Category Archives: Anabaptist-Mennonite theology

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, discernment amid differences, God, grace, loving viewpoint enemies, Teachings of Jesus

Can Mennonites and Lutherans Experience Grace, Faithfulness, and Even Fun Together?

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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.

* * *

Can Mennonites and Lutherans, once bitter enemies, have fun together? Though the journey is challenging, that’s a question Mark Ellingsen’s take on Lutheranism in “Lutheranism: An Evangelical Catholic Way to Follow Jesus” stirs for me.

Noting that, as was true for Anabaptists, the label Lutheran was originally applied by critics, Ellingsen wants to highlight such names as “evangelical” and “catholic.” He explains that Lutheranism incorporates many strands, including Pietistic, Confessional, or the “Neo-Confessional” he names Evangelical Catholicism. He also stresses that most Lutherans can at least agree “that the Christian life must be rooted in God’s grace.”

Where does my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition fit into this? I resonate with John J. Friesen’s take that we owe much to Lutheranism—which helped create space for the Anabaptist rejection of Roman Catholic indulgences, commitment to the Bible (sola scriptura) above tradition, belief that Scripture should be accessible to the common person rather than only privileged priests, and the ensuing affirmation of the priesthood of all believers.

As Ellingsen notes, “Lutherans . . . join with most Protestants in embracing the idea that all who are baptized, all who follow Jesus, are priests. Christians who follow Jesus are priests, for they have been dedicated to living lives in which they perform the sacrifice of dying to their sin and rising to serve Christ and the neighbor (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, p.53; Ibid., Vol.36, p.145; Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXIV.26).”

On the other hand, casting a shadow Ellingsen doesn’t address, Luther became a vitriolic opponent of Anabaptists. How did this come to be?

Through establishing Lutheranism as a state church. As Friesen summarizes, “When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible.” Anabaptists rejected models in which church and state together policed the boundaries of acceptable Christianity.

In contrast, Anabaptists, purveyors of the Radical Reformation, believed that the commandments of Scripture and particularly the teachings of Jesus trumped the state if church came into conflict with state. Surely, thought Anabaptists, there was conflict  if the church demanded, contra Jesus, killing enemies, swearing oaths, infant baptism not optional but coerced, upholding civil order and established norms if they blocked following Jesus. Surely there was almost unbearable conflict when not only did the state go against Jesus’ teachings but the very Martin Luther who celebrated grace countenanced the possibility that the state should execute Anabaptists for sedition and blasphemy.

Although they based it more on New Testament practices than a formal take on the priesthood of believers, Anabaptists, and their Mennonite branch, were also often more radical in blurring the line between laity and clergy. I experienced this as a seminary graduate trained in an American Baptist seminary (where Lutherans were classmates) whose professors advocated a moderate setting-apart of ordained ministers within a larger commitment to the priesthood of all. My first pastorate was at Germantown Mennonite Church, oldest Mennonite congregation in North America, established in Philadelphia in 1683 by Mennonites and Quakers. By 1980s a faithful remnant of some 25 congregants was expressing commitment to the priesthood of all through a leadership team that included ordained but unpaid ministers plus several congregants. As a paid minister, I would stretch the pattern.

My first Sundays careful attention was paid to where I stood when preaching. At the front of the historic building was a raised platform and pulpit many congregants’ saw as too prominent, evidence prior generations had strayed from true radicality. With heart pounding I went to the pulpit instead of the humble portable lectern. Whoever was right or wrong, the resulting controversy had roots reaching down to the early days of Anabaptism, not to mention Lutheranism.

But as with all human traditions, Mennonites are complicated. The same understandings that could be understood as discouraging trained professional priests/pastors exercising authority over Christians also generated structures that sometimes straitjacketed individual freedom of conscience. There were reasons for this; as Astrid von Schlacta observes, “Yes, sola scriptura implies that the meaning of Scripture does not depend on interpretation by a priest. Yet Anabaptists believed that collective interpretation of the Bible by the community of believers was indispensable.” True enough. But then in the name of the community others in the community, often themselves paradoxically following the authority of the leaders they trusted, might ban those they considered out of bounds.

This has led to circumstances in which Mennonites seeking to be “without spot or blemish” have generated communities that have policed boundaries of the quest, excommunicated congregants perceived to be non-repentant sinners, and risked crushing grace under law. In her memoir The Merging (DreamSeeker Books, 2000), my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw tells how her parents helping establish an early 1900s Sunday school. In that Mennonite context, this was perceived as violating church norms. Mumaw describes the day the bishop came to put her family out, an event which cast lifelong shadows over the family, including her younger brother who was my father:

Attendees were warned to discontinue their involvement. Those who continued attending there were finally excommunicated. Limerick Sunday school was closed. All persons who were put out of church were to confess that they had sinned in order to be  reinstated. Some would only confess they had disobeyed a conference decree. I still remember that chilly morning when the little Bishop with the cold sharp eyes came driving up our lane in his boxlike Model-T Ford. I think it was the time he had come to tell my parents that the people who kept on attending Limerick after they were told to stop were going to be put out of the church. And that included my parents. The people who went through this experience were deeply hurt.

This takes me back to Ellingsen and the gospel of grace. One could underscore the shadows of Lutheranism. One could claim, as I’ve heard Mennonites do and sometimes done myself, that Lutheranism purveys a cheap grace. One could suggest, and I see some value in this, that those who wrap their commitments around faithfully following Jesus, often rooted in the Gospels, may experience formation complementary to that of those who particularly celebrate sola fide and sola gratia, frequently rooted in Pauline epistles.

But after 500 years, Lutherans have asked forgiveness for persecuting Anabaptists. Ellingsen underscores that there is an ethical component to Luther, who believes “you only sin bravely when you do not give into concupiscence, when you boldly live a sacrificial, sin-denying life (live your baptism), but do so with the awareness that even then you are still sinning, that all good done is a function of God working in and through you (Complete Sermons, Vol.4, p.367).” And Ellingsen paints moving word pictures of the gifts of grace:

When you live in a family, with a lover whose love works on you, the loved one does not have to tell you what to do to please him/her.  You just sort of know.  True human love is spontaneous.  Imagine then what God’s love can do to you.  In fact, when you are in love (fall in love – note the passivity) it is like an ecstatic experience.  You lose yourself.  Should we not expect it to be that way in the arms of Jesus?  This is another reason why Lutherans claim that there is no need to teach Christians how to follow Jesus.  It will just happen spontaneously when you are living with Jesus. 

Here I still want the Mennonite formation that says human commitments are never fully whole so that, like couples who may not always feel love but want to receive and offer it nevertheless, we need teachings and a community that create disciplines of right living—whether or not these spontaneously emerge. On the other hand, how those Limerick Mennonites yearned for a more ecstatic church than the one offered by the cold-eyed bishop. How importantly Lutheranism, drawing on the Pietistic strand Ellingsen embraces, reminds us that with

awareness that everything we do is a sin, it follows that the best Christians can be is simul iustus et peccator (100% saint and 100% sinner) (Romans 7:14-18; Luther’s Works, Vol.32, p.111; Ibid., Vol.27, p.230).    This is a freeing insight, as it entails the awareness that we are loved by God, even despite all our sin and selfishness.

And how helpfully we can collaborate on the Way. As von Schlacta sees it,

The Anabaptists were part of the Reformation and shared basic convictions with Lutherans and Reformed. Yes, sola gratia means we do not attain salvation through works. But living the faith was important for all. The Anabaptists called this discipleship. For Luther it was “new obedience.”

Perhaps together, then, amid grace and forgiveness for the sins evident in both (and all) traditions, we can say a celebratory yes when Ellingsen asks, “Can the rest of the catholic tradition also embrace the freedom, spontaneity, and fun which Lutherans often associate with following Jesus?”

—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 a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Lutheranism was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, depression, discernment amid differences

Is the Actual Body of Christ the Wafer? Blood? Community?

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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.

* * *

In her “Respectful Conversations” post on Roman Catholicism, Christina Wassell (interestingly enough an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism) foregrounds the Traditional Latin Mass as the hub around which her commitments revolve.

Wasell also underscores the centrality of the Mass when pressed (in the reply section) on having less to say about Catholic social ethics. Concluding a commentary on ethics that values primarily “boots on the ground” service, she stresses that we must meet “our Lord. . . . in the Eucharist first, and our service must overflow from that fount of life if it is to do any good.” (She also responds more fully to conversation partners here.)

This provides a focus for my Anabaptist-Mennonite commentary on Wassell’s post. Because differences between understandings of “the Mass” versus “Communion” or “the Lord’s Supper” go back to the beginning of our 1500s separation.

Catholics, Anabaptists believed, wrongly affirmed transubstantiation, the actual transformation of bread and cup into Christ’s body and blood, as a kind of divine magic.

Anabaptists, and that sub-stream of them called Mennonites, affirmed communion as an ordinance, a practice taught by Christ to become for his followers a sign of remembering him and being empowered to live in unity as Christ’s body.

The Schleitheim Confession (1527), a very early Anabaptist statement of key understandings separating Anabaptist from other Reform and Catholic precepts, makes no mention of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper (described as “concerning the breaking of the bread”). The focus is on remembrance of Christ and on unity in faithfulness as defined by Anabaptists. Only faithfulness, grounded in the Apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 10 teachings, makes one worthy of sharing the bread.

Certainly the Lord matters here. But the key worry is whether those who share the bread are in true community:

So it shall and must be, that whoever does not share the calling of the one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body together with all the children of God, may not be made one loaf together with them, as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ.

The next century, in a classic Anabaptist effort to follow the literal teachings of Jesus, the Dordrecht Confession, a key 1600s Mennonite confession, echoed this. Dordrecht stressed that we are to remember because remembrance is precisely what Jesus taught in instituting communion at that first Lord’s supper.

Then Dordrecht reminds us that if Christ loved us to the point of purchasing through suffering and death our salvation, we in turn are

admonished to the utmost, to love and forgive one another and our neighbor, as He has done unto us, and to be mindful to maintain and live up to the unity and fellowship which we have with God and one another, which is signified to us by this breaking of bread.

From birth on, my Anabaptist-Mennonite family and communities formed me broadly within such views, which remain evident in current confessions of faith.  Communion was then often a source of fear and trembling. If one is to be worthy of communion, one must be in right relationship with one’s Christian brothers and sisters. Otherwise disaster may ensue. Along with many Mennonites, I found worrying indeed Paul’s admonition that

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then. . . . For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died (1 Cor. 11:27-30 NRSV).

Communion can make you weak. Ill. Dead. When I was eighteen I learned at last how one of my father’s most precious loved ones had died. He had been hospitalized in the 1950s for depression even as many Mennonites saw depression as entailing spiritual failure. This peace-committed Mennonite farmer then said he felt better, checked himself out, took a shotgun to one of his fields, and shot himself. A family take was that he had a very sensitive conscience.

The Mennonite emphasis on communion as something one had to be worthy of likely brought failure to the fore for him. How would he be good enough to partake? What of the anger at this son? What of that forbidden desire? Failure everywhere, lurking in secret or not even consciously accessible feelings and thoughts.

When I read Wassell against that backdrop, I experience  grace. I see why a significant number of Mennonites have sought to broaden the Mennonite understanding of communion, to treat it as means of grace in addition to remembrance of a sacrifice we must in turn earn the right to recall through right relations with each other.

I see why communion is becoming more common for many Mennonites. Once often reserved in Mennonite churches for rare services involving soul-and-conscience-searching and sometimes reaching out to sisters or brothers in Christ one feared one had sinned against, communion is now practiced in some churches more often, sometimes even weekly. I participated in the decision one congregation I pastored made to shift from communion twice a year to . . . every quarter!

Wassell helps explain such shifts as she speaks to intertwining experiences of personal and spiritual failure such as broke my loved one:

Desperately aware of our need for grace, we pray at each Mass (as the Centurion did), “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” We only receive our Lord kneeling in humility, and on the tongue. Only the consecrated hands of the priest feed Him to us, taking such reverent care not to drop a single crumb, as each crumb is the whole of the body, blood, soul and divinity of the Lord.

On the other hand. Wassell reports seeking the “Transubstantiated Body of Christ.” Her reverent treatment of “each crumb” as “the whole of the body, blood, soul and divinity of the Lord” fleshes out that view. As does this:

All faithful Catholics assert that what happens at Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary. The priest is there in persona Christi, or as a stand-in for the one true priest, Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man. He offers the bread and the wine, each in turn, to show the separation of body from blood on the cross which resulted in Christ’s death. When the priest says the words Christ spoke at the Last Supper, that bread and wine becomes Christ as perfect victim, offered for your sins and for mine in the mystery of the Eucharist.

I don’t want to take harsh issue with this. Wassell helps me grasp, as a good witness does, the appeal of such faith. I also see why such an understanding takes her to the traditional Latin Mass. I see why she’s disappointed in informal Mass and worship practices that foreground priest as person. I even see why she yearns for the priest’s facing backward in the traditional Mass to spotlight Mystery rather than humanness.

Yet here I also realize how deeply formed by Anabaptist-Mennonite commitments to plain meanings of Scripture and to community I am. I struggle to find Catholic understandings plainly articulated in Scripture, which does seem to me to undergird Schleitheim and Dordrecht emphases.

Meanwhile the austere, impersonal sermons and leadership I often experienced among the must-be-worthy-of-Jesus leaders of my youth (always men) left me cold. The more removed from the quotidian and the personal and even the informal faith practices were, the more I found them meaningless.

It was in the embodiment of the holy in the frail, the flawed, even the sinful, the “this-is-who-I-really-am” testimonies of leaders and community members, that I finally felt faith was possible.

I want my tradition to express significant aspects of the treasures Wassell loves. I want more grace in my community of faith. I also want to experience the presence of the Lord along the lines described in a 2003 report on Catholics and Mennonites in dialogue. Amid celebrating much in both traditions, the document affirms for Mennonites the “body and blood of Christ and recognizes again that its life is sustained by Christ, the bread of life.” It adds that

The key lies not in the elements as such, but in the context as a whole, including the communion of the gathered congregation, the prayerful aspiration of each individual, and the spiritual presence that is suggested and re-presented with the aid of appropriate symbols and liturgy.

I want to honor the body and blood of Christ as Wassell helps me to do. I also want to experience the Lord’s Supper as much in the troubled, tormented, yet often lovely relationships and practices of my people, my part of the Body of Christ in which I seek the holy even as grace empowers me to seek the body’s healing when I have helped to break it.

—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 a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Roman Catholicism was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Communication, discernment amid differences, Polarization, Teachings of Jesus

Orthodoxy and Anabaptist-Mennonitism in Respectful Conversation

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Some  months ago Harold Heie, with whom I had once co-edited Mutual Treasure: Seeking Better Ways for Christians and Culture to Converse, asked me to consider being 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.

The inaugural post was by David Ford, of the Orthodox tradition, and I was Anabaptist-Mennonite respondent, a response also offered below. In future months I’ll also potentially share other responses and my main post on my own tradition, scheduled for December 2021.

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As I’ll explore more fully in my main post (Dec. 2021) on how Anabaptist-Mennonites view following Jesus, the fragmentation of my tradition(s) makes it a challenge to discern the most fruitful vantage point from which to write. Not only is Anabaptism embodied in multiple traditions but its expressions in Mennonite Church USA, to which I belong, are increasingly fragmented.

MC USA is currently only about a generation old after being formed in 2002 from the merger of prior Mennonite denominations with their own centuries-long histories of fragmentation. Yet already in the past decade or so, inability to resolve deep differences, not limited to but certainly often revolving around whether and how to welcome LGBTQ participants, has caused MC USA to lose almost half its members. The pre-merger denominations had a total of 130,000-some members, the merged denomination initially 120,000-some, and the current denomination in the 60,000s.

As I’ll touch on again in my December post, each fragmentation sends sub-traditions rippling this direction and that. As I wrestle then with what standpoint to adopt in responding to David Ford’s insightful, inspiring, even moving overview of what it means to follow Jesus in the Orthodox tradition, I find myself drawn to remembering the main emphases, often enough stereotypes, within which I was shaped from boyhood on. Let them provide, helpfully or not, hints of a grid for approaching Orthodoxy and engaging how Ford’s articulations fit or challenge the impressions within which I was formed.

A primal emphasis I imbibed practically from cradle on was that Anabaptism and specifically my Mennonite expression of it had reclaimed the purity of the early church after centuries of corruption. Such Anabaptism was not only a reaction against the historic church, particularly Roman Catholic as experienced in 1500s Europe, but also a Radical Reformation reaction against or at minimum beyond the “establishment” Protestant Reformation. This is why early generations of Anabaptists and Mennonites were often persecuted and killed for their beliefs. I’ll always remember the Church of the Brethren (another Anabaptist tradition) seminary friend who, sitting among our Reformed-tradition friends, told the professor and class he still could hardly fellowship among those whose forebears had drowned, burned, beheaded his ancestors.

Still a core enemy was commonly viewed as the Roman Catholic Church,  casting its thought-to-be-corrupt shadow over the entire church but perhaps more malignantly than Eastern Orthodoxy. The latter seemed almost too distant and different to be meaningfully engaged.

If there was an error particularly linked to Orthodoxy it was perhaps iconography. As a visit to many long-established Mennonite church buildings devoid of sacred imagery will sometimes immediately make clear, Mennonites have long been iconoclasts, sharing with many Protestants the view that icons are idolatrous but in their Radical Reformation way rejecting icons with even greater passion. The distinctive style of Orthodox iconography has sometimes made it seem even more greatly “other.”

A second emphasis was that in contrast to Catholics and Protestants, often viewed as “buying” their salvation through such practices as infant baptism, the Mass/Eucharist, and/or “cheap” grace,” Mennonites embodied the saving power of Christ through literally living out the teachings of Jesus. Hence Mennonites (stemming from the Anabaptists whose name means “rebaptizers,” a label imposed by enemies) viewed infant baptism as not being faithful to the Jesus who invited adults to make a conscious decision to follow him. Even quite conservative Mennonites frequently resisted the state through refusing to take up arms because Jesus taught love of enemies. They resisted swearing oaths because Jesus taught us to let our yea be yea and our nay be nay. And so forth.

Today some branches of Anabaptist-Mennonitism have moved far beyond the more stereotypical aspects of such emphases. Mennonites engage in interfaith dialogues with Roman Catholicism and sometimes Orthodoxy and even become converts. So it would be misleading to suggest that attending appreciatively to David Ford is anomalous. But I do want to underscore—appreciatively indeed!—that Ford does ease the path for respectful conversation. While not minimizing or disrespecting such traditions as my own, he offers an Orthodoxy radiating significant strengths and appeal.

I experienced particularly this paragraph as summarizing Orthodoxy as an integrating tradition ranging across Scripture, theology, liturgy, the historical church from apostolic age on, spiritual practices, and more:

For this endeavor, the Orthodox Church provides many resources for spiritual growth, including daily study of the Holy Scriptures, being guided by the Church’s long-standing interpretation of them; time-honored prayers for many occasions; rich liturgical life, replete with psalmody, and including hymns filled with devotion and sound doctrine; the Sacraments—especially the Eucharist, celebrated at every Divine Liturgy, and the Sacrament of Confession; celebration of the many great holy days (Feasts) of the Church Year; the writings of the Church Fathers; the Lives of the Saints; the doctrinal proclamations and canons of the Ecumenical Councils—especially the Nicene Creed; veneration of the Holy Icons; the sign of the Cross; the connection with one’s Patron Saint and Guardian Angel; and the spiritual direction of one’s spiritual father.

Though no doubt partly due to my own blind spots, particularly my early experiences of Anabaptist-Mennonitism left me feeling that the key requirement of following Jesus was to live correctly, in faithful and even almost slavish embrace of Jesus’ teachings, particularly in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. We were to live in conformity only to Jesus, not the false and pagan practices of “the world.” Sixtysome years later, I still relive the weeks my parents forbade my taking part in a first-grade play that included bearing fake weapons. I’ve remained haunted by the near-contemptuous look on my teacher’s face, seeming to say that my family’s values were not only strange but idiotic.

But I had less idea how to nurture a spirituality that would empower such practices. I experienced my tradition as telling me how to live but not so much how to do the living. Ford also emphasizes holy living, at times perhaps echoing a perfectionism I’ve experienced in my own heritage. Yet he also offers a tradition rich in resources for the journey. As for me and my house, we can learn much from that.

We can as well from the “Holy Icons.” For some years I had a Mennonite university colleague who had invested passionately in learning about Orthodox icons and allowing them to inspire his own art. There is a power in visual expressions of holiness sometimes hard to find in traditions focused on words and practices.

When it comes to ethical living, Ford generates two responses for me. First, as a neophyte in encountering Orthodoxy, I was surprised at how strong—and for me stereotype-shattering—the above-introduced emphasis on holy living is. As Ford observes, echoing my own tradition’s commitment to Jesus’ commandments, “Growing in communion with Jesus is accomplished in large measure through keeping His commandments (John 15:10; also 15:14 and 14:15).” Ford relatedly highlights “Endeavoring to surrender our own will to His will (Luke 22:42); this includes surrendering our own will appropriately as we self-sacrificially serve others, placing their needs and desires ahead of our own.”

Second, I did look for Anabaptist-type determination to address the social justice implications of the Sermon on the Mount. I searched for ways Orthodoxy might champion the cruciality of not allowing social, economic, political idols, the nation/state, or the Powers as some might put it, the last word on such matters as, say, how we solve conflicts or share resources, including within and between nations. Or how vital it is to disobey the state if it insists on practices—such as accepting being drafted and sent to war—that violate Jesus’ teachings.

Or seeing major implications for social justice understandings in such calls as Jesus offers in his Luke 4 “inaugural address” proclaiming good news and release to the the poor, captive, blind, bruised. For at least some Mennonites (by no means all amid our many splits but certainly evident in a variety of Mennonite position statements of recent decades) there are resources here for analyzing the troubled state of U.S. creation care, economics, governance, politics, policies, and how to proceed when societies tilt toward the rich, the powerful, those who amass and exploit rather than care for the least of these.

I’d expect that implicit in Orthodoxy as described by Ford are paths for social analysis and justice. At that same time, the explicit focus is particularly on individual, personal, interpersonal, internal spirituality and its nurture and expressions. It seems to me that Orthodoxy would benefit in this area from interaction with Anabaptism.

On the conversation with Orthodoxy could go. And on I hope it will, with my tradition and others, as we share and together find our mutual treasures.

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

Communication, hermeneutics, The other

Love Language

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Love Language upside-down chairI’m not the perfect husband. I know, I know. Everybody knows that. I wasn’t really asking for examples. I don’t need more data. It is, yes, stipulated.

Still I was trying to offer love. This was my vision: Last year it was like Covid Covid Covid all the time and my heart had just gotten a new valve and I was never quite sure if my chest would pop open and my heart would stop. So no, I didn’t get around to getting the grass off that little stone patio by the barn that emerged when my friend John, decades ago, said well we have extra stones for this drainage ditch, what shall we do with them?

And I said well what about dump them by that old horse barn which is clearly not today for horses or anything else impressive but would be great with a little bed of white stones in front of it?

So we did it.

And the patio emerged.

And it mostly grows grass and weeds where the white stones should shine.

But this year though my surgery scar is palpable, with little lumps that make me hope for that newfangled thing where they just inject your scar and everything turns baby-skin smooth, I also feel like my chest won’t pop open.

So I moved the chiminea that had been on the front lawn—temporarily for years for my daughter’s pre-wedding celebration—down to that barn patio. I whacked the weeds and sprayed vinegar over them. And I thought wouldn’t it be great to set it up for Joan to join me too, and after she talks with her friends on Zoom we’ll do a little romantic chiminea thing down here with a fire.

To remind myself and show her the way I took a chair, a patio chair with red webbing, and turned it upside-down on the lawn halfway to the barn and this amazing new romantic patio. Then I finished microwaving my part of the leftovers for supper and went down to join Joan.

She was ON A DIFFERENT CHAIR!

“What? I set up a chair just for you.”

“What? ” She says. “What chair!”

“Right there, upside-down on the lawn,” I say, “that red-webbed chair.”

“What?”  she says. “That was for me? How was I supposed to know that was for me?”

“Um because why would a chair with red webbing be upside-down on the lawn other than because I love you?”

“I did have a little trouble understanding why that chair was upside-down on the lawn. I thought it was one more not-yet-completed goal of yours.”

“What!”

“What else would I think? Would you think a chair with red webbing was upside-down on the lawn because I love you?”

“No, I’d wonder why you didn’t finish the job. But that’s different.”

“Why?”

“Well because obviously I set up this whole evening for you, to love you and cherish you like you deserve. And now you’re like what is that chair doing there? Isn’t this a problem? Is our marriage over?”

“Um Michael, how was I supposed to know a chair with red webbing turned upside-down in the middle of the lawn was your love for me? Really?”

“Yes! That’s my love language! Why in the world would I turn a chair over in the middle of the lawn if my love for you wasn’t through sickness and in health until the end of time? Why? Why? Why?”

Joan gazes at me. “Really?”

“Really.”

So now she knows: You see a red-webbing chair turned upside-down in the middle of the lawn, come on, say my goodness what a wonderful husband you are, you are really and truly my sweetie pie. How could I ask for more? Your love language is all a spouse could ever wish for or imagine. Thank you thank you thank you Michael King.

Um. Really?

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. The incident of the red-webbing chair has forced him to recognize that having a degree in rhetoric and communication does not guarantee love-language competence.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Bible, biblical interpretation

Protect Her from the Chaos

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It has been increasingly painful to watch my granddaughter, old enough to take so much in but too young to talk, use hands to communicate. Whenever she sees something to interact with, she waves. This includes cars and trucks but increasingly settles on people. And above all other children. Yet when she sees children, COVID-19 distances her. So she will wave and wave. Once when her grandma took her to a playground and her waving to potential playmates failed, she burst into tears. Her hands speak her longing. And highlight the distances traumatizing our world these days.

Those hands yearning take me back to books I encountered as a 1980s seminary student but which had been released around the time I was born: Principalities and Powers by G. B. Caird (1956); and  Christ and the Powers, by Hendrikus Berkhof (1953). I’d not heard of either before.

But given how regularly the Apostle Paul’s references to them in letters to the Romans, Ephesians, Colossians were cited in church when I was growing up, I had heard ceaselessly about the principalities and powers. My vague sense was that they were satanic forces of evil, fearsome but not in ways hugely pertinent to my youthful realities.

Caird’s and Berkhof’s were the first treatments of the powers that made me come alive.  Both wrestle with whether Paul ultimately believes literally in angelic or demonic powers and both shift at least some emphasis to what Berkhof calls “structures of earthy existence.” Here the focus starts to fall on the patterns and systems that make up our cultural, political, social, legal, military realms, and more.

It is no accident that Caird and Berkhof were writing in the aftermath of a planet and countries and cultures devastated by world wars. Their books were released in the decade after World War 2, a decade which also saw the Korean War, the Cold War, and so many more occasions for thinking through the powers.

Particularly Berkhof taught me to see such structures as both evil and good. Particularly Berkhof feels to me alive in spirit today, addressing the core realities we are at this moment living through as he tells us that the structures are evil. They are evil because they demand loyalties only God deserves, as when a nation commands us to pledge allegiance in ways that clash with obeying God.

As a Mennonite raised to believe in two main realms, one the world’s, one God’s, and to be loyal to God’s when they clash, I practically drank in this view with my mother’s milk. This is why when I turned draft age during the Vietnam War, I registered as a conscientious objector loyal to God rather than then-President Nixon and the military he commanded.

But that is not the end of the story Berkhof tells us about the powers. For Berkhof the powers are also good. Commenting on Paul’s conclusion in Colossians 1:15-17 that Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together,” Berkhof says that “Diverse human traditions, the course of earthly life as conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state—all these can be tyrants over our life, but in themselves they are not.  .  . ; they are the dikes with which God encircles His good creation, to keep it in His fellowship and protect it from chaos. . . .”

And that takes me back to my granddaughter’s longing hand. For that hand to touch other hands, it needs powers that protect her from the chaos.

On the nights when it looked like U.S. powers were on the cusp of unleashing direct military intervention against protestors for racial justice, some among the military powers I would still register conscientious objection to rose against such domination. Here and there in politics and government as some leaders show us what demonic idolizing of the powers looks like, others, often humbler in ego and role, protect us from chaos.

I pray that in the days ahead and for years to come many hands, seen and unseen, will build dikes against chaos and clasp my granddaughter’s outstretched hand.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Until recently, when Mennonite World Review was merged into Anabaptist World, he wrote “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Church structures, Doubt, Faith, formation, Future of the church, Mennonite, Mennonite church, worship

Enriched by the Churched and A-Churched

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When I became a seminary dean in 2010, polls were showing that membership and participation in traditional Christian denominations was falling. As the decade proceeded, the unraveling gathered speed. In an October 17, 2019 update, Pew Research Center reported that “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” Across some 10 years, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian is down some 12 percent to 65 percent. Meanwhile “the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

In recent years I’ve left to others the challenges and opportunities of running seminaries during such a time as this.  This has given me more energy to focus on the reality that this isn’t just an institutional matter; it’s deeply personal. When I was growing up I don’t recall knowing anyone in my immediate circle of loved ones being other than Christian and a regular churchgoer. Now the majority of my friends and family are what I might describe, respectfully, as “A-churched” in the Greek sense of “A-” pointing to an absence of.

As Pew indicates, and whatever the trajectory may become in future decades, for now this trend seems only to be strengthening among those I love. It has perhaps also intensified as political polarization separates Christians into camps who can only shake their heads in disbelief that the other camp could be understood to be truly Christian.

This came to mind as I was discussing with one of my pastors participating in a ritual of congregational healing in preparation for treatment of a leaking aortic valve. At the same time, my wife Joan was working out logistics of an informal ritual with a circle of her friends who had supported one of their group also needing heart treatment. They were now offering this ritual to me.

I value both settings, I realized. As one formed in the church before I even knew who I was, I continue to experience the power of a community gathered in Jesus’ name in hopes of offering to each other and the world at least glimpses of being the Body of Christ.

And as one who has personally spent periods traveling through many of the “A-” dynamics of our age—A-theism, A-gnosticism, A-churchgoing—I also was moved to envision support organized not against but outside of traditional congregational structures.

I‘m grateful that at the moment I’m not responsible for envisioning how this plays out institutionally, as congregations, church schools, denominations, and faith traditions wrestle with what it means to thrive—or not—amid current trends. My time of institutional leadership as the trends gathered force showed me I didn’t have failsafe initiatives.

But as I ponder the personal dimensions of all this, I do draw some inspiration from simultaneously experiencing the power of both formal and informal communities of care. When I discussed some of this with Joan, she reported wondering how even informal communities of healing will continue to be available, given how often they spend capital inherited from formalized faith settings.

Joe Hackman, the pastor who helped shape the Salford Mennonite Church ritual before he shifted roles to MennoMedia, saw connections with Joan’s feedback. He noted that

For spirit and the spiritual, we have been able to rely on the deep spiritual wells of our grandparents, but once those wells are depleted and we have not created our own wells, there’s nothing to pass on to our children other than moral values.  Maybe that’s enough, but I’d like to think we could pass on something more.

So  I hope instead of pitting them against each other, as we sometimes do, we can be flexible enough to learn about the gifts of each type of community. I hope we can be enriched by comparing and contrasting the life stories that cause each of us to navigate joys and dangers of being churched, A-churched, both, or more.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, human finitude

Good Job!

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The going was slow, but I was meditating on how fit I felt compared to when I started biking again the week before.

Some sort of whooshing commotion blew by on my left. Before I knew what it was I heard “Good job!” On she sped. When I crested the hill, she was already far ahead, bike light flashing in the distance like a rocket’s red glare.

How to feel? Affirmed? Ashamed?

Just a week before I had had an appointment to make sure I understood Medicare. Just the day before I had checked our online phone account to see why our landline had been ringing almost, it seemed, every minute. I found some 40 calls. Most were marked “Spam?” and followed by variations on the word Medicare. Many want to benefit from my aging body even as I need to make sure to handle insurance carefully, since my heart may need a new valve.

Good job. I pondered again how to feel. I was certainly tempted to pedal harder and prove how wonderfully I was retaining my youth no matter my body’s age and condition.

I thought about a generation earlier encountering Carl Jung’s idea that an aspect of the first half of life is developing ego, skills, mastery. Key to the second half is falling into soul and spirituality, with ego taking a servant role.

I thought about Jesus and his teachings that to gain our lives we have to give them up, that except a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it can give no fruit, that the first shall be last and the last first, that rather than amass power for its own ego-driven sake, a true leader kneels before those served and washes feet with a towel.

When I was younger I did seek to live out such insights of Jung and Jesus. But the paradox of pursuing this while developing a career and presence in the world posed complexities and confusions about how to integrate ego with soul. So many of the tasks of life’s first half run more with the grain of ego—its inclinations simultaneously bolstered by a culture idolizing the pursuits of wealth, status, privilege, and power which are ego’s delights. Now Christians court presidents and even Anabaptist-Mennonites long committed to basin and towel are often concluding the time has come to claim our places at the tables of influence and preeminence.

I thought about the final years of my parents, who though passionate Christians and believers in the teachings of Jesus found it hard (as do I) to embrace the reality that at the end there is no reprieve from the body’s failings.

Good job! I decided to smile. I decided to embrace the encouragement. Oh, I’ll still bike and walk and hope doctors and medicines keep me young-ish and vigorous for years yet. But maybe my cyclist encourager generously intuited that in fact at this stage being a failure in contrast to her cycling prowess is nevertheless a success.

You’re getting old, I hear her say. You’re falling behind the younger pack as it becames ever clearer that, as Psalm 103 reminds, we bloom like flowers of the field then vanish with the wind. Still you’re climbing on. Good job, Michael!

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Bible, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment, discernment, discernment amid differences, human finitude

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 3: From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

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KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72I don’t know how to reweave an unraveling church if we don’t do it together. Precisely the inability to do it together is a key source of unraveling. Can we do it together?

In “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling,” I introduced a six-part series on ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling. Here in Part 3 I home in on whether we can, in fact, do the reweaving together. I actually don’t know—if anything  our ability to work together seems to be declining. So in this post I proceed with no assurance that we can do this even as I ponder how, particularly through functioning in communities of discernment, we might take steps in that direction if so inclined.

From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

Battle. Win-lose. If we differ, my position should defeat yours.

What if instead we moved from position statements to communities of discernment? Let me test steps and possible outcomes of such a move:

A first step is to take seriously that we all know only in part, as if through a mirror dimly, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians. Then, face to face with God, we will know fully. But now we get some things right—and some wrong. If our main approach to Christian faithfulness is to determine what’s right, then champion it as the position all should hold, we bypass the getting-things-wrong part.

If we accept that we know only in part, we may consider a second step: recognizing that the fullest knowing we can experience now flows from seeking truth together. This is what Jesus invites in Matthew 18, as he promises that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is with us.

Jesus also empowers us to take a third step. That’s to trust that when we gather in his name we form communities of discernment through which in what we bind or loose on earth we are seeking to implement what is bound or loosed in heaven, in God’s realm. We dare not do this frivolously. Just verses earlier Jesus has warned that better to drown than cause one who believes in him to stumble. Still amid ways we can misuse this amazing power, we are to help each other discern what to bind or loose.

Yet how far from knowing how to do this we are, as increasingly we even accuse each other of wrongly binding or loosing. We take stumbling seriously—except that the cause of stumbling is not I but always you.

Is there a step beyond this impasse? Acts 2 offers a possibility. Long before, humans in their pride had tried as one people speaking one language to build a tower to the heavens—but God had scattered them into many peoples babbling countless dialects. Now God’s Spirit falls as tongues of fire on Jesus’ first disciples, and they speak “in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” This astonishes their audience from many nations, because when these Galileans speak, “we hear, each of us, in our own native language.”

Not through human effort but through the Spirit’s power unleashed in the emerging church, Babel comes undone. Here we glimpse a fourth step, which is to trust that still today the Holy Spirit can empower us to speak and hear across the isolating languages our opposing viewpoints become. We won’t become communities of discernment unless when polarized we invite the Spirit to interpret for us. When faced with your seemingly misguided views I need the Spirit to help me hear your language.

If the Spirit interprets us to each other, then maybe we can begin to understand how to take a fifth step, which is to celebrate that in Christ dividing walls of hostility have been torn down. In Ephesians 2, the Apostle Paul celebrates that Christ is our peace. Drawing perhaps on a hymn that had celebrated Christ as unifier of the fragmented universe itself, Paul celebrates miracle: that primal division, a Berlin Wall between Jews once thought to be God’s people and Gentiles once understood not to be has tumbled.

Might that miracle, the reconciling peace of Christ who invites us to love the viewpoint enemies we turn each other into, destroy our walls today? I’m actually not sure. We battle even over whether walls should be demolished, if so how and in whose favor. In the years since I first began to develop the material in this post, theological warfare rather than peacemaking seems to be intensifying. But let me fallibly ponder what might happen if, when we gather around Scripture in the presence of the Spirit, we wrestled with divisive issues as communities discerning what to bind and loose today.

One key thing I suspect we’d wrestle with is the relationship between specific Bible texts and biblical themes or trajectories.

Take slavery, no longer, I hope, divisive, so maybe permitting calm learnings. How could Christians for most of Christian history support slavery? Because specific texts seemed to. But texts gain meaning within larger paradigms or worldviews that have come to be experienced as the common sense of the day.

For centuries worldviews that treated slavery as just the acceptable way things were coexisted peacefully with texts that seemed likewise to assume slavery as normal. Then abolitionists drawing on broader scriptural themes of justice and equality shattered the slavery-is-acceptable paradigm. That’s why we don’t view biblical admonitions for slaves to obey their masters as validating slavery today. Specific texts do matter—and so do the trajectories that sometimes help us interpret given texts anew.

Cut to that battle-surrounded word homosexuality and such successors as LGBTQ. Among reasons we’re at each other’s throats in this area of discernment is a clash over whether to prioritize specific texts many understand to condemn same-sex relationships or such classic scriptural themes as God’s love for the stranger, alien, slave, outcast of a given era or context. Some believe that unless the specific texts bind us, we evade God’s call to costly righteousness. Or they may point more broadly to the primal order of creation as being union of man and woman.

Others wonder whether Jesus wants to surprise us today by turning those we marginalize into heroes, as he did the Good Samaritan or the woman who wept on his feet, frequently turning upside-down expectations of who belonged among God’s people. This reversal was then extended as some of the early Christians, such as Peter in Acts 10-11, came to see Gentiles as belonging among God’s people. Previously Gentiles had been deemed unclean but now, as Peter is told in a vision, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Whatever our overarching paradigm ends up being, it will guide our giving greater or lesser weight to given scriptures even as careful study of and wrestling with specific texts continues to be essential.

Maybe we should try a cooler topic, though it was once white hot and still is for some: the role of women in the church. When I was growing up, I understood specific texts to make matters clear: women are to be silent in the church. Hence women can’t be pastors.

But by the 1995 Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective, the Mennonite church was teaching that all leadership offices are open to women. After generations of agonizing discernment, many had shifted to a paradigm in which, for example, Jesus’ empowerment of women took priority. Now texts that seemed to forbid women pastors were understood as tied to specific New Testament circumstances. Yet others of us believe that in loosening the ties that bound us to literal application of specific texts we’ve taken a broad path leading not to righteousness but to destruction.

Then let’s ponder peace and war and the implications in such a setting as Eastern Mennonite Seminary, both Mennonite and ecumenical. Roughly half of our students are Mennonite and perhaps mostly believe Christian participation in war goes against Jesus’ teachings and his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) call to love enemies, to do good to those who persecute us. But half are from other denominations and may believe the Bible makes space for some just wars to be fought precisely to free the captives and liberate the oppressed, as Jesus preached in his Luke 4 “inaugural address.”

Across our traditions, we take specific texts with implications for war and peace seriously. But which ones we treat as literal guides to daily decisions or as dreams of what may yet be in the already-but-not-yet of the kingdom of God depends on the broader paradigm within which we approach them.

Does this cover the issues for discernment? Not remotely. We need to discern whether the Bible offers explicit or at least thematic guidance on abortion. The death penalty. Gun control. Care for the earth. Global warming. Whether God is biased toward the poor or if not how we honor biblical warnings that the mighty will be brought low. Whether government is part of the problem or the solution in caring for “the least of these.” Whether to be Christian is to prophetically challenge capitalism, constructively embrace it, or both.

Is the point that any view is as good as another? No. It’s that when we see only in part we need to wrestle things out together. If I’m too quick to focus on specific texts when the debates rage, you need to remind me of classic themes of Scripture that could complexify my engagement with such texts. If I’m too quick to ride on viewpoints above the fray, I need you to call me down into the muck and sometimes God-ordained suffering the specifics call for. To wrestle it out together is to become the communities of discernment Jesus invites us to embody.

At EMS we already teach discernment, which threads its way through our curriculum. Yet at EMS and in many congregational and denominational contexts we can more proactively name the importance and nature of discernment and the need to train each other in the discernment process.

This is ever more crucial in a church and culture addicted to offering position papers even when what will truly bless us is the reconciling peace of Christ. That blessing can come as walls of hostility are replaced by bringing our warring views to Scripture in the presence of the Spirit who empowers us to understand each other’s foreign languages. Then truly we might be within range of learning how redemptively to bind or to loose without causing each other to stumble.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in an August 2012 EMS convocation presentation and provided some of the seeds for the seven-part series of summer 2015 posts overviewed in “Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 1: Introduction.”

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Bible, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 2: A Bible as Big as the Universe

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KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72So much is unraveling, yet there is also so much potential for reweaving, movingly life-giving, to take place. When we engage it as the living Word of God, the Bible is key to our reweavings.

In “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling,” I introduce a six-part series on ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling. Here in Part 2 indeed I seek a living Bible large enough to provide resources for reweaving what is coming apart.

A Bible as Big as the Universe

I was raised a missionary kid in Cuba and Mexico as steeped in the Bible as I can imagine being. On top of Bible-saturated church activities, our family added biblical devotions. And readings of a verse by every family member before eating while food smelled heavenly nearly killed us, because there were nine children. I read the Bible through by age nine.

By age 12 I was entering an agnosticism that would persist into young adulthood. The gaps between how I experienced life and what my church taught the Bible meant had stirred wrestlings with whether God existed and Jesus was alive.

Around then I encountered The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, and its wardrobe which behind the coats delivered you into the land of Narnia. I was soon ablaze with love: for Narnia; for main characters Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy; for the great lion Aslan, Lewis’s version of Jesus; for the feeling that it all hung together, meant something, was going someplace wonderful even amid and often because of battles and betrayals and deaths topped off by Aslan’s resurrection after the White Witch slaughtered him.

The Bible didn’t do that for me. Narnia did. However, if fifty years later the Bible hasn’t become Narnia for me it does, as I’ll soon elaborate, send its own shivers up my spine. Within the Bible unfolds the story of God, of Jesus, of the Abrahams and Sarahs called beyond their old lives; of disciples struggling to recognize one walking beside them after dying; of a eunuch and an apostle called Philip drawn strangely and wonderfully together by the Holy Spirit; of Jesus as the vine on which we’re branches; and the story, if we enter it, of every last one of us.

Entering a living Bible as big as the universe is important for many reasons.

First, we all live by a master story, a story within which our values, motivations, goals, and views of what’s real and true are shaped. Currently it’s hard to know what the U.S. master story is, as financial, political, moral, security, environmental, climatological crises, and so many more complicate the American Dream.

The dream is fading quickly amid pleas for the 99% not to be dominated and exploited by the 1%, for recognition that “Black lives matter,” for a transcendence of the political and cultural and church battles that are so often causing us to do so little as injustices mount, infrastructure crumbles, and the planet heats—setting record after record after record as droughts deepen, species go extinct, and the human race itself hovers on the brink,

When human master stories unravel, we need the Bible’s master story. To step as if through a wardrobe into its world is to find a Bible full of the failed master stories that betray us. Then it tells us that if we enter God’s and ultimately Jesus’ story, we’ll grasp that even failure, as human master stories label it, can become success—as in the gospel down becomes up, enemies are loved, justice flows to widows who cry out, the lowly are raised, the least of these are cherished, the earth which is the Lord’s is wrapped in tender care instead of exploited and ravaged nearly to death, the cross as death symbol in the Roman Empire’s master story becomes life symbol in the Christian master story.

Second, the Bible is bigger than our conflicts. Like Narnians, we too are riven by battles, including maybe most frighteningly seeing different understandings across religions and within Christianity as our good battling their evil. And how we view the Bible becomes one more thing to fight about.

But my marriage, of all things, has invited me to grasp that the Bible is big enough to nurture multiple perspectives and needs. Precisely as I was for a time rejecting the Bible, the girl who was to become my wife Joan was finding Bible and faith meaning little.

During her teens, however, Gerry Keener, a Mennonite student at Houghton College, led a Campus Life club at which through life-changing Scripture study Joan grasped the possibility of a more intimate relationship with God through Christ. This new awareness that Scripture could mean something now led to Joan’s passionate involvement in the charismatic movement, within which the Holy Spirit deepened her study of the Bible as God’s living Word.

We met at Eastern Mennonite University at the peak of my agnostic phase and her charismatic one. Two-plus years later we were married. A doomed effort to blend oil and water, thought friends. But through studying at EMU and then Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary, I learned forms of Bible study that allowed me to ask the hardest questions, trust that the Bible was big enough for them, and try the adventure of following the Jesus the Bible reveals.

Meanwhile Joan continued to cherish charismatic teachings that God and the Bible could so vitally shape daily life. But as crises were met with “Pray harder,” Joan also concluded aspects of charismatic interpretation as she had been taught it made the Bible too small.

Together we came to believe that the Mennonite church I was raised in and to which Gerry had introduced Joan offered resources for our different, shifting, yet mutually enriching journeys with Scripture. We came to cherish the Anabaptist-Mennonite understanding that through our individual lenses we see biblical truth only in part. This is why, as Jesus in Matthew 18 invites us to do,  we discern Scripture together in light of Jesus’ teachings and under guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This emphasis on opening Scripture communally in congregations, faith traditions, and even the church worldwide inspires me as I think, for instance, of all the traditions or absence thereof present at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. Each tradition emphasizes different things. Sometimes they reach conflicting conclusions, as when Mennonites at EMS see adult baptism and Methodists infant baptism as what the Bible’s master story invites. So to say the Bible is bigger than our conflicts is not to say it ends them.

But the Bible itself, like the church worldwide today, is full of traditions and teachings jostling. The Bible overflows with anecdotes of biblical characters themselves in conflict over how to understand God’s story. The Bible is bigger than our conflicts because we dare trust that if we take any of our varied and even warring viewpoints into the Bible, we can’t destroy its master story. Even if we battle within and about it, it will drag us ever deeper into its own world, in which God’s tale is told within and through diversities and tensions and varying emphases in all its raw and ragged glory.

This leads naturally to a third reason to enter and read the Bible together: The Bible forms us both through our submission to and our tussling with it. The Bible invites our humility before its truths larger than our understandings. The Bible is also strong enough to give back treasure when we tussle with it. Jacob wrestled with God to become Israel. We can likewise wrest divine blessings from challenging the Bible with our deepest doubts, struggles, questions.

My Old Testament seminary professor at Eastern Baptist, the late Tom McDaniel, taught that yes, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. . .” (2 Tim. 3:14-17 NRSV). But that doesn’t mean the people of the Bible always grasp how God means to speak. So McDaniel taught that the Bible corrects us by showing how people get God wrong as well as how we get God right.

Thus McDaniel would say we have to tussle with the Old Testament book of Joshua’s accounts of slaughters in the name of God of enemy men, women, and babies. Even amid such  cruelties God can speak, as the Israelites sometimes grasp that God is teaching them to be less brutal than surrounding peoples. Yet when we interpret Joshua through such biblical themes as God’s steadfast mercy and love and Jesus’ invitation to love enemies, McDaniel would say Joshua shows us that to fully hear God speak, people need to grow in understanding.

A fourth reason to enter and read the Bible together is that it inexhaustibly feeds our hearts, minds, and souls. Agree or disagree with it, fight or submit to it, be angered or comforted by it, the Bible, in all its poems and psalms, its dialogues and diatribes, its doctrines and dictates, its stories and sermons, never runs out of ways to form us. I don’t mean we should worship the Bible. But the Bible does invite us to worship the one it reveals, the Lord of Hosts, the God who in Jesus set up his tent among us, whom John calls the Word made flesh. The Bible invites us through meeting millennia of God’s people at their finest and frailest to be formed as people of the Bible ourselves.

We’re so tempted to shrink the Bible to our pet ideas, blindnesses, and battles. Yet as we read it both individually and together, it can nurture a Michael, a Joan, or billions of us, whatever our beliefs, doubts, questions, or callings. Nothing we take to it will prove too large for this Bible as big as the universe, a Bible big enough to help us reweave all unravelings.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in the MC USA “Purposeful Plan” (particularly related to “Christian Community”), presentations and sermons at the Mennonite Church USA Pittsburgh 2011 assembly, at EMS convocation in August 2011, and in multiple congregations. It was first published in The Mennonite.

communities of discernment, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Theological training

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling

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KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72When I became a seminary dean in 2010, I knew there was a lot I didn’t know and especially, if I dare echo Donald Rumsfeld, a lot that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. But among the more important things I didn’t know was just how dominated my tenure would be by unravelings and ways this would call for constant assessment of what was worn out, what was working, what needed to be thrown out, what needed to be rethought, renewed, or reaffirmed.

In light of such ferment and sometimes chaos, which has been constant yet is also perhaps even intensifying at the moment, I’d like to think “aloud” about what’s happening and what we might do about it through a six-part series of blog posts asking, can we find “Hope as Church Unravels?”

The first and introductory post is this one, on “The Unraveling.” Here let me first say more about what is unraveling then preview the next five  posts.

Indeed denominational structures and loyalties are unraveling. This is true of many denominations, not least my own. As I write, the structures of my denomination, Mennonite Church USA, have been thrown into near-chaos not only by all the larger forces tugging at all denominations’ stability but also specifically by explosive effects of divisions over how LGBTQ relationships should be viewed. Regional conferences are processing whether to secede from MC USA. Congregations are discerning whether to leave conferences. Individual participants debate whether to stay or leave as their congregations sometimes confirm and sometimes repudiate their personal beliefs.

Reflecting on such realities, Paul Schrag, editor of Mennonite World Review, has asked this dramatic question: “What if Mennonite Church USA stopped being a denomination? Or stopped being, period.” He makes the provocative point that if instead of remaining bogged down in managing declining structures amid constant divisions, we could invest our energies in building a looser but much larger tent for a host of Anabaptist-related entities.

Longstanding quid-pro-quo understandings between pastors and congregations are unraveling. It used to be the case that this was the basic pact: Future minister, denominations and congregations would say, you go to seminary for three years, and even if you come out in debt things will be fine; we’ll give you a job and we’ll pay you enough to make at least a modest living and not be swamped forever in debt. We might even help pay for your tuition.

Ministers would say okay then, I’ll invest in getting the scholarly and formational training that will allow me to serve you with passion, wisdom, and integrity.

And together we’ll generate enough mutual commitment to maintain salaries, buildings, programs drawing many congregants in turn willing to provide support when the offering basket comes by. We’ll celebrate a virtuous cycle producing good will, high morale, and long-term sustainability.

In many established congregations and contexts this pact, in fact, remains intact. But under stressors of declining loyalties, shrinking congregational participation and giving, the sometimes welcome but often forced need to make ends meet through bivocational pastoring (not to mention external economic pressures), in many other settings this pact is unraveling.

In tandem, long-standing patterns of theological education are unraveling. This is evident in a simple statistic yet one that has had high impact on my seminary work: for over 10 years, since reaching a peak in 2004, cumulative enrollment at seminaries in North American has declined most years by about half a percent a year.

Many are sounding alarms or analyzing causes, but let me touch on just two.

Take, for instance, the thinking of M. Douglas Meeks, Cal Turner Chancellor Professor of Theology and Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. As summarized by reporter Heather Hahn in “Does U.S. Theological Education Have a Future?” Meek believes that due to a growing shortage of teachers amid the headwinds denominations and seminaries are facing, “United Methodist theological education in the United States is in a crisis, and a longtime scholar says if trends persist the modern way of training pastors could disappear altogether.”

Or take the bracing view of Kyle Roberts, Associate Professor of Public and Missional Theology at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. His very blog post title, After the Fall of Professional Ministry, What?, makes a riveting claim. Roberts says that

As much of the American church continues to decline (especially mainline Protestantism and now also conservative (white) evangelicalism) and as the “nones” and “dones” increase by leaps and bounds, particularly among millennials, major questions loom for institutions in these circles. Fewer people means less money, less money means fewer jobs, fewer jobs means declining human resources (and therefore less creativity and energy) to “right the ship.”

Roberts offers a summary of how seminaries are addressing such dynamics which I find painfully familiar, given that we’ve been working at precisely such possibilities at EMS:

Many seminaries are experiencing the implications of the dramatically changing landscape. Some are trying their best to adjust expectations and to creatively and constructively adapt to the change. They can do this by shortening curriculum (and therefore lowering cost to students), by revising marketing strategies, by seeking out creative partnerships, etc. Others are simply doubling-down on what they’ve always done: pushing harder for donations, marketing the same but more intensely, trying to be even better at academic theology, practical ministry skills, traditional pedagogy, and so on.

Roberts’ next statement, however, sends a chill up my spine even as it also makes me want to take up his challenge:

But for these institutions to survive, must less thrive, into the uncertainty of the looming future, I wonder if something deeper and more fundamental is needed. We might need to think again about the nature of ministry itself.

Evident in both Meeks and Roberts, and frequently articulated by others, is the possibility that what we face today in our denominational and  seminary journeys—as well as in the larger cultural dynamics with their own chaotic, fast-changing impacts—is not just the need for incremental adjustments. Rather, much of what we’ve taken for granted, held dear, clung to for generations may need to be rethought and reinvented.

At the same time, persons of faith have always encountered periods of particularly intense change, not least during the first century, or when the Roman Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion after centuries of the empire’s persecution of Christians, or during the 1500s Protestant Reformation.

Still, even if sometimes in dramatically changed forms, the gospel has persisted and even flourished. This suggests that rethinkings or reinventions shouldn’t simply start anew but should draw on the wisdom of those who have wrestled things out over millennia.

So how do we move forward with due benefit of what has been combined with requisite openness to what is to be? I don’t claim to know the answers. I’m as bewildered sometimes as any of us by what to do when on the one hand business as usual isn’t working yet on the other hand employees deserve to be paid and the budget needs to be balanced and if we don’t change it may all crumble yet if we do change and don’t get it right it may all crumble.

However, each year at about this time I particularly try to reflect on this or that aspect of such matters in start-of-semester seminary convocations. So in each of the next five posts I’ll draw on materials prepared for an Eastern Mennonite Seminary convocation, culminating in the still-in-preparation presentation I’m due to present on September 1, 2015, and will share as a post soon after. Here is a preview of the posts:

Part 2 will be “A Bible As Big As the Universe.” I see this post as laying a foundation for what is to come. Here I explore how I’ve learned to love the Bible as an endless source of wisdom and guidance for any people in any circumstances over the millennia–yet also to trust that the Bible is strong enough for us to tussle with it, argue with it, challenge it when old verities seem to unravel.

Part 3 will be “From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment.” Here, amid our many divisions regarding what the Bible says or what understandings God is calling us to, I look for ways we might move from win-lose patterns of relating. How might we instead join in communities of discernment focused on the teachings of Jesus under guidance of the Holy Spirit in which even our differences—and sometimes especially our differences—become resources and treasures? I draw on case studies related to slavery, understandings of same-sex relationships, the role of women, or war and peace.

Part 4 will be “Grandparents Dreaming, Grandchildren Seeing.” Here I explore “Christian Formation in an Age of Nones.” I suggest “We should plunge into the yearnings and questions giving birth to the Nones” (those answering “none of the above” when surveyed regarding their commitment to a given faith tradition).  And I offer this guess: “Courageous exploration of how the church has died needs to be paired with hope that not all structures, not all traditions, not all sacred scriptures and holy rhythms and rules are ready for the dead-bones heap.”

Part 5 will be “Recognizing Jesus When Phone Booths Vanish.” Here I draw on the Luke 24 story of the disciples, grief-stricken and bewildered on the Emmaus Road, being joined by a stranger who is precisely the Jesus they’re grieving. How do we, like they, not recognize the Jesus already among us? And how does this connect with the question of whether we’re sometimes structuring church life or seminary training as if the required expertise were to repair phone booths—when in fact in an era of cell phones, phone booths have vanished?

Part 6 will be “Present at the Big Bang.” Here I want more than anything else to testify, starting with observing the process in my own granddaughter, to the miracle of our becoming ourselves. And I want to ask how, in deep and primal ways, seminary training and our lives in community with each other form us as the selves God invites us to be. Much is unraveling; miracles of weaving and reweaving also abound.

—Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.