All posts by Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and owner, Cascadia Publishing House LLC
inspiration, kindness

The Day of Endless Kindness

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Amid the tsunamis of cruelty drowning the planet, the day of endless kindness began as Joan and I watched Maine waves roll in for the last time. We unwrapped the breakfast sandwiches we had bought at the grocery store. On each, written by a server who had once seemed distant then mellowed when gently treated, was a heart face, a smile, and  “Have a safe trip.”

Then  we pondered the hog-the-beach ritual spread in front of us. Even before sunup more and more folks preemptively build beach cities of chairs, umbrellas, windbreakers, tents then leave. To crest the dunes is to wonder if an entire new megalopolis is springing up on the beach.

We flinched as this time one person fed the beach city but did note his spread was minimalist. As he trudged back up past our beach bench I bracketed judgmentalism and cheerily, I thought, teased, “That was cruel, making us watch beach setup just before we have to go home.”

Instantly he turned defensive: though his family had the privilege of living nearby, minimizing the chaos of bringing his children to the beach was worth setting up early.

I tried to signal I had been teasing about having to watch setup just before going home but sensed we were talking past each other. When he left, Joan went down to say goodbye to the waves while I kicked myself: “You have got to stop deadpan teasing when people don’t know you well enough to get it. You deserve to be misunderstood, since early setups do annoy you even if you didn’t mean to take it out on him.”

Minutes later, I looked up. “I just had to come back,” he said. “I thought, I have the privilege of being a year-round Mainer and need to represent my state better than I did. I was sensitive because early setups have gotten people mad; there have even been social media dustups.

“Because I thought you were mad, I wanted to explain that I don’t mean to hog the beach.

“Then after I left I kicked myself. Because when I played back the conversation, I realized you were just teasing about having to watch setup before ending vacation.”

“And I was sitting there kicking myself,” I reported, “for being a deadpan teaser easily misunderstood.”

We reflected on how good it felt to make peace and how often these days we egg each other on instead of paying attention to the inner voices nudging us back to kindness.

Joan and I neared home. I said maybe we should drive around until nightfall to avoid seeing what the lawn looked like after being unmowed forever while rain endlessly fell. Reluctantly we confronted reality.

And were stunned: the lawn was mowed. We texted friends. Did you do that? No. Son-in-law? No. I analyzed the mowing pattern where it met my neighbor’s lawn. The lawns looked seamless. Wow, did he really do that?

Then a knock: neighbor. With  muffins and his own fresh-grown tomatoes. Whoa! “Did you mow our lawn?” Yes.

As eight rambunctious siblings and I grew up, we were not fans of hearing from our parents, “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32 KJV).

But on that day when kindness instead of meanness seemed endlessly to ripple out, I wished my parents were still here so I could tell them, not even grudgingly, “Okay, okay, I get it!”

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Before it merged to form Anabaptist World, he wrote  the “Unseen Hands” column for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Doubt, Faith, gratitude, inspiration, love of God, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Do I Dare, a poem by Joseph Gascho

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If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. —Psalm 139:9-10

Do I dare to tell my Darwin friends
about the giant hand
that led my surgeon’s hand
for six whole hours?

Do I dare to tell my Dawkins friends
about the gentle hand
that held me
for 40 days?

Do I dare to think
it was no dream,
that gentle, giant hand,
holding me,
lovingly?

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (Wipf and Stock, 2023) .

Humor

Some Airplane Fun

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Even if we were having to fly into Newark during a late-season winter storm, we were fortunate to have been able to experience the sunny tropics in the first place. Our plane did run late due to thousands of storm-related delays and cancellations including snow, ice, rain, howling winds. Nevertheless, we were boarded, not that much more than an hour late, pushed back from the gate, raring to go.

Then that dread intercom crackle. Pilot: “Sorry folks. There is a problem with a seal on a life raft access panel. It has no bearing on flight safety, but we need to research if policy will let us fly or we have to go back to the gate. If we go back, we’ll time out and this crew won’t be able to take you to Newark. We do apologize and will update you soon.”

All 150 or so of us are trying not to cry. I’m reminded of my youngest granddaughter: I need a time out so I can go back into my bed and use my pacifier.

Pilot: “I’m very sorry folks but policy doesn’t let us fly. We’ll need to go back to the gate.  Someone there will help you make arrangements.”

Back to gate. But we sit and sit. Maintenance people with orange and green vests roam around the panel. All seems resolved. But that pesky time out. Wait wait wait.

We think about how much of our lifespan is about to go down the drain. I really do need to get in my bed with a pacifier. But then: Wild idea from pilot. Maybe we can fly you to Dulles and then another crew will fly you to Newark and you won’t even have to get off the plane!

Joan and I like this idea. Lots and lots of people do. But some people don’t.

I wish I’d have dared video some of the action to get my minutes of viral fame. In lieu of that, I did text family members contemporaneously, so I’ve stitched together a narrative based on often-verbatim texting of what came next.

After the pilot reported the potential solution,  maybe one-fourth of the passengers went into a complete tizzy (some in we-have-feelings English, some in eloquent and energetic Spanish, bilinguality only adding to the fun). They threw fits. Let us off this plane! We’re done! This airline is toast! We have our rights!

They were reminded they were only going to Dulles to get a new crew. They wouldn’t even leave the plane, and it was the fastest they could get to Newark. They were warned if they got off they might make it to Newark amid cancellations maybe by the end of their lives. So most of them huffily paraded back on. But enough got off that all the luggage had to be pulled and reviewed on the tarmac.

After oh, two or three hours of new mutinies leading to more efforts to get off leading to more reminders that you might be in your grave before you get to Newark if you persist in this self-defeating behavior, a few people did give nice speeches. They pointed out (I didn’t speechify but courageously nodded support) that this would be a good time to work together as a community to help each other get to Newark instead of generating constant door openings and closures and luggage delays and threats from crew to cancel this flight right now. But the collaboration contingent struggled to achieve full buy in.

Then came word that–

a.) we might get to Dulles if the flight path around wind and storm and oh, a rocket launch at Canaveral could be achieved . . .

b.) fast enough the crew didn’t time out (our seatmate noted that if they timed out they might land us in the ocean), but–

c.) only if you dear people settle down right now.

Except that as the hours passed the crew had said you can go out to terminal for food if you send only one rep per family and return soon. Of course all kinds of exciting new hell broke loose as the push-pull of will we obey so we can actually fly or will we do what we want because we deserve it after all the fuss you’ve put us through continued including as some insisted give us airline vouchers right now to buy our food.

Somehow, even as we were constantly warned we had to get going any minute, the chaos persisted yet another hour or more. Then another update: Nearly within reach of a flight plan if you all settle down.

This was greeted as wow, just an ideal moment for more going to the bathroom, roaming the cabin, arguing with the crew. At this point our seatmate, admirable representative of his locale, a polite young gentleman by and large, observed that “these people are f-ing stupid.”

Joan and I have been on multiple canceled flights. There were many junctures at which we knew that in prior cancellations this would signal flight ended.  But unbelievably, the crew started coming back to re-check boarding passes. Okay folks, we should have the flight plan in minutes.

So one woman starts playing local party music really loud. Attendant goes back says stop. She argues. Attendant says everyone can’t play music really loud on this plane it’s not legal stop right now. Argue argue.

Attendant, who seems to be a boss and a grizzled competent veteran of passenger wars, goes back up front to pick up microphone as amid the music kerfluffle a contingent that apparently has bought duty-free liquor celebrates the blessings of the spirits. The music fan and the spirits-lovers both have their celebrations rudely interrupted as the attendant goes on loudspeaker to observe as follows in several layers of Spanish and English:

“You need to know you can’t all play your music loud so none of you can. Imagine if you all did that! And it’s the rules that you can’t. Furthermore. Furthermore! If any of you even try to drink your own alcohol you need to know that could involve the federal government. Which is to say la policia. Which is to say you could be taken off this flight. Which is to say this flight would be canceled and no one would get to Newark. Not even to Dulles. Which is to say you could end up arrested and in jail instead of in Newark.

“So you need to listen. You need to obey the law. Please. Tienen que escuchar y obedecer la ley. Por favor! This flight will be problematic indeed without your cooperation. Este vuelto sera problematico sin su cooperacion.”

Cockpit door keeps opening and closing. Cabin door keeps opening and closing. People in reflective vests keep showing up after all seems resolved. Doors close. Doors open again. Thunk thunk sounds below the plane. Baton dude who guides the plane out gets to work then sits down again on a concrete barrier to watch the fun.

Chief attendant scrolls up and down his cell phone screen for the 3,423rd time in four hours. He and pilot confer for the 50th time. The pilot is not looking like he’s on a happy date. We keep waiting for sorry folks, your dreams are dashed. People keep getting up. Some go to the bathroom 242 times. Bathroom has become an overflowing outhouse and we haven’t even gone anywhere.

But then. Then. Flight plan has been approved “BUT ONLY IF WE GET TO RUNWAY IN 10 MINUTES.”

Lots of fussing and muttering. But crew firm, mostly on loudspeaker now, reiterate: “If we run out those 10 minutes Dulles canceled SIT DOWN people.” Somehow 10 minutes becomes like 25 but flight still hanging by its thread.

Loudspeaker: “Captain says NO ONE Stand Up for ANYthing or That’s IT we’re COOKED.”

The plane actually starts to move. Attendant comes back to check we’re all behaving. Gentleman behind continues a phone call. Attendant tells him, politely but sternly, phone off. Guy yells in several languages, “F— you [that part for sure is in English] we’ve been patient long enough.” It feels like blows come next.

The attendant says one more time “Stop the call or we cancel.” Then backs off and keeps moving up the cabin. Passenger huffs. Gets off the phone.

The plane keeps taxiing. The cockpit door stays closed.  It looks gray and inscrutable and strong and a bulwark against the breakdown of civilization. You can almost feel the pilot concluding that so long as no shots ring out this plane is getting up in the air. And this plane is going to Dulles. And in a few hours this story is going to be shared with airline colleagues, maybe even putting some of that duty-free libation to legal use.

Our seatmate says this is the first time he’s been so scared. He says, “It feels like there’s too much going on in this plane.” Joan and I agree.

We get to the runway. I tell our seatmate there’s no wrong answer but ask if he believes in God. He says yes. So we all breathe prayers.

The plane gathers speed. We see the ground drop away.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

inspiration, loving enemies, Reconciliation

Skimming in Harmony

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As usual the news was filled with reporting on national divorcing of red and blue and infinite variations, enough said, as much of the world’s energy went into taking things apart.

But in one part of the world, itself no perfect place as wealthier and poorer live their sadly stratified lives and the privileged play while the struggling work, there was a moment of sheer loveliness. All the struggle was right there, the endless plastic bottles and trash caught in the grass and dunes and trees just behind the waves, those with too little money selling what they could on the beach while the kites soared.

I wonder what we do about this. But I doubt simply ignoring the soaring fixes the struggling.

So I did love watching as the kite surfers fluttered across the waves like butterflies used to before so many went extinct along with their habitats.

And I particularly felt my breath catch when three surfers, perhaps part of a team though maybe they were just committed to sheer joy, started skimming in unison. Back and forth they raced across the ocean, slowing down to turn at the ends of coves then somehow knowing who would take the lead and how quickly until they were lined up in near-perfect formation.

Kiters one

Mostly there was no need to do anything but cherish the sight. I also, however, thought about the sheer delight stirred by humans who must have spent endless hours practicing their soaring collaboration rather than feeding endless versions of that national divorcing.

Kiters two

I thought I’d better learn from their example how to invest more of my own energy in skimming and less in splitting.

And I imagined all the healing that could be released if resources for kiteboarding, both literal and metaphorical, were so equitably shared across the weathier and poorer of us that we could all skim together on the Planet Earth team.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

inspiration

Thankful for for Little Cow

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Ella, three years old, has been fascinated by the scar on her grandfather’s chest, where the surgeon literally took out my heart and fixed it before putting it back in. She particularly keeps trying to understand the role of the bovine aortic valve Dr. Desai put in.

I explained that it came from a cow. That really caught her fancy. As we’ve kept talking about this, I’ve started suspecting Ella’s cow image is quite literal.

So I asked her: “Do you think there is a tiny little cow in my heart helping to keep me alive?”

“Yes, PawPaw. Your cow is always in there taking care of you.”

She paused. “But it makes me sad. Because a big cow had to be killed so your little cow could live in your heart.”

In recent years I’ve read about research suggesting that in their own ways bees think creatively; spiders dream; trees communicate. And maybe, metaphor though this may be, little cows live caringly in our broken hearts.

Ella is no longer a baby but she lives closer than I do to what William James once memorably described:  “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. . . .”

Through Ella’s insights my bovine aortic valve links me to all of that–and reminds me that there is in nature so much glory and so much sacrifice. Ella reminds me to be grateful for great blooming of life. And for the suffering and new possibilities, so often both mixed together, we create for each other as we strive and yearn for life amid all the buzzing confusions of our thoughts and dreams and sacrifices.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, Holy Spirit

A Pentecostal Theater Large Enough for This Marriage

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Kingsview & Co blog post barn imageFor a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offeredresponses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’ve been posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. As touched on below, this post completes my participation.

* * *

If I dare put it this way, I’m grateful to J. Terry Todd for offering, in “Following Jesus to the Altar: One Pentecostal’s Reflection,” a Pentecostalism large enough for my marriage. This marriage, of a former atheist and semi-former charismatic, has called for a large room–even, in Todd’s language, a theater. And in relation to the Pentecost-related matters Todd addresses, as much my marriage as my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has set the stage for my experiences and perspectives. The story:

As a teen, I attended a church camp. I had by then decided that adopting atheism was the most ambitious, dramatic way I could declare independence from traumatizing aspects of my Mennonite church community.

Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.

It had taken over this church camp. So there I was, theoretically atheist. Yet underneath the atheism I was also, as Todd introduces his experience, “bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name.”

What happened next could be described almost word for word as Todd does:

Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit.  I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise team’s soaring vocals.  I, I’ve seen God do it, and I know / it’s working out for me. / It’s getting ready to happen. The entire assembly chanted the song’s refrain, again and again: It’s getting ready to happen, it’s getting ready to happen.  I wasn’t kneeling at a structure but standing, walking, rocking on my heels at the “altar,” a space that in most Pentecostal settings encompasses the center front of the church, stage left and stage right as well.

My moments of tarrying, or waiting expectantly, involved both the fervent hope for a divine encounter with the Holy Ghost, and a struggle with my willingness to surrender to the experience. And then it happened . . .

But precisely there our experiences sharply diverge. For me it most definitely did not happen. I felt crushed under the dreams of those praying over me, laying hands on me, issuing ecstatic utterances through which I grasped, though without understanding the words themselves, that they were entreating the Spirit to enter recalcitrant me.

“Just let go,” they pled. “Let your tongue go even if it makes no sense. Say nonsense words and then the Holy Spirit will come to fill them with meaning.”

So I did. And a sort of half feeling of sort of half being filled with something arrived but deep down I knew: I was doing my best to be filled with the Spirit but not managing actually to be filled by other than my own quest to be “good” for those who wanted me to be filled. Still I yielded. Eventually I eked out some nonsense words. Joy erupted. For several days I convinced myself It had happened: I had spoken in tongues; I had been baptized in the Spirit.

Only for a few days. Then as I noted no underlying transformation of my troubled self, I admitted the truth to myself: I had tried but failed to open myself. Whatever had happened had been my effort to go along with the expectations of the crowd.

Years later I was to find paths toward following Jesus and experiencing the Spirit. Part of what it took was concluding that what had befallen me back then was external coercion blending with my inner need. I had experienced true hunger but not necessarily for what I was being offered at that camp.

In mid-pilgrimage I met a woman. She was Joan, still a teenager, in her first year at Eastern Mennonite University, where we met when I was a senior. She had been raised American Baptist. She had found much to treasure in her tradition. But there were hungers not yet met in her teenage self. In her world too the charismatic movement made its transgressive appearance, undoing patterns and spiritualities that had long seemed settled. She was blessed. She still connects with friends from the days she sang in a traveling choir with her charismatic mentors and friends.

Eventually, of course, the former-but-sometimes-still-atheist and the charismatic decided that one thing amid their confusions was clear: They should marry. When they announced this oil-and-water merger to their respective friends, there was no joy in either camp. There was gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, smearing of ashes on brows. This was a variant of Thelma and Louise rollicking their way off a cliff.

So here we are, forty-some years later. We have survived partly by becoming more like each other. What our friends couldn’t always see–nor actually could we ourselves, who realized we might have lost our minds–was that we would also, hoary though the concept is, complement each other. So I am often enough the skeptic but experience Joan as offering guard rails that keep me from, ultimately, plunging into the ditch of cynical disbelief.

And I think she would testify to the ways we mutually nurtured each other when at moments of severe distress in her circle of loved ones the charismatic word was sometimes a toxic pray harder, trust God more, get out of the Spirit’s way even if that forces you to lie to yourself about what is actually happening here. During one potentially fatal crisis, it was also not her charismatic mentors but that boring old-fashioned leader, an American Baptist pastor, who knew precisely the words of divinely inspired grace and wisdom to offer.

Within that journey we find ongoing blessings as we nurture children and grandchildren in a world turned wilder than many of us might have anticipated even a few years ago. We go to church. We engage Scripture. We do things good Christians and Mennonites do. We take seriously the Mennonite Church USA understandings of the Holy Spirit offered in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective article 3, which concludes that–

The Holy Spirit enables our life in Christian community, comforts us in suffering, is present with us in time of persecution, intercedes for us in our weakness, guarantees the redemption of our bodies, and assures the future redemption of creation.

But buffeted by traditions we have long experienced as sources of both strength and shadows, we have not majored in jots and tittles of Holy Spirit doctrine. Nor have we found that the somewhat middle-of-the-road MC USA take on the Spirit exhausts the wildness of the wind and the tongues of fire that blow and alight where they will.

This means I take in Todd’s report more as testimony and inspiration than as theological tome–although I appreciate and affirm the theological nuances he offers us and the many ways they resonate with Joan’s and my lived experience. I particularly am moved by Todd’s ability to show us three things:

First “is the experience of worship as a theater of divine encounter, a space of intense emotion and intimacy where God meets us at the altar.”

Second is “transgressive space”:

As a theater of divine encounter, the Pentecostal (or renewalist) altar can be a “transgressive space,” a term Gastón Espinoza has used to describe the altars at Azusa Street, the 1906 Los Angeles revivals that helped put the Pentecostal movement on the Christian map.

Third is the “freakiness” that this can catalyze and empower. Todd documents an amazing array of Christians and peoples and experiences that can all, in their frequently contradictory ways, fit in the theater. As he describes matters, “The altar where I first experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a transgressive space, which is why I use the provocative language of ‘flying the freak flag’ to unabashedly embrace Pentecostal ideas and (especially?) actions that might puzzle or even repel others.”

That grips my heart. That shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other. And have been found by the Holy Spirit who turned even our marriage into a wing of that theater of divine encounter.

Yes, J. Terry Todd:

That prophecy makes me dance with joy at the altar, as I await this Third Pentecost, grateful for the radically relational pneumatology that undergirds it.

Somebody shout Hallelujah, please.

* * *

This post completes my contributions to the “Following Jesus” conversation. It has been a rewarding journey. Meanwhile “Following Jesus Is a Liquid Dance,” J. Terry Todd’s engagement with his respondents (which includes comments on my post above), provides an eloquent and heartfelt wrap-up to a valuable year of mutual learning for the twelve of us involved. Let Todd have the last word:

As embodied souls we are here for a time such as this. Some of the roadblocks to the flourishing of all God’s people are novel – a climate emergency on a global scale, the possibility of nuclear destruction, along with the usual human litany of greed, war, murder, inequality, and exploitation.

How do we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land?  Well, it’s not all dependent on our singing, thank God since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Maybe it’s the Spirit that plays and sings through us. Glory! In a prophetic phrase attributed to Montanus, “Behold, the human being is like a lyre, and I [the Spirit] fly over them as a pick.”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and participated in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist history, Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Mennonite history

Pondering Across Two Traditions Both Shadowed and Hallowed

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Barn image, Michael A. King Kingsview & Co post For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

Robert Millet’s winsome portrayal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took me first back to my growing-up years. As has been true in the case of many traditions I’ve responded to, my early formation in Anabaptist-Mennonite communities and theologies predisposed me to view the Mormons, as we then knew the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with suspicion. I was taught by my tradition that Mormons were a cult. They based their views on the false foundation of the Book of Mormon claimed by then-New Yorker Joseph Smith to have been written on mental plates derived from an angel.

Mormons, it was said, falsely believed that they were the highest, most faithful version of Christianity due to their founding ultimately by Christ in New York  long after the other traditions. They believed in polygamy and tried to convert others to this lifestyle and problematic beliefs.

There are similarities here with Anabaptist-Mennonites. We often have seen ourselves as restoring the true church of Christ. We rescued the church from wrong directions taken from about the time of the Emperor Constantine and across the centuries of Catholicism and of Christendom (church and nation intertwined) expressions still partly maintained by the Reformers.

Mennonites also, it seems to me, have sometimes been careful to interpret our own history in ways that favor our preferred understandings of ourselves. This may be one reason some of us have favored a “monogenesis” view of having emerged largely from 1525 Zurich when Conrad Grebel rebaptized a number of other Anabaptist leaders. This can enable at least some carving away of the more shadowed historical details. In contrast, a “polygenesis” view that Anabaptists emerged from multiple streams and settings makes it harder to say well this is Anabaptism but that wrong turn is not.

For example, perhaps the most troubling dynamic in Anabaptist history emerged at Münster in Germany in the early 1530s. Anabaptists attempted to impose a theocracy on the city through what came to be known as the Münster rebellion. Jan Matthys was one of the noteworthy Anabaptist leaders until the bishop they had exiled besieged the city, killing Matthys and others. For a time the Anabaptist rebels still held considerable sway, as this paragraph from the Anabaptist encyclopedia GAMEO (Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online) summarizes:

The 25-year-old John of Leiden was subsequently recognized as Matthys’ religious and political successor, justifying his authority and actions by claiming visions from heaven. His authority grew until eventually he proclaimed himself the successor of David and adopted royal regalia, honors, and absolute power in the new “Zion.” There were now in the town at least three times as many women of marriageable age as men, so he made polygamy compulsory,[3] and he himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded Elisabeth Wandscherer in the marketplace for refusing to marry him, though this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Meanwhile, most of the residents of Münster were starving as a result of the year-long siege.

For centuries thereafter, Anabaptist-Mennonites have wrestled with this. Are Münster and its leaders part of Anabaptist history? Or an aberrance to be bracketed out?

I pay attention to this example because it illustrates the complexities of my own tradition’s history and because there are  striking overlaps with Mennonite takes on Mormonism. Perhaps finding a path that didn’t affirm Münster or other thought-to-be-mistaken Anabaptist streams contributed to what I experienced growing up: Certainly Mennonites were not prepared to cede the one-true-church or the highest-expression-of-the-church mantle to Mormonism. This contributed, I’d guess, to the Mennonite tendency to form in its members the often-stereotypical perceptions I’ve summarized.

Eventually I went to college and seminary. I learned more nuanced understandings of other traditions. However, I have less often encountered sensitive interpretations of Latter-day Saints history and beliefs. It has been a privilege then to participate in conversation with such a generous sharer of his tradition as Robert Millet. And I want to spend some more time in, precisely, affirming Millet’s interpretations rather than questioning them.

Before I proceed, however, I do wonder if Millet would be willing to comment on the common perceptions–or surely often misperceptions as Millet has in other responses movingly reported–of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (When I invited Millet’s commentary he in fact responded generously and comprehensively.) Perhaps hinting at a kind of polygenesis of Mormonism, the Latter-day Saints offer, as I understand it, a preeminent (and non-polygamy-affirming) but not sole expression of Mormonism.

I note Millet has not mentioned the stereotypical takes on his tradition; I’d expect that’s intentional. Why focus on what may be misinterpretations when given the opportunity to write not so much a defense as a proactive statement of the visionary principles that guide the Latter-day Saints of today? Still, it would be informative to learn more of how Millet might address critiques of his or other Mormon branches. It would also be valuable to learn how Millet, who as highlighted below affirms Scripture, views Church of Jesus Christ specifics. For example, what is the role of the Book of Mormon, which I’d imagine few other traditions are prepared fully to embrace?

But turning beyond the shadows, I am struck that Millet helps me make sense of something of a turning point in my own impressions of the Latter-day Saints. Some years ago I was letting Spotify’s algorithms take me hither and yon. That particular night I was tempted to say the algorithm was Holy Spirit, but I doubt Spotify has itself achieved this though who can say how the Spirit may use Spotify!

At any rate, I was in something of a troubled mood and looking for the comforts of music. There were hints of this in various songs. But suddenly I stumbled across a version of “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by The Lower Lights, about whom I knew nothing. I got goosebumps. I turned up the sound. I let the music fill my home and soul. I looked for more Lower Lights music and found many gems.

Then I looked up the group’s background. I was startled to learn that they are . . . Latter-day Saints. That caught my attention. What a clash between what I had been taught and what I was experiencing. I don’t want to claim there was a major theological impact, though once I knew about the Latter-day roots I could hear Latter-day influences in some of the songs. What really tugged at me was that above or beneath whatever the theological overlaps or differences might be, The Lower Lights were blessing me. My heart opened as it rarely had before to paying attention to Latter-day Saints’ gifts.

Then came Millet, who helps us understand core Latter-day Saints commitments and helps my mind continue the journey The Lower Lights have already helped my heart make. I see much for Mennonites to honor in Millet’s “Walking in His Steps: How Latter-day Saints Seek to Follow Jesus” summary:

Millet emphasizes the Latter-day commitment to search the Scriptures daily. As Millet summarizes, “There is a power inherent in scripture, a power unlike anything else we may read or study.” Meanwhile, at our best (which we don’t always manage), Mennonites are committed to believing as we do because we take the Bible seriously as a guide to daily living. We emerged from visionary leaders and communities that sought to read the Bible for themselves. They became convinced that the Jesus they found in this Bible was to be followed even when teaching such radical precepts as adult baptism or that enemies are to be loved.

Mennonites are perhaps not as known for being a praying people as adherents of some traditions. In fact, when I looked for prayer in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, I couldn’t find an article on it. I did find prayer appearing in footnotes, for example in the article on the Holy Spirit, in a note summarizing that “the Spirit of Christ is in the midst of the church in its gathering for prayer and praise.” I see Millet as speaking well for Mennonites in his descriptions of how Latter-day Saints practice being a praying people.

Millet describes Latter-day commitment to serving and loving others as Jesus did. This is in effect a Latter-day variant of one of the five core commitments of Mennonites I summarized in my post on Mennonites.

Latter-day Saints are deeply committed to church attendance–and this includes emphasizing community. As Millet puts it, “Christianity entails more than prayer, fasting, and searching the scriptures–more than an individual effort to live the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As vital as personal devotion and individual effort are, Christianity is fully lived out only in community.” In turn a core Anabaptist-Mennonite precept is that we are to live not primarily as individual Christians. We are to journey as followers of Jesus who through adult baptism commit ourselves to live as members of the body–or community–of Christ.

Many thanks, Robert Millet, for these valuable admonitions and for contributing to my own personal pilgrimage toward grasping the treasures in your tradition.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, justice

Jesus as Social Revolutionary: Engaging Farris Blount’s Prophetic Invitation

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Blog post from Kingsview & Co by Michael A. KingFor a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Thank you, Farris Blount, for an accessible yet multi-layered overview of the Black Church in A Tale of Many Options: Following Jesus in the Black Church Tradition. The “many options” of your “tale” of the non-monolithic Black Church tradition captures well both central emphases and the many variations.

Your first words fit well with my own take on Anabaptist-Mennonitism and other traditions:

As many of my colleagues have noted during this series on following Jesus from diverse Christian traditions, there is no uniform structure or pattern to such a task. Following Jesus is primarily informed by the context of a people and the needs, desires, and goals of that people.

Rightly emphasized are ways denominational theologies, church models, and forms of following Jesus arise from particular geographical, cultural, and social locations. Amid much that overlaps with ways given situations have shaped my and my tradition’s forms of following Jesus, it’s vital to note your stress on the historical mistreatment and marginalization of the Black Church. Because so much rides on one of your core paragraphs, let me quote it in full:

The historical mistreatment and marginalization of African-Americans can explain how many Black Jesus followers have understood that to follow Jesus means working towards the liberation of all those who are oppressed, particularly Black people. Such a perspective has been molded first by our historical experiences. Our Black Christian forebearers could not understand how a loving and redeeming Savior, who sought to restore our relationship with God and free us from the penalty of sin through His crucifixion, could support the brutal institution of American slavery. Throughout history, African-American Jesus believers could not make sense of how some people could worship a God on Sunday that made humankind in God’s image and declared that this creation was good (Genesis 1) but then treat Black people like second-class citizens unworthy of rights and resources on Monday. Because of these realities, Black Christians have argued that the Jesus we serve laments with us as we process through the trauma that racism creates and fights alongside us as we work to create a world where all God’s creation can thrive. In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.

I‘m a member of a tradition born amid persecution and death so significant that the massive classic, The Martyrs’ Mirror (assembled by Tieleman Van Braght in the 1600s), tells story after story of Anabaptists chased down, burned, drowned during the Reformation. I was ridiculed as a first-grader for not bearing toy guns in a school play because my peace-committed Mennonite parents forbade it. I feel in my bones the traumatic potential of mistreatments and marginalizations. I resonate with your statement that “In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.”

However, precisely because for me and many in my tradition the age-old persecutions involved primarily beliefs, not race, I struggle fully to understand. I imagine beyond a certain point I can’t grasp the depths of trauma intertwined with slavery and racism persisting both in historical memory and still so often actively inflicted today.

Then add the complexity of how African-Americans have themselves, as you report, found their way through that history and present racisms:

However, despite the myriad ways in which the Black Church tradition echoes this commitment to justice in following Jesus, such a commitment does not reverberate through the halls of every Black congregation. In fact, the disagreement between how African-Americans should respond to discrimination can be explored through a polarity that Lincoln and Mamiya call “the communal and the privatistic.” If striving for equal and fair treatment of Black Americans in all areas of life is considered a “communal” approach to the Black Church tradition, then the privatistic approach is one in which there is a “withdrawal from the concerns of the larger community to a focus on meeting only the religious needs of its adherents.” While communal approach advocates echo that following Jesus involves active engagement against oppression, privatistic approach proponents contend that following Jesus is all about an individual public declaration of belief in Him and a resulting shift in behavior (i.e. no cheating, stealing, etc.). Communal believers see Jesus as a liberator that desires for us to experience some Heaven on Earth right now through just relationships and equitable policies, while privatistic believers see Jesus as someone who came chiefly to liberate us from sin and its penalty – eternal separation from God.[1]

It makes sense, as you describe Black Church diversities, that this polarity of the communal and the privatistic would name and form alternative expressions of Black Church experiences. The polarity is also strongly applicable to other traditions. I grew up in what I’d consider a privatistic form of church. I remember its members criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. for focusing on social justice rather than, as these Mennonites believed was more crucial, bringing about change through inviting Jesus into our hearts as personal savior.

In contrast, some Anabaptist-Mennonites have emphasized communal approaches. I’d understand Mennonite Church USA to be trending in this direction in its statements and resources on “Undoing Racism” introduced with these sentences: “Racism, antipathy and alienation stand in the way of Christ’s kingdom of love, justice and peace. As missional communities we will seek to dismantle individual and systemic racism in our church.”

Crucial to my own quest to follow Jesus was Vincent Harding, whose journey included speech writing for Martin Luther King Jr. (such as King’s historic “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence“) and significant involvement with Mennonites. He increasingly became a critic of Mennonites (for reasons likely related to the privatistic side of the church) yet also at one point with first spouse Rosemarie directed a Mennonite service unit in Atlanta. In the 1970s he changed my and my wife Joan’s life when in a presentation at Eastern Mennonite University, our alma mater, he urged Mennonites, so often agrarian, to become more meaningfully involved in cities and communal concerns. His invitation catalyzed our spending some 14 years training, working, and living in Philadelphia.

I’d see the privatistic/communal pendulum going back and forth in Anabaptist-Mennonite circles depending on era, given congregations, denominational variations, and so forth. Interestingly, this might be illustrated through how our Following Jesus conversations have been received. I’ve been sharing my posts on Facebook and elsewhere. When I posted my response to Pietist Christopher Gehrz, one FB commentator observed that “I too have heard Mennonite leaders opine about how Pietist sentiments can lead to a me-and-Jesus instead of an us-and-Jesus mentality. I find those comments suspect. It ignores, suppresses and denies the reality that each of us is an individual with an irreducible inwardness. . . .”

Another commentator hoped that valuing the inward, privatistic aspects of Pietism as I had summarized them was not an either/or. This person stressed what Blount is calling the communal, wondering, “Is the Bible primarily addressed to whole communities of God’s covenanted people or is it primarily intended for our personal devotions?” The commentator answered that we pray not “My” but “Our” Father in the Lord’s prayer. This is in contrast to, say, coming “to the garden alone” or walking the Jericho Road as “just Jesus and me” (as two songs put it). 

I said that “As I understood the Pietist summary to which I was responding, indeed both/and not either/or!” Your own answer, Farris, is that

I am not condemning such an approach to following Jesus. On the one hand, there are spiritual practices, such as prayer and scripture reading, that should undergird the life of a believer, no matter what one believes it means to follow Jesus. These practices give us the strength to keep serving and following Jesus amid life’s difficulties. On the other hand, Black Christians who have dedicated themselves to fighting for justice have sometimes done so at tremendous personal sacrifice.

Well said, and a nudge to any of us—personally or at the level of our traditions who may be tempted to overinvest in the privatistic at the expense of the communal. Many thanks for making the stakes clear.

The week this was first published we confronted yet again the violence shredding our culture, too often on behalf of White supremacy, and Black shoppers dying simply for being in a Buffalo grocery store when a teenager, incited by hate-filled ideologies he had no trouble finding and feeding on in today’s political and media contexts, set out to kill as many as he could. Amid such horrors, you issue an invitation that ultimately has implications for all of us:

However, I do not believe we can avoid the fact that Jesus was a social revolutionary if we look at the scriptures and His engagement in His world. And if that is the case, we in the Black Church tradition who call ourselves Christians and attempt to model the life of Jesus, must ask ourselves – what am I willing to sacrifice and give up to follow the Jesus that came to give humanity life and life more abundantly right here and right now?

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, LGBTQ

Celebrating Wesleyan Treasures and Rooting for United Methodists to Continue Offering Them

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Reading Sarah Lancaster’s insightful overview of Wesleyanism and keeping in mind its United Methodist denominational expressions took me back to when it was my responsibility to articulate overlaps between Mennonite and United Methodist teachings and values. The United Methodist University Senate oversees UM higher education, including in non-UM institutions it approves to teach UM students. To maintain the Eastern Mennonite Seminary UM Senate approval for further quadrennials, as seminary dean I needed to validate, on behalf of our students and faculty, that EMS adequately understood United Methodism and was prepared to teach and form UM students accordingly.

I was struck at the time, and now in reading Lancaster, that there are indeed significant commonalities. A key one is the overlap between the Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on discipleship and the Wesleyan emphasis on scriptural holiness along with the growth in holiness summarized through sanctification. There are variations in the details (particularly the Anabaptist grounding in believers baptism versus the Methodist affirmation of infant baptism), yet discipleship and sanctification both involve living faithfully for Jesus and not simply articulating doctrines or believing this or that.

This is communally expressed for both traditions. As Lancaster puts it, “Following Jesus to grow in holiness, then, was not finally individualistic and private, but rather took place in community.” And if holiness is not individualistic but public, this in turn leads to what Lancaster calls “social holiness.” In founder John Wesley’s 1700s as in our times, this can lead to opposing slavery, racism, oppression, alcohol production that leads to grain shortages for the poor, and so forth.

As I learned during my seminary dean days, it has also led to the “Social Principles” of the United Methodist Church. The fact that UM student numbers at EMS were second only to Mennonites made sense as I learned, for example, that both the United Methodists and Mennonites are committed to peacebuilding and principles of social justice. Both traditions take seriously the way of peace taught in the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus who stressed love of enemies.

As the UM 2016 version of the UM Book of Discipline affirms in relation to Social Principles: The World Community,

We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as an instrument of national foreign policy. We oppose unilateral first/preemptive strike actions and strategies on the part of any government. As disciples of Christ, we are called to love our enemies, seek justice, and serve as reconcilers of conflict

Throughout my reading of the Social Principles, I’m struck that again and again Mennonites would say amen to the UM social principles related to the natural world, the nurturing community, the social community, the economic community, the political community, the world community. This includes resonating with the UM position on the separation of church and state, a principle dear to many Anabaptist-Mennonites, and affirming, with the UM Social Principle on the Political Community,  “the diversity of religious expressions and the freedom to worship God according to each person’s conscience.”

If amid occasional differences in details and emphasis, many Anabaptist-Mennonites will resonate with the UM Social Creed and its celebrations of God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, natural world as God’s handiwork, the rights of all, the rights and duties of workers amid “elimination of economic and social distress,” and more. Affirmations in response to Lancaster and such principles could go on and on. If anything as a Mennonite I feel a hint of chastening as I encounter the sheer comprehensiveness with which United Methodists address social issues and UM faith commitments.

Yet that does not exhaust United Methodism. Lancaster also highlights effectively the suppleness of a Wesleyan ethos that can catalyze such significant social thought yet also encompass “seeking emotional experiences of God in prayer and worship.” She helps us integrate social principles with John Wesley’s famous and memorable journal testimony that as he was listening to a reading of Luther’s Preface to the epistle to the Romans,

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins. . . .

This also overlaps with Christopher Gehrz’s thoughts on the Pietist influence across multiple traditions.

There was one area in which I wished for Lawrence’s fuller exploration. She does observe that “There have been divisions over various matters, such as race and slavery, lay rights, women’s ordination, etc. (and we face division now over LGBTQ+ issues), but none of these ‘various views’ are distinctive to Wesleyans.”

There she lets things rest, perhaps understandably and deliberately so. To wade into such matters is to find all too little rest and perhaps often to muddy core convictions. It can be a challenge indeed, for example, to maintain communal commitments as polarizations related to “LGBTQ+ issues” threaten to shred community, at least at the formal denominational level. And Lancaster is understandably aiming to speak not only for United Methodism but also more broadly for a Wesleyanism expressed in but not limited to the UM denominational manifestions.

Yet fragmentation is affecting so many of our traditions, very much including Anabaptist-Mennonite as I earlier touched on. In addition, the UM battles related to LGBTQ+ denominational positions seem to involve significant intertwining with Wesleyan emphases on holiness, perfection, social creeds. When such core teachings confront the acids of controversies in which alternative views of sin and right living are in play, how do they fare? It would be valuable to learn more about how Lancaster sees United Methodists continuing to offer the treasures of Wesleyanism while confronting intense denominational factionalisms.

During my days as seminary dean, such denominational dynamics were omnipresent for both Mennonites involved in Mennonite Church USA and for United Methodists. Several times UM leaders provided resources to the EMS community based on UM dynamics that were not identical to Mennonite ones, given polity variations, yet involved overlapping complexities and sufferings still working their way through both denominations.

Mennonite Church USA is in the final stages of preparing for a May 2022 special delegate session that could “retire” or embrace several resolutions affecting LGBTQ-related denominational positions.  And as of this spring, even such a general-audience, non-theological source as USA Today was stirred to report, for instance, that a new Global Methodist Church would split from the UM Church by May and that

The new denomination announced its plans on the same day the UMC postponed its General Conference for the third time, this time until 2024. Delegates were expected to vote on proposals regarding the creation of a new denomination at the General Conference on Aug. 29-Sept. 6 in Minneapolis.

I certainly don’t propose that such developments invalidate Lancaster’s overview. But as an Anabaptist-Mennonite who has experienced the challenges of maintaining communal commitments when divisions erode denominations’ ability to gather around core understandings and practices, I will continue to watch with interest and concern how the United Methodist Church navigates such shoals.

And I’ll be rooting, Sarah Lancaster, for the various wings of the United Methodist Church, whether still officially part of one “United” denomination or fragments of what once was, to continue to offer us what you summarize in your memorable conclusion:

In the Wesleyan tradition, following Jesus means being a child of God and living appropriately in that relationship. However differently holiness may be conceived, it is a common conviction that God empowers us to live in the power of the Holy Spirit so that we may work with God in God’s intention to restore the world to what God created us to be.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, inspiration, love of God, Pietism

Stirred by Tender Pietism

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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In his stirring rendition of “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” Christopher Gehrz illumined for me the reality that a fair amount of what I’ve experienced as just part of my heritage is indebted to Pietism. I needed barely to  read more than that one of my favorite hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” has Pietist roots to grasp this.

This intrigued me enough that I pursued Gehrz’s fuller comments on the song writer, Carolina Sandell, learned that she is his favorite hymn writer, that she engaged in bride (of Christ) mysticism, and that

Still more controversially, she inherited the Radical Pietist and Moravian interest in the divine feminine. The first draft of “Thy Holy Wings” asked God to spread “warm mother’s wings,” and a hymn inspired by the martyrdom of Swedish missionaries in Ethiopia implored God to “tenderly hover” over Christ’s witnesses on Earth, “Embracing their cares like a mother.”

Reading this took me to my childhood as an often-lost missionary kid trying to survive both the beauties and bafflements of life in Cuba and Mexico. By the time I was 12 the crosscurrents of the missionary experience and my escape into secular inspirations like science fiction had me flirting with atheism. Yet repeatedly a backdrop of hymns and gospel music playing most bedtimes on a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder brought comfort amid pain.

Many a troubled night I’d listen to songs like George Beverly Shea singing “Tenderly He Watches.” Here the controversy of feminine images for God is dialed back. This is done perhaps intentionally and as Sandell herself sometimes seems to do (not least as in “Heavenly Father” children safely to God’s “bosom” are gathered). God remains in such renderings a male who watches over me not as but “like” a mother, a “mother watching o’er her babies.” Still the tenderness is explicitly and implicitly palpable, and it strikes me how often Pietist-flavored hymns leaven the sternness of traditionally patriarchal faith expressions.

When I aged into a culture-shocked teenager trying to make sense of college in the U.S. after leaving Mexico just months before, key to my surviving the tough days was lying many an evening on the couch watching the reels turn on what was now my more advanced stereo Dokorder tape recorder. I would put on the most tender hymns I knew. Shades of Sandell.

Which then takes my heart and memories back to the scores of hymns offering God’s tender care that healed my wounds way back then, bless me still today, and surrounded the bed of my dying mother-in-law Mildred. As she faded, her daughter and my wife Joan, along with our three daughters, sat by her bed singing such hymns. We accompanied the tracks playing on an old Ipod I had loaded with hundreds of hymns and gospel songs for Mildred to go to sleep to in her retirement community much as I had as a boy.

Many of the songs,  in fact, were precisely the same ones I had listened to in Cuba and Mexico, plenty of them with that Pietist flavor. I had resurrected them by buying lost vinyl records on Ebay and laboriously transferring them to the MP3s that eventually ended up on my and Mildred’s Ipods.

All of which is to say this: I certainly have long loved such hymns. But it was Gehrz who helped me more fully understand that through them I was experiencing aspects of a Pietism that did indeed help save my life.

I need to rethink some of my own personal history and my Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage in light of Gehrz. I’ve under-credited Pietism. I’ve long been reasonably aware that strands of piety did heavily influence the communities within which I was most primally shaped. I’ve been less aware that these pieties were not just floating in the Anabaptist-Mennonite air but were a gift from sources such as Sandell and the many others Gehrz identifies, including Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Franck, and more.

Citing Roger Olson, Gehrz observes that “if there is no Pietist movement, we might nonetheless discover what Olson calls ‘the Pietist ethos’ in Lutheran, Wesleyan, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed, and other churches represented by other participants in this conversation.” Indeed.

Gehrz himself names what I might otherwise worry a tad about from within Anabaptist commitments to social ethics. This is the possibility that piety can so turn inward as to forsake the outward. I’ve heard Mennonite preachers worry, precisely, that the more Pietistic hymns can generate a me-and-God as opposed to us-and-God or God-and the-world Christianity.

Gehrz, however, makes the case that as with “Francke (1663-1727), personal conversion to Jesus Christ sparked social action.” And my own experience suggests that the tenderness that watches o’er the troubled ones of us safely in God’s bosom gathering can be a key source of returning to the world healed enough to care for it.

Thank you, Christopher, for this tender report, on behalf not only of your own tradition but our many traditions enriched by it, of a week in a Pietist’s life.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.