Tag Archives: Mennonite Brethren

The top 10 Mennonite Brethren stories of the decade

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The transition from old to new year is always a great time for picks and pans, for looking back and making lists. This year, of course, there was an entire decade to grab on to and re-consider. 

The international and national scenes have already been covered by the media pundits, but I put my hand to a list of my own on a rather smaller scale: the top 10 stories of the decade for Mennonite Brethren.

Although I worked with the denomination for five years of the decade, please be assured there’s nothing official or sanctioned about this list, and please realize too the opinions and impressions are entirely my own.

In no particular order then, and for tried-and-true MB conference junkies only (I’m warning), here are my picks for the top MB stories of the decade:
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The significance of siblings

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Events such as the death of an elderly parent, which my siblings and I experienced this week, bring the original configuration of a family into sharper focus. We were eight children, a relatively large family even for its time. We were also the children of a minister who served various churches, none of them in communities where our grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived. It has always seemed to me that for all the disadvantages created both by the size of our family and its isolation from our relatives, there were advantages as well, including a strong enjoyment of one another — squabbles notwithstanding — and reliance upon each other for memories around the year’s special days, when families are the key unit of celebration.

It’s been a long time since the last child left home to form her own household, and even longer since the first left to form his. Over the decades we’ve become our own extended families, with five of the eight of us now grandparents. Shaped by divergent career paths, the people we married, and our scattering to reside in four Canadian provinces and one U.S. state, we’ve become much more diverse than we were in our family of origin. We’ve remained relatively close, certainly very cordial, but we’re together occasionally rather than frequently, and certainly much less than siblings who remain in the same place geographically. We have our own “space”; we have our own lives. 

The past week, though, in planning and participating in our father’s funeral, it was the “originals” who met via telephone conference call to make decisions about the arrangements. In the storytelling and slide-viewing that happened once we’d gathered here in Winnipeg, it was, inevitably, the original bunch of us that again came to the fore. Without intending to (and here our spouses are the best witness), we probably slipped back into earlier roles, banter, “insider” references. This deceased man was most particularly ours and, for a while, we went back to this knowledge with whatever joys and wariness it might entail, as children of the household he had formed. 

Truly, the sibling bond is an interesting one. It’s complex, but somehow simple too. Virginia Adams, in “The Sibling Bond: A Lifelong Love/Hate Dialectic,” an article I saved in my files from the June 1981 Psychology Today, says the link between brothers and sisters “is in some ways the most unusual of family relationships…the longest lasting…and the most egalitarian.” 

In the church
In the same file, I found a 2004 Sojourners article by S. Scott Bartchy called “Secret siblings.” Bartchy describes Jesus’ “radical new vision” of believers as family and goes on to say that popular English translations of Paul’s letters have in many cases mistranslated the Greek word for brothers and sisters by using non-family terms. This has diminished the impact of what is proposed as a way of being in the church.

Sibling relationships, as Adams reminds, are indeed unusual, long-lasting, and egalitarian. Implied in them is fairness, equality, the honor of the family, love and support in spite of diversity. When my church — the Mennonite Brethren — was debating women in ministry leadership, it seemed to me that the arguments against it sometimes inserted notions about marriage into the discussion, as if every woman in the congregation was the “wife” of every man. Yes, Paul also compares marriage and the church in Ephesians 5:22 ff, but the church entire is meant vis a vis Christ, with both the marriage relationship and the relationship between church and Christ illuminating the other. But to be siblings of Jesus in the church, well, that’s another perspective all together.

The past week has reminded me how formative, powerful, and life-giving the sibling bond is, and can continue to be. Freshly appreciative of its significance, I want to also probe its meaning for the church. Our identity there as “sisters and brothers” is familiar enough. But, I’m wondering, have we really grasped its many implications?

Mennonite Brethren at 150

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Speaking of commemoration (previous post), the particular Mennonite group to which I belong — the Mennonite Brethren — celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2010. It will be interesting to watch what emerges. Will the commemorative process serve as an archive of the community’s dominant memories? Will it be an agent in forming memory, in controlling it, or in contesting it?

Events and writing planned for the anniversary of which I’m aware of are the January issue of the MB Herald , at least two books, a spring commemorative event in Europe with global MB representatives, and a July gathering of North American MBs in British Columbia. For the latter, the tone struck so far (see poster, below) is one of celebration, though it also includes a symposium on identity and mission.

A former colleague, MB Herald assistant editor Karla Braun, raised some good questions about what it is we’ll be celebrating in a blog post here. Her post grew out of remarks from a leader within the Lutheran World Federation — coming up to their 500th birthday — who noted that while Lutherans were “proud of their theological distinctives,” they would not be “celebrating” their birthday because of the divisiveness of the Reformation. 

The birth of the MB Church on January 6, 1860, when 18 family heads in the Molotschna Mennonite colony of Russia/Ukraine signed a document of secession from the larger Mennonite Church, was contentious and divisive too.

But in 1960, when MBs celebrated their centennial, the General Conference of the Mennonite Church (as heirs of that larger Mennonite church from which MBs seceded) presented a statement of apology for the “many feelings, words, and deeds that were not brotherly” in the 1860 separation. The MB conference reciprocated with a statement, recognizing “that certain attitudes, on our part, have been colored with intolerance, even to the point of reservations of mutual fellowship and love. We deeply regret our failings and weaknesses of the past and hasten to say that we are motivated by the spirit of love to ask forgiveness where we have acted coldly and unbrotherly.”  (Source: We Recommend… p.20)

So perhaps the wheel of action-on-divisiveness doesn’t need to be re-invented. (Although we might ask if there are lingering resistances to the wider Mennonite fellowship; not all our global MB conferences are members of the Mennonite World Conference, for example.)

As for theological distinctives, like the Lutherans, we’re proud of ours. We name ours “evangelical-Anabaptist,” though unlike the Lutherans, we may be less sure what our label means and how to sit on our particular fence without teetering. We seem confident and “successful,” but there are questions about “identity,” and this past year, while closer to the institutional center, I sometimes sensed an undercurrent of fear. 

Our year of commemoration may be merely a blip in our historical consciousness. Or it could turn out to surprise us with its significance. “What might a clear-eyed, unflinching gaze at our past reveal to contrite hearts?” Karla asked. For now, we’ll have to wait and see.