Mennonites lack frequent Eucharistic worship and have no explicit tradition of spiritual writing, what forms them to be Christians of peace and justice, simplicity, and community? Or, more disturbingly, what forms Mennonites to be Christians who feel they ought to embody these virtues but know that they don’t—and who feel the disparity between profession and reality with what Dawn Ruth Nelson calls “desperation”? What resources can enable contemporary Mennonites in postmodern, post-Christendom Western cultures to live the Christian life as Mennonite theology tells them they ought to live it? In this book, Dawn Ruth Nelson explores these questions with perceptiveness, vulnerability, humor and, above all, hope.

Of this book’s special contributions, I will point to three. One is the author’s resolute realism. Dawn (I use her first name because I know her well) is a product of late twentieth-century Mennonite idealism. In the late 1970s I was among the Mennonites in England who perceived that the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, in which Protestants and Catholics were engaged in a brutalizing civil war, was a blight on the beautiful “emerald isle” and also a hard-to-refute argument against the Christian gospel. When we issued a call to North American Mennonites to come to Ireland to live the gospel of reconciliation as a peace church, Dawn and her husband Paul were among those who responded. They did so at great personal cost. They worked tirelessly in the peace movement; they learned to survive in one of the roughest areas of Dublin; they lived in intentional community in an overcrowded house; and they had the highest expectations for their own contribution. It was a recipe for burnout, which is what led Dawn to talk to the Irish Jesuit. And to make retreats at abbeys. And to build the significant friendship which she and the other Dublin Mennonites enjoyed with the Cistercian monk Eoin de Bhaldraithe.

Dawn came to see that she could not live the Mennonite vision of discipleship with the spiritual resources she had brought to Ireland, and she found some Catholics who ministered to her “desperate need for a more meaningful prayer life, a deeper spirituality, a closer connection to God.” Dawn had discovered what sensitive missionaries always learn—that there is something in the people to whom they are sent that is a source of healing for them. 

She also discovered that the Mennonite tradition was contributing significant things to Brother Eoin and other Irish people, both Catholic and Protestant. Mission, Dawn notes in this book, involves an exchange of gifts. And the gift that Dawn received was infinitely precious—an impetus to learn to pray, to pursue her relationship with Jesus so she could follow Jesus more faithfully. This led Dawn, upon her return from Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1991, to study spirituality and Christian formation.

The book’s second special contribution, its analysis of narratives, is a result of her studies. Dawn sensed that the Mennonites of earlier generations had known how to pray; at least her grandmother had. So Dawn arranged to talk extensively with Susan Alderfer Ruth (1909-2005) to get her story. How did Susan pray? How did she learn to be a Christian? What did she think was important? 

The chapter that records these conversations is a treasure; and it may well inspire other Mennonites to talk to their parents and grandparents about their spiritual practices. Dawn knew that her grandmother Susan was a remarkable, loving, serving Christian who embodied the best in Anabaptist values. Conservative in garb, Susan was ever experimental in finding ways to learn about the world, to make peace and to serve the weak. Yet Dawn discovered that what enabled her grandmother to live in this inviting way was an embodied but inarticulate spiritual formation rooted in community and place that, in an age of mobility and the Internet, seemed irretrievable. Dawn’s comparison of her own narrative, as a cosmopolitan, urban Mennonite, with her grandmother’s convinced her that there was no way she could live the Anabaptist values that she so admired in her grandmother unless she became thoughtfully articulate about spirituality and was open to being “chastened and enriched” by other, non-Anabaptist traditions. Dawn could bring her narrative into continuity with her grandmother’s, but only if other Christians came to her aid.

This leads to Dawn’s third special contribution: her willingness to propose new approaches that are spiritually perceptive and pastorally constructive. One proposal is that we ponder the story of a group of Mennonites in Portland, Oregon, and then at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary who were learning to take spiritual formation seriously. Prophetic figures like Marcus Smucker and Marlene Kropf helped individual Mennonites—and an entire seminary—to pray. It has not been easy; Dawn notes the ongoing struggle of Mennonites to take spirituality as seriously as they take ethics. 

Dawn’s second proposal, based on her own experience and study, is that Mennonites today develop what she calls “a Mennonite spirituality for the twenty-first century.” The six elements of this spirituality are rooted in the Christian gospel and the deep Mennonite tradition, realistic about the contemporary Western culture’s impediments to the spiritual life, and practical. Informed by the wider Christian tradition, these elements would all be familiar to Susan Alderfer Ruth. “God in the ordinary,” nonconformity, community, service, Gelassenheit, the centrality of Jesus—all are classically Anabaptist. It is not accidental that the sixth of Dawn’s proposals has to do with Jesus Christ: “to be conformed to Christ, to be formed by Christ, we need to spend very significant time with his words and in his presence, corporately and privately.” It sounds like Hans Denck! Dawn’s writing helps her readers make this vision their own and live it.
Dawn Ruth Nelson’s A Mennonite Woman is personal, profound, and practical. Christians who long for the spiritual resources to live the Anabaptist Vision in today’s multilayered world will find it immensely useful. And, if it inspires its readers to listen to the spiritual journeys of their grandparents as well as to the wisdom of other traditions, it could lead Christians to find “a Mennonite spirituality” that is a gift to the entire Christian church.

—Alan Kreider, Elkhart, Indiana, teaches Church History and Mission at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart. For twenty-six years a missionary with Mennonite Mission Network in the United Kingdom, he is author, with Eleanor Kreider, of Worship and Mission After Christendom (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster Press, 2009).