Fully Engaged

Missional Church in an Anabaptist Voice

James R. Krabill, Stanley W. Green, James R. Krabill, Stanley W. Green, James Krabill, Stanley Green

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780836199444
• eBook ISBN: 9780836147568
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Does your church look and sound and feel like mission? Mission happens when congregations fully align themselves with God’s purposes. As the missional church movement matures, Anabaptists bring a time-honored theological tradition, a contemporary spiritual vitality, and practical stories of witness to the conversation. How are churches and individuals living out Christ’s call to engage locally and globally? And how is it changing them in the process?

Featuring the voices of missional Mennonite leaders, Fully Engaged offers stories and analysis about how mission is taking shape in local congregations and contexts. A diverse chorus of Anabaptist pastors and laypeople explores the roots, tools, and applications of the missional movement. From nurturing church planting to creating a missional culture to preaching for missional engagement, Fully Engaged offers insights and ideas for churches looking for direction.

PART 1

Roots and
Foundations

1

Why Missional and
Mennonite Should
Make Perfect Sense

Wilbert R. Shenk

Say “DNA” and it is assumed everyone knows what you are talking about. Try starting a conversation about “deoxyribonucleic acid” and you’ll be met by blank stares. Fortunately, “DNA” is the shorthand for “deoxyribonucleic acid.” The discovery of DNA as the basis of the genetic code that is unique to each human being is a relatively recent scientific breakthrough. But it has already made a substantial difference in various fields.

For example, DNA testing has largely replaced the older method of fingerprinting and other means of establishing a person’s identity. DNA samples are used to trace the identity of persons who have died, leaving little or no information on themselves. Criminals are being apprehended by matching the physical evidence—including body fluids, skin, or hair unintentionally left on a victim—with samples taken from their own bodies. Persons who have served long prison sentences on death row are being released because DNA evidence shows that the accused person’s DNA does not match the evidence collected by detectives twenty or more years before. DNA testing is a reliable tool used to establish true identity and relationships.

The power of DNA is that it identifies the most basic components of an individual. Yet the individual fits within a certain pattern that is shared by the kinship system of which the individual is a part. What light might the DNA metaphor throw on the present genealogy of Mennonite Church USA in relation to its genetic code?

Mennonite Church USA in 2015 is made up of diverse historical, cultural, and theological strands that have been added, especially since 1800. Twenty-first-century Mennonites have difficulty imagining the circumstances that gave rise to the several sixteenth-century reformations, including the Protestant, Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, and Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists. While the roots of Mennonite Church USA can be traced to the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century, multiple cultural currents have left their marks on the descendants of the Anabaptists. Some of these influences have enriched MC USA; others have seriously undermined crucial Anabaptist convictions.

Anabaptist genius

The genius of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists was to recognize that the Christendom concept of the church was at odds with the apostolic vision. Christendom’s DNA was formed by its imperial origins in the fourth century. The Anabaptists felt compelled to recover the apostolic understanding of the church. This put them at odds with both Roman Catholics and the Protestant Reformers who accepted Christendom, the powerful governing system based on the alliance of church and state. This system left no doubt that it was prepared to use whatever force was necessary to maintain social and political order, starting with the mandatory baptism of all infants. To insure that every person born in Christendom, except Jews, would be both a member of the church and a compliant citizen, it was required that the child be baptized soon after birth. These were inseparable requirements: citizenship and church membership must be synonymous.

By the sixteenth century this church-state alliance had been in place for more than a thousand years. The fruits of the system were plainly visible. The church was corrupted by its entanglements with the state. Cardinals, bishops, and monastic orders were preoccupied with amassing political power and wealth. But for the peasant masses it was an oppressive system. They burned with resentment at the way they were exploited. The situation was like a volcano waiting to erupt. The masses were Christian in name only.

The Anabaptists rejected the entire system and called for the separation of church and state. The first article of the 1527 Schleitheim Confession denounced infant baptism as “the greatest and first abomination of the Pope.” Instead, “Baptism shall be given to all those who have been taught repentance and the amendment of life and who believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ … and desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The new birth is the only valid basis for becoming a member of Christ’s body, the church.

A key text for the Anabaptist movement was what we call the great commission, in Matthew 28:19-20 and Mark 16:15-16. This clashed with the interpretation of the Protestant Reformers. Opponents such as Julius Mencius and Heinrich Bullinger brusquely dismissed the Anabaptist appeal to the great commission on grounds that this threatened the stability of the local parish system. Rather than answering the Anabaptist critique, they argued for maintaining the status quo on the ground that Jesus gave this instruction only to the original twelve apostles.

Intimately acquainted with the spiritual plight of the people of Christendom in the sixteenth century, the Anabaptists held that everyone urgently needed to hear the gospel. In August 1527 a group of Anabaptist leaders met in Augsburg, southern Germany, to discuss the evangelization of Europe. Although historical evidence is meager, it is believed some sixty persons representing the scattered Anabaptist congregations were present. Whereas the meeting at Schleitheim was concerned with formulating a statement of doctrine and practice, at Augsburg the delegates focused on a strategy for evangelizing Europe and beyond. The threat of persecution, and possibly death, was no deterrent to these leaders. This has been called the Martyrs’ Synod because many of the delegates died within a short time as martyrs.

For the next sixty years, hundreds of Anabaptist evangelists, often at great sacrifice and constant risk, fanned out across the European continent sharing the gospel wherever they could gain a hearing. By 1550 Anabaptist evangelists were active in every German state, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, France, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, and Italy. Some had made forays into parts of Scandinavia. Balthasar Hubmaier was reported to have baptized three hundred persons at Waldhut in a single day, and Melchior Hoffman did the same thing at Emden five years later. Between 1551 and 1582 Leenaert Bowens baptized 10,378 converts in the area between Emden and Kortrijk.

Anabaptist laypeople were full participants in this extraordinary evangelizing movement. They used natural relational networks—family, vocational, social—to reach people. Women and men alike engaged in evangelization. All members were expected to participate. South German Anabaptist leader Hans Hut included in his charge to those he baptized the phrase that they should obey the commandments along with the great commission, preaching the gospel and baptizing those who believed.

From mission to survival

The transition from Anabaptist dynamism in the sixteenth century to die Stillen im Lande (“the quiet in the land”) quietism in the seventeenth century was the defensive response of a people struggling for survival. Intense and sustained persecution had taken a terrible toll. Some two thousand Anabaptist martyrs are known by name. By the end of the sixteenth century surviving Anabaptists were seeking safe havens. The missionary impulse became blunted, and descendants of the Anabaptists either retreated to the margins of a hostile society (south Germany, Switzerland) or entered the mainstream of an increasingly tolerant environment (the Netherlands).

Seventeenth-century Europe was a miserable place. The collapse of the Spanish empire early in the seventeenth century meant the loss of its dominance in Europe. This left a power vacuum that opened the way for continual military conflict. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, essentially a series of religious conflicts, resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. Political instability and constant wars kept the Continent unsettled. The Little Ice Age in Europe during the 1600s took a terrible toll. Crop failures, massive food shortages, and large-scale outbreaks of disease resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people.

In the late seventeenth century migration became a defining characteristic of the Anabaptist-Mennonite churches. The first of multiple waves took place within Europe. After intensifying its efforts to get rid of all Anabaptists in the 1660s, in 1671 Switzerland made an all-out effort. Some seven hundred Anabaptists fled. At the invitation of Count Karl Ludwig the majority went to the Palatinate. The count sought Mennonite help in recovering farmland devastated during the Thirty Years’ War. The rest went to Alsace and Montbeliard. But wherever they went in Europe, the state churches made sure the Anabaptists were not allowed to own land or evangelize and baptize outside their own group. Even burial of their dead was often a contentious issue. In 1683 the first group of Mennonites arrived in Germantown, Pennsylvania. But large-scale emigration to North America did not begin until after 1710.

In 1660 Dutch Mennonite pastor T. J. van Braght published his massive compilation, the Martyrs Mirror. He was disturbed by what he observed to be growing spiritual complacency among his people. The Netherlands had emerged as the leading naval power in Europe and its economy expanded rapidly. Dutch Mennonites benefited from the growing tolerance in Dutch society toward minority groups, on the one hand, and the fine reputation of Dutch Mennonite bankers and businessmen, on the other. Dutch Mennonites intervened with the Swiss government in the seventeenth century on behalf of their Swiss sisters and brothers, repeatedly coming to the aid of Swiss and German Mennonites who were migrating to escape persecution.

As a result of these sustained hostile forces, the original Anabaptist evangelizing impulse was curbed by the unrelenting persecution of the state churches. The Anabaptist-Mennonite DNA was decisively altered in the seventeenth century. Mutual aid, relief, and service have remained defining characteristics ever since.

Sources of renewal

Van Braght was not alone in his concern for the spiritual health of his people. A young German Lutheran pastor, Philipp Jakob Spener, was similarly disturbed by the spiritual lethargy he observed in the state churches. In 1675 he published a pamphlet calling for renewal of spiritual life. Spener’s pamphlet was influential in sparking what became the Pietist movement. Essentially a lay movement, Pietism emphasized the importance of the new birth, spiritual practices, discipline fostered by cell group meetings, and actively engaging in witness and service.

Unlike Anabaptism, Pietism did not address the nature of the church directly. It stressed personal faith and practice. Pietist influence quickly spread across Europe and North America, touching all varieties of Protestants. It spawned other renewal movements, especially the Evangelical revival and Moravian Brethren in the eighteenth century. These currents brought new vitality to mainline Protestants as well as believers church groups such as the Quakers and Mennonites that, under intense external pressure, had turned inward.

One fruit of the Pietist/Evangelical revival was the modern mission movement. As early as the mid-1600s several missions were organized, all without support from the churches. The modern mission movement emerged around 1800. It, too, lacked the official backing of any church. The first Mennonite support for “foreign” missions came from Dutch Mennonites. The Baptist Serampore (India) Mission developed a support network in Great Britain and on the Continent in the early 1800s. A group was organized in the Netherlands, in which Dutch Mennonites were active. They also participated in the nondenominational Réveil, a European renewal movement patterned on the classical Pietist model.

The Great Awakening in North America and Great Britain, starting in the early eighteenth century, emphasized both personal conversion and social transformation. Out of this came various social reforms and mission initiatives: antislavery, education of children, child labor laws, prison reform, Bible societies, and home and foreign missions. This whole gospel vision continued into the nineteenth century. But with the rise of premillennialism and dispensationalism, especially after 1870, a narrowing of focus emerged. Since the return of Christ was imminent, it was argued, personal salvation was the priority. Every effort must be focused on “winning souls.”

Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Mennonites were interacting with these revival and renewal movements. Inevitably, tensions arose between those who welcomed renewal and those who did not. Traditionalists feared change. They correctly sensed that renewal threatened the status quo. Those who welcomed the message of renewal recognized that the church must find in the gospel the resources to engage the changing culture.

For example, Mennonites who had settled in Ukraine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become ingrown. Young people were not attracted by a religiosity that was not life-giving. Through the ministry of itinerant Pietist evangelists from Germany, many of these people experienced renewal. But the message of revival also brought conflict and schism. Similarly, in North America repeated schisms occurred across the nineteenth century as the message of revival influenced traditional Mennonite piety in rural communities that did not welcome change.

The contrast between the evangelizing fervor of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and nineteenth-century traditional Mennonites could hardly be sharper. Traces of the Anabaptist DNA remained in nineteenth-century Mennonite piety in terms of ethical values, but the instinct for world-avoidance drilled into the Mennonite subconscious by generations of persecution and migration retained a powerful grip on the Mennonite view of the world.

Twentieth-century transformations

The tumultuous twentieth century affected all dimensions of life. These are key defining developments that continue to shape life globally:

•	The birth of the atomic age
•	The rise—and fall—of powerful new ideologies dedicated to world domination
•	Two world wars, plus endless regional wars
•	In the aftermath of World War II European colonial empires collapsed and independent new nations emerged throughout the world
•	A Cold War that dominated wo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Roots and Foundations
• Part 2 Context and Perspectives
• Part 3 Tools and Applications
• Part 4 Stories and Testimonies
• Part 5 Missional Journeys: Congregations and Conferences
• Part 6 Missional Journeys: Multicultural Initiatives
• Epilogue
• A Missional Church Bibliography
• Authors
• Editors