The Menno Melange

Every Christmas I have a few books in mind that I would like to receive as gifts. I am so fond of books as a gift idea, that I often talk to other people about what they are reading, moreso around Christmas, so I can get a good idea of what to ask for. What follows is a list of books that I’ve read recently, or have on my shelf and use often as a resource. For your convenience, I’ve linked them to amazon.ca where you can order them for yourself (and I get a small commission, but that’s not why I’m doing this).

Both of the above books were promoted during the pastor’s gathering at the Mennonite Church Conference gathering in Edmonton, AB, which we attended this summer. Arnold Snyder was the keynote speaker there and the author of these books. Fellow blogger Tim Chesterton took close notes of the talk.

If you’ve read a great book along these lines recently, let me know. Also, if you’ve read one of these books lately and disagree with my assessment, let me know that too.

At the minister’s conference in Edmonton, I did something that I’m rarely bold enough to do. I went up to the microphone and asked a question. After hearing about the spiritual path of the early Anabaptists, I asked what we can learn from them about ecumenism.

It set up an easy answer that I could have given myself, that we need not copy everything they did, and certainly our contemporary ecumenical efforts are a way that we’ve improved upon the Anabaptist legacy. I should have phrased the question better, but even then I don’t know if the answer would have been any different.

We had been asked to think how we could apply 16th century Anabaptist spirituality to our 21st century churches. In other words, we were being encouraged to sell our congregations on the Anabaptist legacy. However, part of that legacy is a certain narrow-minded outlook that all of us try to avoid, even if that means we replace it with another kind of narrow-minded outlook. My question was intended to be along these lines. How can we sell our congregants on that spiritual mindset when part of it runs fundamentally counter to the core of our pluralistic society?

Now that I’ve rephrased the question, I’ll try to venture an answer. One might think that the call of Christ (and the Anabaptists) was to be counter-cultural, and so we should oppose the pluralistic element of our society. However, at the time, the Anabaptists weren’t more or less closed-minded than anyone else. It was the Reformation, everybody was calling everybody else the anti-Christ. If you can trace your roots back to a religious group in the Reformation that didn’t get labelled as the anti-Christ, it’s because no one took them seriously. The only obvious difference with the Anabaptists was that they didn’t have state support required to punish “heretics”. (Unless you count Münster, but let’s be serious, those guys were nuts. That’s by far the exception and not the rule.)

The first building point that I see though, is the commitment to peace. Sure, they labelled everyone, Zwingli, Luther, the Pope, the Jews, etc. as antichrists. Sure their ultimate goal was to convert everyone to their side. These are not building blocks for ecumenism. But at least they respected their right to live. There are all sorts of stories of Anabaptists at the gallows evangelising to the executioner as well as to the audience. I’d take evangelism over vengance and seeking retaliation any day.

The second thing is their commitment to authenticity. All the hype around adult baptism was because they viewed infant baptism as insincere by definition. Church membership should be voluntary. All participation in the body of Christ/the church should be voluntary. Micheal Sattler said that if he was forced to fight in the war, he would rather fight alongside the Muslim Turks than join the Christian army, because he would rather help those who didn’t know any better, than join those that thought they were being good Christians simply because they were following orders. In dialogues between churches or between faiths, participation has to be sincere. If anyone involved is simply extending tolerance or open-mindedness because that’s what their supposed to do, it’s doomed to failure. To be true to one’s own belief structure, a little bit of closed-mindedness is necessary. Allowing someone the right to speak, out of tolerance, is simply that, it’s not really listening. Forbearance may be a better word than tolerance.

So the early Anabaptists are not good role models for ecumenical dialogue, but we can still learn something from them. We can however try to embody their peace and sincerity to enrich our work and our discussions with those of other religions and denominational groups.

On Monday evening, we will be boarding a plane to Edmonton. We are excited for more reasons than one. I’ve never been to Alberta before, so I can cross one more province off the list (that leaves only Newfoundland). Also, we are going on behalf of our congregation, who have graciously provided this trip through individual, out-of-budget givings.

There isn’t really room for much else besides attending the conference. I preach the Sunday before, and Ana plays organ the Sunday after, so it worked best for us to spend as little time there as possible. Those times also happened to be the cheapest flights, which helped. Even when I’m spending other people’s money, I can’t stand to over spend, which is also why we opted out of the supper portion of the conference meal plan. There is some time set aside for site-seeing, which we will do, and I’m still trying to convince Ana to accompany me to the Eskimos-Lions CFL game (which we’d pay for ourselves). Otherwise we will be enjoying the hotel pool, meeting other Mennonite Church Canada folk, and trying to use some of the time to work on our musical (a few scenes to go on the rough draft).

So if anyone else will be in the area around the same time, July 3-8, or if you have suggestions on dining or entertaining while we’re there, let us know.

Part of my salary is an allotment for books and periodicals that I’m supposed to use for education and personal enrichment. This past year, I’ve been receiving “The Mennonite”, which is a semi-monthly periodical printed by Mennonite Church USA. While the articles are well written and the content is well-organized, I never really felt all that engaged by it. My last issue came this past week, and I knew just by looking at it that I would read the whole thing cover-to-cover. Most of the issue focused on how Reformation era Anabaptist theology applies to contemporary church practice and thought. On top of that, the articles were accompanied by all sorts of “Martyr’s Mirror” woodcuts and writings from various historical figures.

The first article was entitled “Anabaptists & Mennonites” and written by Walter Klaassen who also wrote Anabaptist: Neither Catholic nor Protestant. I loved that book and I’ve loved his work on Pilgram Marpeck, another under-recognized Reformation era Anabaptist scholar. I have a lot of respect for his work and have been fortunate enough to learn, not from him but from students and proteges of his. I was expecting to be enriched by this article, but I constantly found myself disagreeing with him. He makes a few valid points and others that I didn’t agree with, for historical and for semantic reasons. Of course my level of study and accreditation falls far short of his, but these are my responses.

But I have grown increasingly uneasy, even disturbed, by the now common designation of Mennonites as Anabaptists. We seem to think that in spite of our often uncritical cultural accommodation we can somehow preen ourselves with the bright feathers of a heroic tradition.

This is essentially the basis of his article. For a number of reasons, he is not comfortable with contemporary Mennonites calling themselves by the name of their spiritual (and often geneological) ancestors. The first reason is that the majority of Mennonites now are not re-baptized, and since the prefix `ana’ comes from the Latin meaning “again”, that disqualifies them from using the title.

But names rarely imply their literal meaning, especially in the passing of time. Are Catholics universal as the original definition of that term implies? Do Protestants still protest? In general or especially against the Catholics? Are the Brethren all male relatives of each other? Is the United Church really all that united? Are the Brethren all male siblings of each other?

He goes on to list a number of things which the early Anabaptists were and that we (contemporary Mennonites) are not. They challenged everything in their culture. They separated church and state. They rejected capitalism. They couldn’t justify any killing. They lived as outlaws because of their beliefs. In my studies I have not found that these statements are either universally true about the early Anabaptists, or that they are universally false about contemporary Mennonites.

He accuses us of holding up our own religious group too high, but not holding up the early Anabaptists high enough. It seems to me that he is holding them up a little too high. The early Anabaptists certainly did new and different things despite the dangers that came along with it, but there are still a number of non-heroic things about them. Often, civil unrest caused as much of the religious conversion as any spiritual conviction or revelation. The Anabaptist word was spread with fire and brimstone style end times preaching, which I doubt Klaassen would consider heroic in this day. Soon after the small Anabaptist communities developed, they often fell prey to petty sectarian infighting and leadership turmoil.

Klaassen does list two groups of Mennonites that can legitimately call themselves Anabaptists, those who have actually been rebaptized and those living in countries with repressive governments (ie. Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia, etc.). As much as I respect both of those groups, this would have been an absurd notion to the early Anabaptists. The very reason they hated being called Anabaptists was partly because it was used derisively but mostly because it legitimized their first infant baptism, which they couldn’t do, and they certainly wouldn’t expect us to do it either in a contemporary setting. Also, they wouldn’t have expected us to be poor or persecuted, just that we help those who we know are poor and persecuted in our world.

Those of us who have studied and written about 16th-century Anabaptism have not emphasized sufficiently that our 16th-century forebears were not out to separate from the Catholic church of their day … they were out to reform the one church, not to create another.

I agree that the Anabaptists were not setting out to establish an Anabaptist church would could co-exist peacefully with other mainline churches. I think they would be surprised, if not offended, that we study them as much as we do, and that we even name our schools after them. What they wanted, was not to reform the church but to purify it. In purifying the church, all of the unholy aspects of it need to be removed. They didn’t see themselves starting a new church, but rather they saw themselves as leaving a group of people following an earthly, man-made religion and joining the one true church. In other words, the one true pure church already existed, the problem was that no Catholics or Protestants belonged to it.

I still have a lot of respect for Walter Klaassen and I agree with a lot of the points he made. I agree that we often comfort ourselves too much in our ethnic pride. I agree that many of us are too comfortable with our adaptation within larger society. I agree that we need to continue to work in ecumenical circles, strengthening the one body of Christ. Also I still love the early Anabaptists and will continue to study them. I have no problem admitting that I fall short of their legacy, as have my both my geneological and institutional ancestors, but that, it seems to me, is also part of the Anabaptist legacy.

I volunteer at a local Mennonite Museum where various tourists drop in to watch an educational video and wander through the self-guiding exhibit. I would love to be a guide and explain the exhibits as the guests walk through, but the nature of the place is that I need to stay at the front door, start the video for people and answer questions. I encourage people to come to me with their questions after their walk through and I also welcome people’s questions as they enter off the street. The questions deal almost exclusively with the stereotypical Amish and Old Order Mennonite lifestyle of the local residents who inadvertently draw the tourists in to town in the first place. At my post this past Sunday, I had some interesting conversations which I will try to transcribe here.

The first guy explained that he grew up in Romania. He looked to be in his mid thirties. He wasn’t really all that drawn to Mennonites perse, but he wanted to see people who lived a similar lifestyle to what he saw in Romania in his childhood. He saw the Amish lifestyle as “romantic” because of his own upbringing instead of a glamourized Hollywood portrayal somewhere. He didn’t see it as an honourable way of life or a cutesy lifestyle. The voluntary nature of their way of living was irrelevant because it reminded him of a time when he lived that way as a result of poverty, not as an act of conscience.
When he asked why there weren’t out and about, I told him that they would all be home resting or visiting with other people since it was the Sabbath. He corrected me saying that the Sabbath was the day before. I wasn’t going to get into it over that, and he knew what I meant, so I let it go.

The next couple was of Japanese origin. First the husband showed me a brochure of the town and asked me how to pronounce the name in English. After I said it carefully, he began repeating it until he felt he had adequately got it. Then his wife explained to me the appearance of a couple she had seen earlier on the sidewalk. She asked me which religion they were. I explained that they were likely from a conservative group of Mennonites. Upon hearing that her husband asked me to explain to him their way of life. As I outlined to him a few details, he nodded his head as though he already knew what I was going to say, but still astonished that I was saying it. Afterwards he said that other people had told him about Mennonites before, but he didn’t believe it.

The final couple of note was a Welsch couple who had since moved to Canada. They noted to me how silly it seemed to them as Europeans that this 200 year old town with its Victorian era-esque shops, was a historical destination for tourists. They went to explain that life in the “New World” made them appreciate the historial value of European town when they go back to visit. They also learned to appreciate more sentimental moments like watching a sunset or spending time with family and friends. They were drawn to observe the Mennonite way of life because of those values. They also went to discuss the declining morality in the Western World. They bemoaned the fact that the era of individuals’ rights was beginning to fail and that perhaps another method would be best suited for the present reality. The interesting part was that their displeasure had arisen from being mistreated themselves, from a moral superiority, or even from religious convictions, they were simply observations.

I think that I often get more out of my few hours of volunteering than the tourists who drop in with questions.

This past weekend I performed my fist baptism as a pastor. The service went well and neither I nor the baptismal candidates (all female) were overly nervous.

The girls were worried behorehand that their testimonies would be too short. As it turned out, they were longer than I expected, long enough that my 4 page abridged sermon quickly became a one page abridged sermon. Instead of expounding on anabaptist theology inspired by some of Graham’s recent comments in here, I just elaborated on the story of Lydia’s baptism in Philippi (Acts 16).

One notable outcome of the morning for me was that one of the girls had already been baptized as a baby. So when I baptized her, I fulfilled the Latin based definition of an “Anabaptist”, I am now a re-baptizer. Five hundred years ago, I could have been killed for doing that. It didn’t really impact how I felt about or performed the ceremony, but it was definitely something interesting to take from the morning. I hope it doesn’t alter my relationship with my various Catholic and Lutheran friends.

I take a healthy level pride in my various expertises. One of them is Anabaptist/Mennonite theology, history and sociology, or at least I like to think so. Tomorrow, my expertise has been called upon. Through a family connection at the church where I pastor, I have been asked to visit a local high school world religions class to talk about the Mennonite religion. Since it’s a catholic school, I’ve been asked to highlight the places where Mennonite belief differs from Catholic belief. My biggest fear is that the presentation is supposed to take up the whole class, which is 75 minutes. My other worry is that I probably know more about the 16th century Catholic church belief structure than I know about contemporary Catholicism.

If I can, I’ll use a few video clips which should help to both entertain and amuse. I’m also really hoping to get some good questions from the students, besides the typical horse & buggy and incest questions (I should have some good comebacks ready just in case).

I’ve already planned to talk about baptism, pacifism and symbolism. I think that should pretty much cover it. They want me to focus mostly on religion and not so much history or sociology. I want respect that, but as with almost all groups, the three are inextricably interwoven. The best explanation of a question from any one of those groups generally includes parts of the other two.

If anyone has any suggestions or points to highlight, or even questions that would be helpful or that you even want answered, feel free to post them in the comment link. Thanks.
(I leave at 10am EST on Tuesday)

In researching historical data, I hit a snag recently, and went to inquire with a local history prof regarding the info. In my script, I want to do a just representation of the person of Felix Manz. For those unfamiliar with the story, and even a refresher for those who knew it once, Felix Manz was a well educated scholar of the Bible and key figure in the beginnings of Anabaptism in Zürich Switzerland. His writings of word and song endure, and his impact on present day Mennonite, Anabaptist and Free Church theology is undeniable. The history books record all these things, but they also add a sidenote, that he was the son of a priest. In pre-Reformation Europe (Manz was born in the late 15th century), even though there was some dissent among the church, priests were still sworn in with a vow of celibacy.

The history books record that Felix lived with his mother in a house close to the Grossmünster in Zürich. The group of Radicals that wanted to speed up the pace of reform in the church, namely Conrad Grebel, Wilhelm Reublin, Blaurock, etc., also met at her house regularly for Bible study, and more famously on the night of January 21, 1525 when they all took turns baptizing each other.

The modern reader reads this story and sees Felix as an illegitimate child. Upon further research, I found that Heinrich Bullinger (the successor to Ulrich Zwingli in Zürich) was also an illegitimate child of a celibate priest. I wanted to do justice to Felix and his mother on stage, and I was curious for historical reasons as well, so I brought my list of questions. What was the nature of these relationships between priests and their wives/concubines/girlfriends? To what extent did Felix’ status as an illegimate child play into his initial child baptism? How did it alter his status in society? at theological universities? How did it reflect upon his father?

The answer I got was quite surprising. The answer was that priests having children and long-term monogamous relationships was so commonplace that nobody cared. Many great figures of the Reformation (Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Bucer, Dirk and Obbe Phillips, etc.) were illegitmate children of priests. In fact, the only people wdisapprovedved of these relationships were the odd high church figures and the establishment in Rome. General society supported the local priests’ in ignoring of their vows of celibacy, and they also resented Rome for discouraging these marriages.

Analyzing this reality, I started to wonder about contemporary clerical celibacy within the Catholic church. 500 years after the Reformation, the church is still able to enforce it? Some suggest that a new pope (likely not Benedict) could bring about badly needed development in this issue that many say is the most visible demonstration that the Catholic church is behind the times. Back when all of Europe was Catholic, and the church exercised powerful influence, many priests publicly broke their vows. Now, when the church has almost no political or civil power, almost no priests break their celibacy vows.

I also wonder what things has our society accepted as irrelevant vows? Maybe civil obedience? Every pastor I’ve ever driven with breaks the speed limit, some obsessively. Are there other things? Should we change our perceptions so that breaking our vows is okay, or change our vows because nobody keeps them anyway?

On January 21, 1525, at a meeting of religious thinkers on the fringes of their local church institution, George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him. That baptism is seen by many scholars as the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement. (Others, like myself, see it as only one of a series of events in various parts of Europe that gave rise to the Anabaptist movement).

477 years later to the day (in 2002), I joined two other guys to begin work on a Mennonite history play. Showing events like the initial adult baptism, we told the story of how the Mennonite movement developed theologically and culturally leading up to our specific present day situation. That play was produced in our home community, retelling the story to our own particular branch of Mennonites. Working on that project injected a lot of meaning and enthusiasm to my life, at a time when my work break from school failed to excite me.

Three years after that (this year), I began a similar but newer project. Together with the graceful and musically talented Ana, we have begun a project utilizing both her passion, music, and mine, Anabaptist history. We both have other things on the go this summer, but we formally began the project this weekend, and are both quite excited about it.

I had forgotten how much fun it is to pour over the history books to piece the data together. I had also forgotten how necessary it is to do so. I am quite happy with how much I know, and I feel that I can retell it adequately, but to tell the story well, details need to be verified, events need to be contextualized, and historical characters need to be analyzed. Pouring over the work of C. Arnold Snyder and John Howard Yoder, I will be able to occupy myself for months. When things become more solid, we will announce it in here.

Also, for those following my other play, a second draft has been completed, and is slowly being reviewed before further developments take place. I am open to having interested parties review my second draft. My G-mail user name is william.loewen, thanks.

After my last post on the nature of Mennonite literature, Jared Penner, a Mennonite scribe of his own right (pun intended), posted a three-part reply, addressing some key questions. In it, he talked about his librarian mother, who wondered why writers of Mennonite books only know how to be critical.

Jared, thanks for your insightful reply. Your mom is right to notice that popular Mennonite literature only comes in one form, critical. While it sadden me as well, I see three main reasons that justify/explain this pattern.

1. Mennonite writers face two types of critics, first, larger society, including the literary community, and second, their extended Mennonite community. If a book comes off as being too pro-Mennonite, then the larger society sees it as propaganda, and it gets relegated as religious/cultural fringe work. If a book comes off as being too critical of the Mennonite community, then the writer gets ostracized. There is profit in appealing to the masses, and their is a strengthening of social ties in appealing to the home community. Also, if it’s too lukewarm, we all spit it out of our mouths.

2. A social worker friend of mine said that the recent immigrant Mexican Mennonite women she works with have been brought up only being able to show two kinds of emotion, grief and shame. Maybe 400 years of cultural development has left that same mentality ingrained in all of us, including the writers of our best Mennonite novels.

3. Part of our problem (there’s my ingrained shame) is that we try too hard to embrace writers (and everyone) as our own. Maybe when people leave the Mennonite church, and move out of their Mennonite communities, and they publicly state that they don’t like sunflower seeds, perhaps we should no longer call them Mennonites, and as such, we no longer need to be offended by what they write.