I first met Katie Funk Wiebe in 1975, when I moved to Hillsboro, Kansas, to work with The Christian Leader, the bi-weekly magazine of the U.S. Mennonite Brethren Church. By then she was already in brisk stride as a writer, well on her way to becoming a literary powerhouse. It was my great joy to “inherit” her as a regular columnist who could deftly wrap words around thoughts that readers struggled with but perhaps could not (or dared not) articulate themselves.

I felt kinship with Katie on many fronts, including our limited appetite for churchly pomp and pretense. We both treasured the Anabaptist heritage of our Mennonite Brethren world and were saddened by those who would squander this capital (either by neglect or design).

It was a time when full service in the church could be relegated according to biological plumbing, which meant many women’s gifts were locked away, suspended in amber. Katie provided tonal clarity to those straining to make music in a choir dominated by tenors and basses.

But the women’s issue is not the only defining category of her monumental contribution to the Anabaptist world, as this memoir so vividly shows. This “life review,” as she calls it, is a wine of late harvest, a story “told right” which many readers can embrace as their own. It is, in a sense, a social history of the Mennonite movement of the second half of the last century, as refracted through her Mennonite Brethren lens. Her opening depiction of earnest but stifling Bible college life, for example, is not simply personal reflection but a candid analysis of Mennonite piety, a textured rendering of a generation in flux.

With skill and soul she reaches out to anyone who has felt their gifts smothered in the church, anyone who cares about Anabaptists in the wider world, anyone who has been ready to toss in the towel over the dawdling pace of ecclesiastical change.

And, one might add, anyone who is growing older. “I write about aging as an insider,” Katie notes in the final section. For those who fear becoming old, this section alone is worth the price of the book.

Thanks to Katie’s efforts, my young grandchildren have access to a more spacious and ventilated church, with generous rooms and windows that open wide. I plan to set aside copies of this book for them, so they have a better grasp of how it all happened. —Wally Kroeker, Editor, The Marketplace