I'VE COME FULL CIRCLE

Randy Klassen

My Christian journey seems to have come full circle, but I did not recognize the value of what I had left until I had returned.

Beginning in the mid-1930s in Winnipeg, my parents, faithful to their tradition, took me to a Mennonite Brethren church. In those days everything expressed in the church was in German.

That was only one of the reasons I did not like the church. The preachers often seemed to yell. I’m sure they said much that was good, but I could not understand it. The taboos, however, were quickly translated into English. The word English itself was used as a synonym for worldly. So the church appeared to this teenager as a bastion of rules and regulations—anti-culture and anti-fun.

Then, during World War II, my dad chose brief participation in the Naval Reserve. He never touched a gun, but the uniform was disgrace enough, so he was asked to leave the church. Actually we were all glad to leave those narrow-minded Mennonites and find an English speaking church.

At age 18 I experienced a unique encounter with Jesus Christ that changed my life. I felt so grateful for pardon and adoption into God’s family that I soon felt a strong desire to preach this good news to others—in English, of course.

Surprisingly, my search for a denomination brought me to the Evangelical Covenant Church. Its members had struggled with their original language situation and had left their Swedish behind a couple of decades before. Their Lutheran background included Pietistic and Moravian influences, which in some ways were not too dissimilar from Anabaptism. I appreciated their focus on Christ as Lord and so served in this denominational family for 40 years.

The longer I pastored, the more I pondered the meaning and mission of the church. It’s too easy for a pastor to get trapped into a role of maintaining a tradition or struggling for church growth by any means possible. But when one reads and rereads the Gospels, it soon becomes evident that love for God and love for neighbor are given top priority.

I am convinced that Jesus intended the church to become the embodiment of everything he taught and did. Paul affirmed this when he wrote, "the church . . . is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Eph. 1:23) .Surely this means we in the church are to incarnate Christ’s love for "neighbor." And "neighbor" includes "enemy" (Matt. 5:44). Such love is to be central and foremost in the life of a Christian church.

Yet it seems when the command to love our enemies is heard, we dodge the call. It’s idealistic but unrealistic, some claim. Some even think the way to peace is to eliminate the enemy! More often interpreters say that Jesus meant only our personal enemies, like the difficult person at the office or the careless person next door. However, we need to remember that Jesus was living in an occupied land in a situation of political violence. For the first disciples his message was unmistakable. Jesus meant that his followers not return violence for violence, evil for evil.

During their first 300 years, Christians remained courageously pacifist, even when the result was death. They took seriously Jesus’ call to love the enemy by overcoming evil with good.

The insightful theologian Walter Wink notes that historians cannot find a single Christian writer in the first three centuries "who approved Christian participation in battle" (The Powers That Be, Doubleday, 1998, p. 129). The early church saw itself as inaugurating a new order in which all people are included in God’s love. "All" included slaves, the poor and marginalized, and all enemies. So what happened next?

When Emperor Constantine endorsed Christianity in 313 C.E., this brought to a close the many waves of persecution Christians had endured since the first century C.E. The church’s response was joy, confusion, and compromise. Suddenly it was legal to be a Christian. That brought joy.

The emperor called himself a Christian and therefore so did most others, as it was the most politically expedient thing to do. That produced confusion.

Then church and state married, forming an alliance called the "Holy Roman Empire." That was compromise. The empire proved to be anything but "holy." By 380 C.E., non-Christians were being persecuted! Jesus’ design for his church to be a community of love and nonviolence had been betrayed. Instead of challenging the warring ways of the empire, the church justified them. It still does in most of the Western world, including the United States, which we like to say is "under God."

Fame and fortune had not brought meaning into the life of Count Leo Tolstoy. So he explored religions and, in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, found what he believed was the answer to the question of why and how people should live. He wrote, "Only by fulfilling the law of love in its true, rather limited meaning, i.e., as the supreme law does not admit any exceptions, can one find salvation from the terrible, increasingly disastrous and apparently hopeless situation of the ‘Christian’ nations today. For a Christian who has recognized the demands of the law of love, none of the demands of the laws of violence can be obligatory, but present themselves as human errors which must be exposed and abolished."

This, Tolstoy concluded, was God’s way and therefore the only way to peace and harmony in the world. Tolstoy is remembered as a great novelist, not as a theologian, yet his description of Christ’s way of love is right on the mark. To my ears, it sounds Mennonite!

So he returned to the church, only to be shocked to see the Orthodox Church supporting the czar in oppressing the poor and fighting its enemies. Since the Orthodox claimed to be the one true expression of Christ’s church, its enemies therefore included Roman Catholics and Protestants. Then he learned that these same religious bodies made similar claims and justified their killings of all enemies, including Jews and Muslims.

That did not look like the "body of Christ," so Tolstoy left the church. Or did the church leave her Lord? (Technically, Tolstoy was ex-communicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for his denunciations of its anti-love practices.)

Has the church improved over the years? Thankfully, there are dedicated communities involved in proactive peacemaking, such as the Carter Center, the Salvation Army, World Vision. Numerous church-related organizations, like Mennonite Central Committee and scores of similar organizations give evidence of faithful followings of Christ’s love.

But far more needs to be done. Although Christianity is numerically the world’s largest religion, the global situation is not encouraging. The twentieth century saw more violent deaths—109 million—than all preceding 10,000 years combined, as recorded by Walter Wink (p. 137).

Wink further notes that in just the 1990s, some two million children died as victims of warfare. That is more than three times the number of battlefield deaths of American soldiers in all wars since 1776!

If love is the law of life, then peacemaking lies at the heart of the gospel. We have been given "the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:18). To waste our energies on doctrinal disputes or liturgical differences, or to cozy up to political leaders to gain some kind of favoritism or material advantage, is a betrayal of our Lord.

We who belong to the church do not exist for ourselves. We are to be as passionately concerned for justice as were the biblical prophets. The words for justice in Hebrew and Greek appear 1060 times in the Bible. We are to be radically committed to an identity with the needy and marginalized and proactively involved in peacemaking. Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God" (Matt. 5:9).

We need to unsentimentalize the word love. We need to see it as the most needed, most demanding, most challenging, and most redemptive power in the world. Then we need to pray for God’s Spirit to give us the courage and wisdom to express this love in action. Was that not what Menno Simons was calling God’s children to do? Is that not what the Quakers, the Brethren, the Anabaptists, and other peace churches are attempting to say to our world? If so, I want to join their chorus.

I am disappointed in the warring ways of the United States. The killing of thousands of innocent children and their parents as well as the deaths of our service men and women caused by a preemptive strike sicken me. Clearly, Christ’s way is to overcome evil with good. Tragically, our country fails to make the supreme effort of following that way of love. Should the church not judge this country’s worldly ways?

I once thought a conscientious objector was a coward. Now I see her or him as a role model. If there were a Mennonite church here in Walla Walla, my wife and I would join it. Indeed, it appears I have come full
circle.

—Randy Klassen, Walla Walla, Washington, served as pastor in Covenant Church congregations for 34 year and developed two new churches. For four years he was Covenant Church Executive Secretary of Evangelism, and he did artwork professionally for six years. He has written many books and articles, most recently What Does the Bible Really Say About Hell? (Pandora Press U.S., 2001).