CGR Vol. 22, No. 3 (Fall 2004)

This issue of The Conrad Grebel Review was occasioned by the fourteenth assembly of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC), held in the summer of 2003 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. It was an assembly that almost did not take place. In the months leading up to it, Zimbabwe did not appear to be a good choice for an international meeting. There were widespread shortages of food and fuel, occasional riots in the streets, high unemployment, a currency shortage, and a mounting social and political crisis. Would non-Africans come to Zimbabwe? If they came, would conditions be stable enough to allow for a celebration of faith?

In the end, the MWC Assembly 14 did come to Bulawayo, and some 7,000 people from more than 60 countries celebrated the wonder and the miracle of it all. The reflections published in this issue were occasioned by Assembly 14, but they take us well beyond the assembly itself. The various contributions speak to different aspects of the question of what it means to be members of a world-wide Mennonite and Brethren in Christ family of faith. Assembly 14 provided a particularly powerful point of focus for answering this question.

The MWC has developed into a significant representative international body, beginning to take its place alongside more established international mission and service institutions. One may say that MWC has developed as it has because Mennonites and Brethren in Christ have wished to respond faithfully to the dramatic changes in membership that have developed over the past century. What these changes mean for the church as a whole are only gradually being understood and assimilated. Writing from the perspective of a Mennonite Brethren church member from Canada who experienced Assembly 14, David Wiebe describes the MWC as something “we desperately need if God is going to get through to us.” God’s message, he is convinced, will come to the north through “our sisters and brothers from the other hemisphere.” Things have not always been seen this way.

At the time of the first MWC assembly, held in Basel, Switzerland in June 1925, no one could have predicted that the MWC would become what it has become today. The locus and focus of the first conference was European and its purpose was historical: to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the emergence of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland in 1525. The small number who participated in that initial conference represented only European and North American Mennonite churches.

The historical emphasis of the first session soon was replaced by theological and spiritual foci in succeeding conferences; the international scope grew and expanded slowly. At the fifth conference, held again at Basel in 1952, simultaneous translation equipment was used, with the addresses translated into English, German, and French. Such simultaneous translation has remained a feature of assemblies ever since, although the languages translated have varied. The sixth conference in 1957 at Karlsruhe, Germany witnessed the participation of representatives from twelve different countries.

In describing the MWC in 1957, Harold Bender stated that “The conference is basically an inspirational and discussion conference.” He concluded that the regular MWC sessions (at that time held every five years) “can contribute much to the strengthening of world-wide Mennonitism and the effective discharge of its spiritual tasks.” (Mennonite Encyclopedia, III, 642; see also ME, V, 574-75). Bender was right in pointing to the potential contributions of MWC — probably right beyond his own imagining. In the years following, MWC has become a primary agent in the strengthening of a world-wide anabaptist fellowship.

The Mennonite and Brethren in Christ (BIC) churches of the southern hemisphere, invisible at the first assembly in 1925 and only beginning to be recognized by mid-century, were in the process of quietly growing and developing as churches in their own right. The first MWC assembly to be held in the southern hemisphere (and not without controversy) was the ninth assembly, held in Curitiba, Brazil in 1972. The MWC churches of the south were beginning to be recognized, organizationally as well as in the participation of members from throughout the world. The demographic shift was well underway, with the steady growth of MWC churches of the south now a tangible reality.

Nowhere was the growth of MWC churches stronger than in Africa. In 1900 there was only one BIC church in all of Africa; by 2003, at the time of the fourteenth assembly in Bulawayo, MWC church members in Africa numbered 451,959, narrowly outnumbering MWC members for all of North America (451,180). Furthermore, when the world-wide membership of MWC was considered, it was clear that the numerical balance had shifted solidly from the north to the south, and the shift was actually accelerating. According to 2003 figures, out of a total MWC membership of just under one million three hundred thousand, Europe and North America combined accounted for slightly less than 505,000, or less than 40 percent of the whole (figures from the MWC web site: www.mwc-cmm.org). It appears that this general trend will continue into the future, since the vigorous growth of MWC churches of the south is not abating, and it is not being matched by growth among member churches in the north. The MWC has taken on increasing relevance as a place where the voices of the increasing majority of our church members are welcomed and heard.

The nature of the Mennonite/Brethren in Christ family of faith has changed dramatically, and this raises numerous challenges that call for reflection and action. The inescapable reality is the increasingly wide diversity of culture, language, and location within this one family of faith. The reality of diversity within a world-wide body raises serious questions:

• Is there a particular “identity” that unites MWC members and churches?
• How is MWC identity expressed in word and action? Said another way, are MWC members and churches united by a theological vision? By a practical vision?
• What does it mean to share the Gospel in widely varying contexts?
• How important are “styles of worship” in establishing and expressing identity?
• What does it mean to share gifts in the face of wide economic disparities?
• What does it mean to incarnate Christ’s body in a world that is fragmented politically, socially, economically, and religiously?
• Is it possible for members of the body of Christ to reach beyond cultural barriers to establish a vital fellowship, a working community, that transcends the particular and the divisive? Can faith and love overcome cultural particularity?

Questions such as these are being addressed in MWC, informed by the difficulties and practicalities of church life on a world-wide scale. In the first of two addresses first presented as the Bechtel Lectures for 2004, Nancy Heisey, current president of MWC, draws both on her patristic studies and her experience in the international church to argue for a practical “catholicity,” an inclusivity that respects diversity. The history of the church demonstrates dangers at the “universal” end of the spectrum, as well as at the “sectarian” end. The temptation of universality is to identify Christian language with imperial ambitions; the temptation of sectarianism is to erect tight boundaries and to dismiss those who have not joined this narrowly-defined community. In answer to the question of identity posed by the growing and diverse MWC family, Heisey provides the practical answer that the MWC “family” is rightly made up of all those who choose to belong.

Although she stops short of providing defining theological marks to characterize the Mennonite/BIC family of faith, Nancy Heisey does point to common understandings found within MWC member communities: a commitment to the truth in Christ, mutual accountability in communities formed by those who choose to belong to one another as they follow Christ. All of this implies a life of discipleship and a commitment to the ways of peace.

The MWC continues to work actively at the tasks of discerning and naming the distinctive beliefs and practices of its growing family of faith. In 1999 it commissioned a study booklet, From Anabaptist Seed, to function as a catalyst for world-wide discussion of the Anabaptist identity of current MWC churches. This booklet is now available in ten languages, and continues to generate study and discussion. As the result of a specific process of discernment, a seven-point document outlining the “Shared Convictions” of MWC member churches was adopted at Bulawayo (this document is reproduced below). Those who have chosen to belong to the MWC continue to discern and define the characteristics of their family of faith.

One of the marks of the early church in the time of Clement, Tertullian, and Origen was that it was a church of martyrs, of faithful sacrificial witnesses. The same was true of the Anabaptist communities of the sixteenth century. In her second address, Nancy Heisey takes martyrdom as her point of departure, reminding us that as aspiring witnesses to the truth, we must relearn the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and self-denial. Self-sacrifice is not to be carried out in a detached “passionless” way, or out of a “gnostic” desire for self improvement, but rather out of our need for each other. Faithful witness, even when it is not required to the point of death, still requires a willingness to sacrifice for the love of God and neighbor. This love, in its turn, will be demonstrated in the sharing of gifts.

The Mennonite World Conference (MWC) has been concerned not only with the theological identity of its community, but also with the practical dimensions of true communion. To help members move from the theoretical to the practical, MWC commissioned Pakisa Tshimika and Tim Lind to write Sharing Gifts in the Global Family of Faith (Good Books, 2003), a book that explores the practical dimensions of giving within an Anabaptist framework. Faithful witness cannot be reduced to the extreme of martyrdom at one end, or of simple verbal witnessing on the other. Communion is experienced when gifts are shared; and in order for gifts to be shared, some discipline and sacrifice will be required, Heisey reminds us. When we recall the faithful witnesses of the past, what grows is not despair at loss and difficulty, but rather hope in God’s faithfulness.

In order for the sharing of gifts to take place, for communion to be experienced, people have to come into relationship with one another. As the reflections of Barbara Nkala, Dothan Moyo, Thomas Frank, Erv Wiens, Doris Dubé and David Wiebe attest, the assembly in Bulawayo was a powerful occasion of deep communion. Here the gifts of African food and hospitality were generously shared in a time of want, with so many visitors who had come from lands of plenty. Nevertheless, these material gifts, as well as the spiritual gifts of prayer, worship, music, and testimonies of God’s faithfulness were shared and enjoyed by all, in a communion of thankfulness and praise.

The Bulawayo assembly was a miraculous “foretaste of heaven,” say Thomas Frank and Erv Wiens, an expanded family circle of people no longer strangers, says Doris Dubé. In this setting, Siaka Traore reminded us all that the gifts we offer and accept from one another are judged by their quality, not their quantity. I recommend Siaka Traore’s unforgettable story of the African chicken to any who suspect that all this talk about “gifts” is really about prying northern money out of tight pockets. Gifts of any kind that are offered in love, build the body of Christ. But for communion to exist, these same gifts must be accepted and valued in the same spirit of love.

Included in this issue of The Conrad Grebel Review are two essays that did not arise directly from connections with either the MWC or the Bulawayo Assembly. Nevertheless, their subject matter furthers the lines of reflection already begun.

Recognizing the widespread “generic” use of the term “anabaptist” in “Mennonite World Conference circles,” C. Norman Kraus considers the question of whether it is legitimate to speak of an “anabaptist” interpretation of Scripture. Central to his analysis is a description of how North American Mennonitism evolved historically into a world-wide, trans-cultural family of faith, at the same time that it was confronting fundamentalism at home and re-discovering its own historical sixteenth-century roots (the latter identified as “Anabaptism” with a capital “A”). Kraus describes lower-case “anabaptism” as “a post-denominational perspective” whose goal is not orthodoxy but rather authenticity in biblical interpretation. He identifies four hermeneutical convictions that characterize an “anabaptist hermeneutical perspective” in continuity with the sixteenth century Anabaptist tradition, distinct from Protestant and Roman Catholic hermeneutics. Central to this perspective is the call for “authentic contextualization of the message and example of Jesus.”

Kraus maintains that the anabaptist way of interpreting Scripture provides a dynamic and living way of discerning and translating “the meaning of the life of Christ for the diverse cultures of the world.” His observations have particular relevance for the conversations taking place within the MWC family of faith, where the more brittle historical orthodoxies of “Mennonitism” speak with difficulty to the multiplicity of cultural contexts and realities. In concert with Heisey, Kraus envisions a world-wide family of faith defined not by orthodox pronouncements, but rather by faith in Jesus Christ and obedience to his example and command, with room for plurality grounded in dialogue and accountability.

 In our concluding article, Thomas Finger approaches the contemporary theme of social justice – or perhaps better said, global injustice – through the lens of sixteenth-century Anabaptist spirituality. When brothers and sisters from the world-wide family of faith gather together, nothing is more vident than the economic disparities that separate us from each other. The proclamation of communion will necessarily confront the scandal of surplus and need co-existing within the same body of Christ. While Heisey notes that the ancient martyr tradition of authentic witness leads through discipline and sacrifice to the sharing of gifts, Finger notes that the Anabaptist spiritual tradition likewise calls for the uprooting (or crucifixion) of any “creaturely attachments” that prevent a “resurrected life in the world.” It is the incarnation of the resurrected one in the body of believers that continues to call us to faithfulness and a closer communion, a path that (the patristic witness and the Anabaptist tradition each maintain) must lead through spiritual renewal and personal sacrifice. 

The fourteenth assembly of the Mennonite World Conference in Bulawayo was a noteworthy step in an unfolding story of faithfulness and challenge. Bulawayo brought into clear focus once again the new global reality of Christ’s church. In Africa, as in other parts of the world, the painful adjustments of growing beyond the colonial legacy are receding into the past, and the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches are blazing their own trails in popular education (religious and practical), church administration, responsible tithing, church planting, grass roots evangelism, and witness. The remarkable story of these developments in Africa has been told by African Mennonite and BIC writers, again under the sponsorship of the MWC, in A Global Mennonite History: Volume 1, Africa which was first presented at the Bulawayo assembly. This history of Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in Africa, as narrated by Africans themselves, deserves a wide hearing in the MWC community. It is a story of faithfulness that leaves us with the light of hope for the future.

Introduction

Let me begin with a few statements that try to locate me – location is an important part of what I want to say about Anabaptist[*] identities in the many settings around the world where we Mennonites and Brethren in Christ people now find ourselves. While none of us is as ready to proclaim our objectivity as were scholars of earlier periods, a bit of vulnerability still persists when one decides to connect her academic thoughts with a personal narrative. Nevertheless, here is a bit of what I am and what I am not – I am not a theologian, and not a scholar of Anabaptist history. By practice, I am a historian of early Christianity with a deep interest in how that community is portrayed in the New Testament and in the centuries that immediately follow. By experience, I am the child of Brethren in Christ missionary parents who grew up among the Navajo people of the southwestern United States. I lived for a year and a half in France; worked with Mennonite Central Committee in Congo and Burkina Faso; did a two-year study project with my husband Paul Longacre, during which we visited churches and other Mennonite friends in 45 countries; and have been involved with Mennonite World Conference since 1995. So I also have a deep interest in the way our churches live and witness in diverse settings. These lectures are part of my ongoing process of trying to hear the conversation between what I have studied and teach, and what my life experience has been.

I begin this conversation by looking at the efforts of early Christians to identify themselves as “the third race,” suggesting that these efforts reflect the tension they experienced between the particularities that identified them and their sense of call or desire for a universal identity. Early Christian particularity, or peculiarity, was a given of their emergence from within the Jewish community, which in the broader Mediterranean context had been known as different for centuries. Christian identity was further determined by the move, witnessed in the New Testament, to fully include Gentiles in the community. Thus, aspects of particularity were givens in the early Christian period but, as the exploration of second and third century documents will show, Christians also clung to their particularity.

While recognizing the strengths of what set them apart, Christians also were drawn toward a universal vision.[2] To the extent they chose to define themselves in universal categories rather than live within the tension between universal and particular, I suggest they opened themselves to the problematic consequences of what is often called “Constantinianism.” With that backdrop, I will then return to questions of twenty-first century churches in the Mennonite World Conference community, placing in dialogue John Howard Yoder’s concept of “catholicity” with that of historian Justo Gonzalez. This dialogue will suggest that catholicity opens a space for the many particularities within our family, while offering an understandable identity we can invoke in our invitation to those around us. I will suggest that the reality of our performative[3] experience, that is, our lived-out experience, in the global Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community is one of many particularities who have chosen to be together in a common commitment that offers hope in our world.

In the study of early Christianity (I will not seek to describe the diversity that characterized the movement from the first century onward),[4] traditionally scholars of Anabaptist history have identified the most determinative event as the transition that took place for Christians in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine proclaimed tolerance for Christianity as a religion. The extent to which this perspective has shaped the thinking of contemporary Mennonites who study church history is reflected in the fact that most people who have heard of Constantine report that he installed Christianity as the official religion of the empire, a transition that actually took place more than fifty years later under Theodosius.[5] Nevertheless, the problem of the “Constantinianization” of the church has been perceived in various streams of the Christian movement ever since. The choices made during that period were frequently critiqued by John Howard Yoder, choices defined in his naming of “the recurrent accents of the anti-Constantinian critique”:

• its concern for the particular, historical and therefore Jewish quality and substance of New Testament faith in Jesus;
• its holistic inclusion of communal and cultural dimensions of ‘way of life’ within the faith (decision-making patterns, e.g., or economics) as religious issues, rather than making them peripheral behind the priority of spirituality or dogma;
• its insistence on the voluntariness of membership in the visible church, usually expressed in the baptism of persons old enough to confess responsibly their own faith;
• its rejection of the support, defense, and control of the church by the civil rulers;
• its relativizing of the hierarchal dimensions of the church in favor of maximum freedom and wholeness in the local congregational fellowship.[6]

Based on this list, I suggest that the primary aspects of the Constantinian temptation are a quest to establish a universal identity, dogmatic spirituality, coercion, civil control, and hierarchy. For this paper, the temptation of a universal identity will be specifically in focus.

Walter Sawatsky has criticized the traditional Mennonite reading of Constantinianism within a “fall of the church” paradigm.[7] However, for Yoder, the Constantinianization of the churches and of society was not something linked with Constantine himself. Yoder acknowledges that this process was going on for much of the early Christian period before Constantine himself became emperor (a process we will explore below), and that “the use of his name does not mean an evaluation of his person or work.”[8] Further, Yoder sees the problems of the churches over the centuries as a series of compromises, which he dubs “neo”-Constantinianisms. Writing in 1966, for example, he comments: “Something of the same character takes place in Latin America when Christians give their a priori approval to the political revolution that they consider imperative and, therefore, imminent. Such advance approval of an order that does not yet exist . . . we would call ‘neo-neo-neo-neo- Constantinianism.’”[9]

The “Third Race” or “New People”

In order to consider the particular-universal tension with which the early Christian movement lived, we should look at several documents from before the Edict of Milan in 313 C.E. The specific discourse to be considered is the efforts of Christians to define themselves in conversation with the ethnic categories that shaped the self-understanding of the peoples of Late Antiquity. Early Christian writers frequently used the terminology of “the third race” or “a new people” to talk about their identity. An inquiry into this discourse points out the unhelpfulness of the assumption that the rise of Constantinianism represented the fall of the church. Rather, the temptations to which the bishops yielded when they agreed to go along with Constantine’s maneuvers had always been present. While some aspects of the situation of twenty-first century participants in the Christian movement are vastly different, the loss of old identities that has accompanied the demise of Christendom suggests helpful analogies might be drawn between early Christian reflection on these matters and our own situations.[10]

At least thirteen references to Christians as a “third race” or a “new people” are found in second- and third-century texts. Each reference manifests both a sense of particularity as definitive of the Christian community and a pull toward the universal. The ancient Christian writers who used this language were not oblivious to tensions within their thinking, but rather than naming those tensions as between particular and universal, they were more likely to articulate them first on the spectrum between physical and spiritual. A second, multi-layered tension is equally visible within traditional binary oppositions such as Greek/barbarian and Jew/Gentile, and the relationship of those oppositions to an understanding of a human community as made up of a complex mix of peoples.

The Epistle to Diognetus articulates both physical/spiritual and Greek/barbarian tensions. The writer begins by identifying his audience as one that wants to learn “the religion of the Christians.” Asking “why this new race or practice has come to life at this time, and not formerly,” the writer situates his response between the Greeks, who “reckon as gods” those things that Christians do not accept as divine, and the Jews, who “keep . . . superstitions.” Thus the apologist has firmly established the boundaries from whose limits the author claims “the religion of the Christians” can liberate one, and has offered a “new race,” Christians, as the answer to older problems of identity.[11]

If a universal calling is hinted in this introduction, it is articulated more forcefully as the text proceeds. The theme of newness in relationship to old oppositions is underlined in section two, where the audience is enjoined to become “a new person” ready to listen to “a new word.” The problem with the old opposition between Jews and Greeks is spelled out as a problem with their respective cults. The text’s famous fifth section is introduced by the promise of a revelation of “the mystery of the Christians’ own religion.” Christians participate in the particular behaviors of many cultures, but their identity is distanced from the daily realities of human culture: “Yet while living in Greek and barbarian cities . . . and following the local customs, both in clothing and food and in the rest of life, they show forth the wonderful and confessedly strange character of the constitution of their own citizenship.”[12]

The remainder of the treatise (not including the last two, somewhat separate sections) completes the portrait of a reality that goes beyond the known cosmos, referring to Christians as the “invisible” soul of the world, formed by the Creator himself. For all of its questing toward a new universal identity, the Epistle to Diognetus nevertheless remained in conversation with the particular. For within this section the early Christian commitment to nonviolence is inscribed within a very particular understanding of God: “Did (God) send (Jesus) as a man might suppose, in sovereignty and fear and terror? Not so, but in gentleness and meekness . . . not compelling, for compulsion is not an attribute of God.” This non-coercive view of God is tied directly to the perseverance of Christians under persecution.[13] The remainder of the text nevertheless insists on the spiritual foundation of Christian identity, manifested through faith rather than nature, and ordered by a God of mysteries who lives in heaven.[14] The text’s overall leaning is toward the universal, describing an identity that it was hoped would come to characterize all of humanity.

Another second-century text, the Apology of Aristides, considers questions of identity in even more detail. The author’s initial question about the nature of God is answered throughout the body of the text with extended discussion about the various “classes” or “nations” of humanity. The Syriac text lays out a system of four classes – barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians. The Greek text names instead pagans, Jews, and Christians, perhaps an echo of the “third race” concept. However, it also recognizes greater complexity in human identity, as it subdivides pagans into Chaldeans, Greeks, and Egyptians.[15] Both versions then proceed through a description of the errors of the cult of the “nations” they have named, including barbarians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews, with the culmination being a description of the proper worship of the Christians.[16]

In addition to this nuanced portrait of human experience, Aristides, when he comes to the Christians, does not spiritualize their way of life but defines them according to a series of concrete practices, including doing good to enemies, delivering orphans from those who mistreat them, and taking strangers into their homes. The importance of actual practice is further underlined as he commends Christian modesty that does “not proclaim in the ears of the multitude the kind of deeds they do.” Yet the spiritual nature of Christian identity is not forgotten and indeed is linked directly to their status as “a new people,” for this people is visible by “something divine in the midst of them.” Further, as for Diognetus Christians are the soul of the world, for Aristides “the earth abides through the supplication of the Christians.”[17] Thus while Aristides articulates a strong sense of Christian identity as marked by the performative and particular, his use of “new people” language also evokes a universal vision.

Several other works that may be situated in the second and third centuries likewise use the language of “third race” or “new people.” The Epistle of Barnabas twice mentions a “new people,” both times as part of an explanation of the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection.[18] Both references lie within the internally contested space of Jewish-Christian identity. Its non-literal reading of the scriptures places it within the territory of the quest for the universal, as the treatise calls for circumcision of the heart rather than the flesh, and for a spiritual understanding of the food laws.[19] The Sibylline Oracles provide a fascinating illustration of complex but universalizing negotiation of identity spaces, as both Jewish and Christian writers claim to be reading pagan sources as witness to their particular truths. In one of the Christian sections, a retelling of the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection describes the result of the resurrection as the sprouting of “a new shoot . . . from the nations.” This conclusion follows the placement of the story within the Jew/Gentile opposition, describing “Hebrews” as “stumbling” against the stone of the son of God, but Gentiles being “gathered under his leadership.”[20] De Pascha Computus, a third-century Carthaginian text dealing with the date of Easter, calls Christians “the third race of humanity,” a reality it locates as a spiritual identity by using the additional descriptive term “mystery.”[21]

Clement of Alexandria makes frequent use of “new people” language. At least four references to laos kainos are found in The Instructor, in contexts that suggest both the Jewish-Christian frontier and the emergence from the Jew/Greek opposition. In an explanation of how Christians are children of God, Clement speaks of “new people” as a biblical term,[22] later juxtaposing the childlikeness of Christians with the hard-heartedness of the “ancient race.”[23] In his discussion of how Jesus as Instructor spoke through the Hebrew Scriptures, he links the new name given to Jacob by the wrestling angel and a “new name” “reserved . . . for the new people.” Later in the same section, Clement describes the progression of Logos beyond the Old Covenant: “To the fresh and new people has also been given a new covenant, and the Logos has appeared.”[24] While elsewhere in The Instructor Clement is exceedingly concerned with practical details of Christian life, his references to the “new people” clearly seem to choose a spiritual, universalizing approach.

In the Miscellanies, Clement moves along the edges of the Greek/ barbarian tension, although at various points he refers to the more complex world of Egyptians, Scythians, and Greeks.[25] His one reference to Christian identity as emerging from such a tension is a citation from the Preaching of Peter, where that work calls for worship of God going beyond the cult of either Greeks or Jews. Having located himself on that boundary, however, he moves to redefine his desired territory: “But we, who worship Him in a new way, in the third form, are Christians. For clearly, as I think, he showed the one and only God was known by the Greeks in a Gentile way, by the Jews in a Jewish way, and in a new and spiritual way by us.” Throughout, the spiritual realm is the place of true Christian experience.

Clement’s North African contemporary Tertullian sounds a different note. Tertullian’s use of the “third race” is found in his attack on those who suggest that Christians can avoid persecution by confessing their identity in heaven rather than on earth. This reference is unique, putting the language of a new identity in the mouths of Christians’ opponents, and with a negative connotation: “Will you plant there (in heaven) both synagogues of the Jews . . . before which the apostles endured the scourge, and pagan assemblies with their own circus . . . where they readily join in the cry, ‘How long shall we suffer the third race?’” Although the Jew/Gentile border is visible in Tertullian’s articulation, in an interesting divergence from the other passages under consideration, he also locates the expression in a concrete setting – that of Christian martyrdom. Further, his scorn for those who seek to avoid suffering offers a twist; his opponents are placed in heavenly territory, while his view of Christian identity insists on an earthly location. Tertullian has broken the ground for this unique perspective earlier in the chapter, when he looks not forward but backward, asking whether Christ “preserved a race such that He is looking for a testimony to Himself from them. . . .”[26]

Origen’s argument Against Celsus offers a final third-century perspective on questions of Christian identity in the struggle between particular and universal. In Book 8, Origen deals at length with the pagan philosopher’s critique of an aspect of Christian particularity – the lack of support for the empire. For all of its philosophical posturing, Against Celsus in this final book takes on the cast of a dispute over practice. Somehow the points raised by the earlier critic have drawn Origen toward the realities of the everyday. Celsus had raised the question of Christian refusal to honor the daimon or fortune of the emperor, paraphrasing or misquoting the gospel text by stating that Christians said they could not serve many masters. He thus seemed to suggest it was the Christian rejection of the ambiguity of a world of many powers that made their way of life a problem for the empire. Such talk, he insisted, was “the language of sedition, and is only used by those who separate themselves and stand aloof from all human society.” For Celsus, the conflictual territory was between those people who could place their religious practice within the framework of the empire, and those who could not.

In his reply, Origen took up Celsus’ argument that if Jesus had been God, punishment would have come upon those who caused his suffering. He describes Jesus’ death as God’s plan, but sees it as related to the physical visibility of Jesus’ suffering. The concrete location of what has happened in the polis is then underlined: “Some new thing, then, has come to pass since the time that Jesus suffered – that, I mean, which has happened to the city, to the whole nation, and in the sudden and general rise of a Christian community.” Origen’s “new thing” is thus both particular and universal, the latter inclination being sustained elsewhere in his explanation of how the Roman empire made possible the spread of the Christian message.[27] Like Clement, Origen also spiritualizes the potential of Christian identity, when he refutes Celsus’ claim that “any agreement between the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Libya, as well Greeks as Barbarians, (is) impossible.” Impossible, Origen retorts, for all of these people within their physical identities. However, it is possible when humans are “released” from the body.[28]

In their negotiation of the limited space of a proscribed practice within the pre-Constantinian empire, then, early Christian writers demonstrated that they were aware of the identity tensions within which their communities grew. Their choice of the images of a “new people” or “third race” represents both an awareness of their particularities and their desire to belong to something universal. To the extent they were able to live within the tension in the early centuries, their community life and their theological energy led to their growing appeal among the peoples of the Mediterranean world. Before the end of the period when Christianity was an illicit religion, it had spread not only north into Europe but beyond the borders of Rome’s sway, south into Ethiopia and east into Persia. However, the reality that within decades after the Edict of Tolerance, Christian writers such as Lactantius had moved from a powerful articulation of the reasons that Christians would not fight to a spirited defense of the right of the emperor to use force suggests that the intersecting of the universal vision of the church with the universal vision of the empire created a deadly mix.[29] When the “third race” was understood to define a universal reality rather than a definition of particular spaces lived out where Christian faith was taking root, it defined a vision fraught with peril for the churches. Yet other early Christian language pointed in a different direction.

“Catholicity” as Another Approach

The “catholicity” of the church was another vision articulated among early Christian communities. This term can be used to describe the kind of experience reported on the second-century epitaph of a Christian from Asia Minor named Avircius Marcellus. Avircius had traveled as far west as Rome and as far east as Nisibis, east of the Euphrates. Everywhere he went, the epitaph reports, “he found other Christians who set before him ‘the fish’ . . . from ‘a holy virgin’ . . . , accompanied by bread and wine.”[30] In contrast to later doctrinal arguments Avircius’ observations were metaphorical and couched in terms of practice. This usage suggests an understanding of Christian identity discussed in the second-century writings of Ignatius and Irenaeus. Ignatius brought the word “catholic,” literally “according to the whole,” into Christian discourse early in the second century, in his critique of so-called heretics.[31] Their error, as Justo Gonzalez reads him, was to sow division by claiming universal status for their particular teachings rather than by paying “heed to the entire ‘catholic’ witness of the entire ‘catholic’ church.”[32] Later in that century, Irenaeus explained why four gospels were included in the New Testament canon:

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the ‘pillar and ground’ of the church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men (sic) afresh.[33]

For Gonzalez, this passage, often ridiculed as a simplistic or magical perspective, offers a description of catholicity, connecting as it does the gospel accounts, both normative and plural, with the geographic diversity in which they were finding homes. Gonzalez links this understanding to the related concept of apostolicity. While it “later became a means of excluding all who could not claim a literal, mechanistic succession from the apostles,” in its earlier uses apostolicity was intended to oppose those who claimed secret or elite status based on the teaching of one apostle rather than from “the open tradition received from all the apostles, through all their successors, and shared alike by those successors and by all those others who agreed with them.”[34] Elsewhere, Gonzalez reiterates his definition of catholicity, warning against the tendency to equate “universal” and “catholic.” While the universal “is that which is uniformly present everywhere; ‘catholic’ is that which is according to the whole, that in which all have a place.”[35]

Gonzalez raises the issue of catholicity and its definition as inclusive of Christian diversity in a context of stressing the danger of what he calls “sectarianism,” the claim that one’s own group possesses all the truth. Acknowledging the countervailing danger of “syncretism,” he proposes the solution the early Christians worked out in the spreading diversity of the second century – the solution of creeds, canon, and the authority of the episcopacy.[36]

For descendants of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, the sound of those “safeguards” has a highly problematic ring. Yet within our own extended family, we too have manifested a yearning for an understanding of our defining central idea(s). Proposals for naming Anabaptist defining ideas have been made by Donald Durnbaugh, J. Denny Weaver, and C. Arnold Snyder. While they do not entirely agree, these proposals manifest a degree of coherence in their insistence on discipleship, community, and peace.[37]

The desire for an agreed-upon expression of what everyone in the Mennonite/Brethren in Christ family shares is not uniquely northern, although northern theologians have been especially engaged in the effort to define such ideas for the whole. For example, in a discussion about Anabaptist distinctives at the Consultation on Theological Education on Five Continents in 1997 in Calcutta, one participant from the global south insisted that the consultation should determine the central “doctrines” of the Anabaptists, which could then be taught in all our theological training programs. A move in that direction is the statement of “shared convictions” presented for discussion to MWC member churches by the General Council in Zimbabwe. As important as this process is, it has not made specific space for the different histories and processes of coming into the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community that have shaped the nearly 100 member churches of MWC.

In a study of how biblical texts serve as sources for character formation, Lisa Sowle Cahill describes a tension which pushes us a step further in understanding how our particular and universal identities might both be honored in our community. She criticizes biblical scholars for the perpetual lifting out of the diversity of voices within the biblical record, and agrees with Carol Newsom that Christians must agree on a “‘single, fairly coherent story’ of Jesus as the Christ” as central to our identity. Commitment to diversity alone, she argues, is of little use in ethical discussion, for it makes possible the argument that any behavior might be acceptable under particular circumstances.[38] Agreeing with Cahill, John Howard Yoder goes so far as to pronounce pluralism as “lazy.” Pluralism, or Cahill’s diversity, he suggests, would defend the Crusades by seeing them in light of Bernard of Clairvaux’s deep piety. In contrast, the NT perspective of diversity is that of “several members of one body, several functions with the same purpose, numerous people doing different things but each in unity with the others. Accountability and commitment to truth are important aspects of the church’s unity in diversity.”[39]

Despite his sharp critique of pluralism, Yoder does not propose a simplistic universal agreement among the churches. Although he seems surprisingly unaware, even in 1990, of the growing international reality of and diversity among Anabaptist-related groups, his work on ecumenicity speaks to related issues. Drawing on the definition of catholicity of fifth-century Vincent of Lérins, he argues for catholicity as “what has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.” He argues that the only way to apply this definition is to look at specific places and times, that is, “locally.” Veteran missionary to India Stephen Neill defined this local-based vision as representing an area “small enough that one can get to open fields by walking twenty minutes.” Yoder adds to this geographic proposal a practical ecclesiological criterion: locality requires that what the church is supposed to be like must be possible. So, if the Eucharist is a regular part of church life, then those who can offer Eucharist regularly need to be readily present. “Catholicity has . . . been ‘located’ in that no one place, not Rome or Canterbury or Rhodes (nor, we might add, Kitchener-Waterloo, or Elkhart, or Strasbourg) is privileged; such conversation must take place everywhere.”[40] Yoder’s articulation does not go far enough, for it does not deal with the question that arises within a global fellowship. If the church must make possible what it proposes as authentic, and if mutual accountability is to be taken seriously, then members of a community need to be able to talk with each other. The givens which must be opened up for scrutiny are those which assume the impracticality of Elkhart talking to Kinshasa, for example, or even more critically for Djakarta to talk to Sapporo.

Yoder does locate the particularity in the particularity of the witness that is normative for the church, the New Testament writings.[41] He does not naïvely insist that the normative witness look alike in all its genres. Rather, his work supports the reflection of others that even in the normative biblical witness, the particular people of God were always negotiating their identity in relationship to the broader forces around them. Walter Brueggemann makes this case for the prophetic witness of ancient Israel. The prophets recognized that “the pressure of a ‘universal identity’ is always a threat to a particular identity; assimilation is ever a clear and present danger.” Yet they constantly interacted with the very identity they perceived as a threat. So “Hosea seems to mount a polemic against ‘fertility religion,’ but does so by a Yahwistic appeal to the modes and images of fertility.”[42] Paul’s use of both rabbinic argumentation and Greco-Roman rhetoric in constructing his argument for Gentile inclusion in Galatians offers a NT example of the same negotiation at work. Indeed, the matter of NT normativity is itself caught up in the reality that it is impossible to determine exactly when the NT period was over.

Thus, the story of Jesus and his first followers, as it grows into the story of the spread of the world Christian movement, is one of continuing negotiation between the universality of God’s call and the particular places and times where that call was answered, as has been documented in our discussion of the “third race” conversation above. Rebecca Lyman describes the work of Justin Martyr in the second century against “heretics” as representing a similar negotiation. Justin’s efforts to articulate Christian thinking in philosophical terms “is not a transformation of ‘Hellenism’ by ‘Christianity’ or a cultural takeover by an external ‘third race,’ but a reconfiguring within the religious culture itself as a means of understanding ontological universality and multiple cultural identities.”[43]

Dale Irvin and Scott Sunquist’s effort to present the geographical and theological diversity of the Christian movement is replete with illustrations of the perpetual Christian experience of defining ourselves to each other and in relationship to the contexts in which we find ourselves as both similar and as different. M. J. Heisey insists that this process has continued throughout the story of modern descendants of the Anabaptists. Her study of the Brethren in Christ peace witness in the United States and Canada in the period between World War I and World War II notes the BIC effort to define themselves while participating in and being influenced by many cross-currents. Quoting Martin Marty, she refers to their identity as full of “cross clefts and crisscrossing.” Building on the stories of many who participated in this body of peace practices, she describes the quest to maintain a peace witness as “messy.” The ideals articulated by the leaders often conflicted with the realities of daily experience, yet concrete expressions of the peace witness sometimes expressed the gospel more faithfully than the leaders’ pronouncements.[44]

It may seem that historians are addicted to the messiness that theologians are determined to correct. Here I find helpful the intersection of the articulations of Yoder as theologian and Gonzalez as historian. While Gonzalez’s discussion of catholicity seems largely focused on doctrinal matters, perhaps understandable for one whose career has been marked by reflections on the history of Christian thought, at one point he names “North Atlantic sectarianism” and “socioeconomic sectarianism” as problems of practice that threaten to overcome the Christian community, threats that are not foreign to a global Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community.[45] Yoder, as a theologian, also insists on geographical and practical realities of catholicity:

Catholicity is not ‘looking for a home’ in the sense of a vagabond who ‘once lodged will no longer roam’; it is a lived reality that will have its place or ‘location’ wherever all comers participate, in the power of the Triune God, in proclaiming to all nations (beginning where they are) all that Jesus taught. Only if the avowed agenda is that broad and that open can we claim the promises of the Lord who pledged that he would accompany us to the end of the age.[46]

Mennonite World Conference has operated with a membership application procedure that has been criticized as “loose,” yet it has been able to respect the particularities among us. It is true that some member groups reflect very little practice or teaching that Northerners would find recognizably “Mennonite” or “Brethren in Christ.” Yet the membership process begins with a group that expresses an interest, even a choice, to belong. In the first stage of the process, the applying group receives a short questionnaire that includes the following questions: “What are your reasons to consider yourselves Mennonite?” and “What are your relationships to other Mennonite groups in the world?” After a visit from MWC representatives, a report is made to delegates from member churches in the continent of the applicant church. Upon the recommendation of those continental caucuses, the church is admitted to membership. The document outlining this procedure stresses that the main objective of the procedure is for both the applicant church and MWC, especially in the continent where deeper relationships between churches might practically be developed, “to learn to know each other more fully.”[47]

The statement of “Shared Convictions” adopted for study by the General Council of MWC during Assembly 14 seeks to provide material that can deepen applicant churches’ understanding of the question, “What are your reasons to consider yourselves Mennonite?” Beginning with a statement of the importance of a catholicity which goes far beyond our own family, it claims that we are “part of the one body of Christ at all times and places.” The document then proceeds to name both what we share with other Christians and what we consider distinctive to our particular faith story: the church as a community “following Christ in life,” the interpretation of Scripture in the community “under Holy Spirit guidance” and “in the light of Jesus Christ,” “becoming peacemakers who renounce violence, love our enemies, seek justice and share our possessions with those in need,” and “the spirit of mutual accountability” in the faith community.[48]

These “Shared Convictions,” it is hoped, will prove helpful as they are used for the conversation and relationship outlined by the membership application guidelines. We still face the process of going beyond adopting these convictions for study to choosing them as central to our identity. It is not clear what currents of experience, history, or relationship to other parts of the church will come to bear on our efforts to provide this degree of self-definition. It can be hoped that we can agree on something manageable in translation, and at the same time clear and allowing room for member groups to use it in more particular self-definition within their specific locations.

Northern Anabaptists in the twentieth-century “rediscovery” of our sixteenth-century European heritage have at times chosen to describe ourselves as a “third way,” “neither Catholic nor Protestant” reality.⁴⁹ This naming brings to mind the early Christian exercise of the language of the “third race.” While this construction may have been valuable in considering relationships to our European and North American ecclesiastical history, it is not likely to be useful for the global community of Mennonites and Brethren in Christ in the twenty-first century. Some might propose an alternative, “neither Evangelical nor Pentecostal,” but the reality is that in many places our sister churches fit one of those identities as much if not more than they do any traditional Anabaptist self-understanding. So it seems critical that rather than trying to find a new universal name for ourselves, we accept the particularities that we represent and learn to find in them gifts that we offer to each other. We follow our Anabaptist heritage in choosing to belong to one another as we follow Christ. Our particularities – the witness for justice of the church in Colombia, the energetic evangelism of the church in Ethiopia, the openness to new learning of the church in the Netherlands, the creative worship of the church in the Congo, the service to the poor of voluntary service workers in Canada and the United States, and the practice of smallness as sign of the church in Japan – all of these have something to add to our community of faith.

We cannot be like each other in most ways. We can choose to walk together, to support each other financially, in prayer, and through meetings when it is possible for us to gather. We may not be in a position to measure the results of our becoming a global community within this collection of Anabaptist identities. Yet we carry within us the hope that our catholic witness will offer an invitation within the broader church and in the world to join those who, following Christ in life, are leaning into the coming fullness of God’s reign.

Nancy R. Heisey, the daughter of Brethren in Christ missionary parents, is President of the Mennonite World Conference. She is an associate professor of biblical studies and church history at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA, and has spent 18 years working with the Mennonite Central Committee.

Notes

[*] The discussion about whether and how the term “Anabaptist” is appropriate for (at least) the community of churches within the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) framework is a relevant one, but not one that will be pursued in depth here. See C. Norman Kraus, “Anabaptist or Mennonite?” in this issue of The Conrad Grebel Review.

[2] This universal vision can be seen in Paul’s writings, in particular in his emphasis on the “all” in Romans. See Rom. 1.5, 2.16, 3.23, 4.16, 5.12, 8.14, 11.32, 14.10, 15.33. Paul is criticized by Daniel Boyarin for articulating and promoting a vision that destroyed the particular calling of first-century Jesus-believing Jews. See A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).

[3] For Homi Bhabha, nation is an ongoing process of what emerges in the tension between the “pedagogical,” or the expression of the idea or the image of what the nation is, and the “performative,” the reality of the way different individuals and groups live out their lives within and at the margins of that idea. It is within this tension that “people” emerge as “a problem of knowledge.” For “people represent the cutting edge between the totalizing powers of the social and the forces that signify the more specific address to contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population.” See Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-7; “DissemiNation,” in Nation and Narration, 297.

[4] See Nancy R. Heisey, “Anabaptist Identity and Faithful Diversity,” Brethren in Christ History and Life (August 2003): 92-108.

[5] Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Vol. 1 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 182; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 636-37.

[6] John Howard Yoder, “The Disavowal of Constantine: An Alternative Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Scottdale, PA, and Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 1998), 247.

[7] Walter Sawatsky, “Taking Church History Seriously When Weighted Down by Yoder’s Dismissal of Constantinianism,” paper delivered at the Believers Church Conference, University of Notre Dame, March 8, 2002.

[8] Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church,” in Cartwright, The Royal Priesthood, 56-57.

[9] Yoder, “Christ, the Hope of the World,” in Cartwright, The Royal Priesthood, 197.

[10] See Justo Gonzalez, The Changing Shape of Church History (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2002), 35-40, and chapter 5, “Mapping a New Catholicity,” for a discussion of reasons that considerations from the second and third centuries are useful to Christians reflecting on the issues they face in the twenty-first century. See a similar move by Alan Kreider, relating early Christian thinking about conversion to contemporary missiological issues, in The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), xvi-xvii.

[11] Epistle to Diognetus 1.

[12] Ibid. 4.6, 5.1.

[13] Ibid. 7.3, 7.7.

[14] Ibid. 8, 10.7.

[15] Aristides, Apology 2.

[16] Ibid. 3-14.

[17] Ibid. 15-16.

[18] Epistle of Barnabas 5.7, 7.5.

[19] Ibid. 9-10.

[20] Sibylline Oracles, 1.345-7, 383.

[21] Kwame Bediako, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern Africa (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1992), 39. (Migne, PL 4.930 D-968 A)

[22] Clement’s use of this term in conjunction with the phrase “new name” seems to link it to Is 65.15 (LXX) rather than the more obvious connections to the “one new humanity” of Eph 2.15.

[23] Clement, Instructor 1.5.19-20.

[24] Ibid. 1.7.57, 59.

[25] Clement, Miscellanies 5.4, 5.7-8, 5.14.

[26] Tertullian, On the Scorpion’s Sting 10.

[27] Against Celsus 2.30.

[28] Ibid. 8.2, 43, 72.

[29] For a discussion of Lactantius and early Christian pacifism, see Alexander F. C. Webster, The Pacifist Option: The Moral Argument Against War in Eastern Orthodox Theology (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998), 156-59.

[30] Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Vol. 1, 106.

[31] Ignatius, To the Smyrnians 8.2.

[32] Justo L. Gonzalez, Out of Every Tribe and Nation; Christian Theology at the Ethnic Roundtable (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 20-21.

[33] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8-9.

[34] Gonzalez, Out of Every Tribe, 19-22, 122, n. 8.

[35] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Changing Shape of Church History (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press), 71.

[36] Ibid., 71, 73-74.

[37] Donald F. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism, reprint ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985); J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origins and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1986); C. Arnold Snyder, From Anabaptist Seed: The Historical Core of Anabaptist-Related Identity (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999).

[38] Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Christian Character, Biblical Community, and Human Values,” in William P. Brown, ed. Character and Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2002), 10-13.

[39] Yoder, “The Imperative of Chritian Unity,” in Cartwright, The Royal Priesthood, 292-93.

[40] John Howard Yoder, “Catholicity in Search of Location,” in Cartwright, ed., The Royal Priesthood, 301-20.

[41] See, above, the first point in the witness against Constantinianism. See also Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics,” in Cartwright, ed., The Royal Priesthood, 110, 115.

[42] Walter Brueggemann, “Ecumenism as the Shared Practice of a Peculiar Identity,” in Brown, ed., Character and Scripture, 231-47.

[43] Rebecca Lyman, “Hellenism and Heresy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (Summer 2003), 220.

[44] M. J. Heisey, Peace and Persistence: Tracing the Brethren in Christ Peace Witness through Three Generations (Kent, OH, and London, UK: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 21-23.

[45] Gonzalez, The Changing Shape, 75.

[46] Yoder, “Catholicity in Search of Location,” in Cartwright, ed., The Royal Priesthood, 320.

[47] “Membership Application Procedure,” unpublished MWC document (Heisey files).

[48] “What does it mean to be Anabaptist?” Courier (Quarters 3 & 4), 24.

On Christ the Solid Rock I stand, All other ground is sinking sand.

The image presented by this song has never been more vivid than during the fourteenth Mennonite World Conference (MWC) Assembly in Bulawayo, August 2003. To date, I’m still marveling at God’s mysterious and abounding grace! The MWC Assembly was a precious gift to the Brethren in Christ Church (BIC) in Zimbabwe. The peaceful and joyous occasion surpassed all our expectations and defied all our misgivings. There were bounteous blessings in Bulawayo.

Picture a place that has one of the worst publicity reports of human rights ills. The inhabitants wallow in hunger, political violence, unemployment, poor communications, riotous inflation, and all manner of suffering. Then brothers and sisters from some fairly peaceful and comfortable areas are asked to go and hold a week-long gathering in such a place. No one can be blamed for thinking that is sheer madness. The first miracle for BIC Church Zimbabwe was the big step of faith taken by the international community of the Mennonite and BIC churches when they decided to come and share with us in suffering. It is easy to share in joy, but to share in suffering is another story. That commitment preached volumes to us. It became a challenge also for me and for many others, I am sure. Would I have done the same, presented with a similar scenario outside my country? Right inside our country, there are many of God’s children languishing in various forms of suffering due to the sick economy and a harsh environment. What am I doing to share in this predicament with my country folk?

The visitors who came brought many gifts with them. These were food items; gifts of fuel to enable transportation; gifts of encouragement, love, and togetherness; not to mention huge donations of money that made the Assembly possible. Zimbabwean brethren still talk with wonderment at God’s providence. There is no way we would have taken care of even a tenth of the Assembly without the amazing gifts we received. 

The colourful spectrum in the meeting hall was a blessing for us all. There were different nationalities, tribes, languages, colours, and classes. According to world standards, these differences can cause communication and relational barriers. A miniature model of what was happening during the Assembly is the vibrant international choir that performed as though they had been singing together for years. The choir was made up of nationals from fourteen different countries. They amply demonstrated that God’s children are a united force. Music has no barriers. The message of the love of God through music says we are all heirs of the Father. We are family. We are one. I still can hear music in the air, which tells me God is good and compassionate all the time.

The youth did not feature much during the Assembly, but when they made their beautiful presentation of a song, they demonstrated that we still need to become globally oriented by communicating fully with everyone. They had one of the singers performing sign language as they sang. We need to engage in such [efforts] more and more, so that no one is left out.

Two major and relevant publications graced the occasion. Both texts were very significant to the theme of the Conference. If Siaka Traore’s vivid illustration of the live chicken gift to a visitor to one’s home in the African context was not clear enough, then Tshimika and Lind’s Sharing Gifts in the Global Family of Faith: One Church’s Experiment has enough illustrations to show that even those who are not materially rich have a lot to give. They can give of their time, talents, and spiritual gifts. The text is a rich and fresh way of approaching the topic of sharing gifts, especially when we consider the North/South relationship. The second text is A Global Mennonite History: Volume One, Africa, edited by John Lapp and Arnold Snyder. What is particularly exciting about this volume is that it is written by Africans, showing the African perspective of the development and spread of Christianity through the Mennonite and BIC involvement. It is hoped that future church historians can build further on this study. Again, there was sharing of gifts, in that the North provided the material resources and technical skills while Africa provided the human resources and knowledge of what had transpired in their areas. The effort was that of the body of Christ in action. What a rich resource for posterity! What a gift for Africa! A good foundation has been provided for others to build upon.

One of the most powerful interactions during the Assembly was a workshop titled ‘God Invites Growth in the Midst of our Grieving.’ It was packed full each day with sisters and brothers sharing their painful stories of loss and grief. Many hearts were heavy and bleeding still. A number of participants mentioned how the burden seemed to have become lighter after  listening to the stories of others. Some of those stories seemed worse than theirs. It was again noted that there are no boundaries where pain and grief are concerned. The love of God spans across nations and is shared in community. We are grateful that this workshop took place, because Radiant Publishing had been hoping to do stories of loss and grief and how the Lord brings healing in lives as testimonies to help brethren in similar situations. The Assembly beautifully jump-started that process. There are plans afoot to prepare some of the stories for publication.

In Zimbabwe, matters to do with HIV and AIDS are not yet wholly open topics. There is still some holding back when such issues are discussed. One of the highlights towards the end of the Assembly was the [memorial] quilt made out of 234 pieces beautifully sewn together. About a hundred people took part in this project. The love and patience shown in making each little piece shows how much the dearly departed are loved by us and by God. Again, this demonstrated how we all suffer the same pain in the loss of our beloved. God cares for all of us.

I cannot relate all the events that impacted many of us. But, whether it was a simple testimony of God’s goodness such as how the Lord God answered our prayers as shared by Ethel Sibanda, who headed the Prayer Committee; or a deeply researched topic such as ‘Saints, Sages and Singers’ by MWC President Nancy Heisey; or a symbolic act of forgiveness for past wrongs incurred during the slave trade, performed by an African and an African American, all messages were greatly uplifting. 

Even streams in a desert or an oasis have some undesirable creatures lurking there, in search of a living. We were not blessed by the few incidents where some guests lost their precious belongings to thieves. Still, it could have been worse, considering an average of 5,000 – 6,000 people were hosted each day. God was with us. God is with us, and he continues to be our Solid Rock and Fortress.

Barbara Nkala is Director of the International Bible Society of Zimbabwe and Malawi. She is an elder in a local Brethren in Christ congregation, and was the leader for plenary worship services at the MWC 2003 Assembly.

My father and mother-in-law recently visited us in Harare to see the new home that my wife Ski and I had built over the last two years. I had kept with me the Assembly 14 (A14) conference bag, in which I had stuffed my Assembly program book, song book, the Anabaptist Seed, and a collection of previous Assembly song books. As soon as my in-laws had left, I found the bag contents sprawled on the floor, and I was sad in a way to learn that my mother-in-law had requested the bag. But I was later excited that even ten months after the Assembly, both of us valued that bag!

I still had the books and a couple of volunteer T-shirts that I had used at the Assembly, but most importantly I still have the good memories of the Assembly itself, and how God’s mighty hand had played a major part in the proceedings. Both my in-laws had attended A14 and even now they are amazed at how spiritually filling the sermons were. To them it was a great occasion. My parents were there too, and have fond memories of the Assembly.

I worked as the National Coordinator for Assembly 14, and it was an honor working with Ray Brubacher and others in planning for it. I am ever thankful to the Mennonite World Conference community at large for the opportunity to serve God in my assignment. In August 2001 at Thomas Hoff in Germany, I had just started my official assignment as coordinator. My task then, so it seemed, was to defend my church and my country as a good choice to hold the Assembly. Already there were too many questions – about security, food issues, the rule of law – but I had been convinced that by God’s grace all would be well. I drew a lot of inspiration and support from a prayer  committee that we had chosen to intercede for the Assembly. My faith grew, and was never shaken, because then the only way to answer the concerns was by approaching God in prayer, knowing that he is a God who listens to and answers our prayers.

All may be history now, but my testimony is God is always faithful. I acknowledge that the Assembly itself succeeded not by might, power, or anyone’s intelligence but by God’s spirit and grace.

My role meant that I would be the team leader for the organizing committee. I had not done anything close to this before. Even Bishop Ndlovu allowed me to lead him at times. My age was against me, but I was determined to make this work. I met and made so many friends and connections both locally and overseas. I accessed high offices in Government departments, and at the end of it all had personal fulfillment. Today I don’t think my wife would care to walk the streets of Bulawayo with me, because I now stop at every corner, meeting people who attended the Assembly, and hearing just how wonderful the event was and how much they wish another Assembly would be hosted in Zimbabwe again. Quite a few are ready to attend the next Assembly, wherever it might be held.

I attended a wedding in Bulawayo in May 2004. One of the cooks was wearing a volunteer T-shirt used at the Assembly. During the same month I was privileged to attend a Brethren In Christ Men’s Fellowship Conference. I was amazed at seeing so many Assembly bags carried by the participants. It was good to re-unite with all those who had played a part in making the event a success.

I draw many lessons from the Assembly: the power of unity, trusting in God, the power of prayer and fasting. “Assembly Scattered” effects are still being felt. One pastor thanked me for the vision of Assembly Scattered. He received a donation of a computer and fax modem from an A14 “scattered visitor,” and the world was opened to him. A church in Mutoko is well mobilized to build a church building, thanks to a donation from other such visitors. A lecturer at a Bible school has connected with Bible Overseas to exchange information.

The Assembly may be history now, but it was more than an event: it was a blessing to us in Zimbabwe. We have fond memories of it, and we believe it was certainly a platform to share, in suffering, in joy, and all to the glory of God.

Dothan Moyo, a member of the Brethren in Christ Church, was National Coordinator for the MWC 2003 Assembly in Zimbabwe.