“We are undone” - a reflection on the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement
As a Specialist in Church History and Missiology with Mennonite Mission Network, and as a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University School of Theology, I have been working on editing a new Mennonite World Conference Global Anabaptist-Mennonite history series (successor to the previous, now-completed Global Mennonite History Series), to be based on biographies. I’m currently co-editing the first volume, focused on Congolese Mennonites, which will also appear as the first volume of a Dictionary of African Christian Biography book series.
Participants in a biography-writing workshop in Kinshasa, DR Congo, discuss who they will write about. Read more about the workshop at https://dacb.org/church-history-workshop/.
Although it’s a mouthful to explain, it gives me joy to collaborate with so many institutions to make stories of our global Anabaptist forebears more widely available. But it is also sometimes a challenge to try to integrate the work I’m doing with MAST with my ongoing work on supporting the preservation of the stories of the global Anabaptist movement.
I have concluded that the best way to articulate the connection between these two involvements is to say that I am working on helping the global Mennonite church come to terms with two kinds of stories: stories from the new centers of the Anabaptist movement, and stories of “peace” church violence. For various reasons, both types of stories can be hard to tell, hear, and/or get access to. And yet, as I argue in a reflection piece that has just been published in the January Mennonite Quarterly Review, these stories offer an opportunity to move us, as a global church, toward repentance and revival.
Such stories “invite us to celebrate the contributions of those situated on the margins of official stories and powerful institutions, and to respond with lament and justice to the pain of those betrayed and harmed.” And in this way, they offer a way for the true church to become “visible.” As Catholic political theologian, William T. Cavanaugh, states it — in terms that hit uncomfortably close to the Anabaptist focus on the “visible” church — the church becomes visible not through its holiness or purity, but through its penitence and repentance. As I conclude:
Are we a “peace church”? A leading producer of avant-garde “peace theology”? Founders of a globally significant “peace organization”? The ultimate apologists for Christian non-violence? I long to see our commemorations of the last 500 years include a significant focus on the ways in which we have ripped to shreds any credibility we might have had in the peace and non-violence department through our betrayal of our suffering or marginalized members. I long to see “non-violence” begin to refer not only to our refusal of military service and our migrations to avoid conscription, but to the work of naming and identifying our own violence, hearing from those who have been harmed by it, confessing and rejecting it, and repairing the harm it has caused.
Given what is now known about how individual and institutional abusers are adept at avoiding accountability, deflecting responsibility, and “weaponizing” theological concepts such as reconciliation or peace theology, repentance must involve not only the confession of sin but the willingness to embark on a process of truth and repair. In such a process, stories of victim-survivors become central, and our theology makes space for resistance to violence — “anti-violence.” When stories of marginalization, betrayal and pain – carefully documented and courageously shared – can be honored and believed in our communities as part of our very “catechesis,” then our communities can become places where “harm is repaired and offenders are held accountable.”
May the Spirit, as in the revival at Shirati, bring us to the awareness that without such contrition, everything we thought we were doing with God’s approval goes up in smoke – whoom! – and we are undone.
Read the full article (shared with permission of MQR) here: