January 10th, 2008 Promoting an Anabaptist culture of engagement: Experiments in post-colonial and postmodern global connectivity

Stephen Kriss
8-3-07 Mexico City

Preface considering the city and culture

Over the last 18 months and for the previous decade before that, I have been trying to figure out new possibilities for Anabaptist engagement with the world. I have become focused on what it means for Anabaptists to engage in a way that is culturally appropriate and postured in a way that is generally unafraid.

For North American Mennonites, engagement of urban life has mostly meant one of two things—either engaging a culture as exiles or engaging the city as a place of need. I want to suggest that neither of those will help us to imagine the future that I believe God is inviting us toward and to live within.

To engage as exiles is to mean that we don’t belong in the city. We as Mennonites for a variety of reasons have managed to codify Jesus’ invitation to be in but not of the world as a reason to avoid contact or to disengage in many ways. At the same time, our orientation that has been inspired by the mission mindset of the late 20^th century has been to save the city.

Those biases have resulted in unhealthy relationships in many urban areas. Right now, even today, as I am writing from Mexico City, I am realizing that we are reaping the harvest of those two primary metaphoric engagements of urban life (which can be extrapolated) into our culture in general. We’ve created problems with those metaphoric approaches. We’ve felt we need to either withdraw from the city or to save it.

Faith and the watching world

John Howard Yoder suggests that our faith as Anabaptists is lived in front of the watching world. I believe him for the most part, however, I believe that we are arrogant in this time if we assume that what we do as Anabaptists just by our very presence is so compelling that people will watch it and be interested. In a world when everyone can post their insignificant and significant life events on-line, we can no longer assume that the way that we have been living and engaging (or not) continues to offer a live presence in the watching world. The watching world has changed and so must we.

We are in a world that is controlled primarily by urban areas—by global cities where the strands of media, capital and politics commingle. Yet, for the most part, Mennonites have been largely unable to influence those settings in ways that are tangible and compelling. There are exceptions. And I recognize that we as Anabaptists are a small group of people. But I believe that we have been largely unfaithful as we have attempted to live quietly in this emerging age of global connectivity.

In Wayne Meeks’ book The First Urban Christians he suggests that the church changed as it figured new ways to work in the Empire of the time. When the center of the church’s life moved early-on from Jerusalem to Antioch on its way to Rome, the church could move beyond its potential boundedness as an ethnic group. In Antioch, where the followers of Jesus for the first time find a new name as Christians because of their ethnic diversity and urban savvy, something new emerges. These cosmopolitan followers of Jesus take a message to diverse places out of their relationships and build a new community based on their abilities to connect globally through the emerging available communicative means of the time. As Anabaptists, we are also in this time, and we must literally give opportunity to create multi-ethnic, multilingual networks for emerging leaders who can connect via new communicative means, that are outside of our own ethnic Jerusalems and in places of global influence.

Open Communities

We need these places to be open communities. We need them to be places where emerging leaders can move across lives of ethnicity and develop a relevant and engaging global faith. Through education in Mennonite schools in North America, many of our best and brightest young adults are not afraid of the world. Rather they are invigorated by the questions that it poses and the possibilities that emerge from being a people committed to peacemaking, justice-seeking and refiguring the nonviolent camino of Jesus.

Creative Spaces

We need places for emerging leaders to be creative. Global cities along with their challenges and possibilities represent the best of these venues. The watching world watches our global cities—New York, London, Jerusalem, Jakarta, Sydney; places where culture and commerce commingle and where conflict has emerged. We need to find our way and to offer a relevant hopeful message from within these settings, for our own sake and to provide the space that Alan Seidel and John Paul Lederach say is required to understand the spiritual ethic and creativity required for the journey into the next historic era of global connectivity and globally-shared struggle.

Embodying the way of peace in love and communication

We need places to practically embody the way of peace. I don’t believe in our mission models anymore. Mostly, they aren’t rooted in biblical or ethical conceptualizations. The way of the early church was a way of connective relationships that provided a means to engage the struggle of the Empire. Within these early followers of Jesus, there was a new thing emerging, a sharing of resources, a possibility of empowerment for women, a way to share the wealth of commerce with those in need. They used new communicative methods like sending letters to promote the growth of such communities. Peace cannot simply be a value for us. We have to be willing to incarnate it—to believe that we can reflect the Creator in a way that suggests our love for the world enough to get out into it—and to find ways to be reconcilers and builders of hope, to literally have some form of Good News that is like Jesus—not just a religious message. We have the time and space now to assert now that peacemaking is not merely pacifism. It’s active embodiment that transforms individuals and communities that we love and invest within and these are not only places like Goshen or Souderton, like Lancaster or Kalona.

Beyond privilege and colonialism: responding to possibility

The worst case scenario is for this to become some sort of colonization effort of sending EuroAmerican daughters and sons of privilege out into the world to taste it and experiment within it to return home to their communities after their Rumspringa in the world. In the days of PAX and in days of war, Mennonites knew that they could respond to the world’s crises through the service of their young adults but I want to suggest now that we must respond not to the crisis, but the possibilities of and for and with Anabaptism in such a time as this. We need this call within our faith communities now to provide a meaningful framework for our young leaders to engage the world.

A place where we all belong for the sake of our soul

Global cities are no respecters of persons. Everyone belongs there. And in these cities, we commingle and create new things as the cultures collide. In a sort of post-post colonial move, I want to suggest that we belong in these places. We belong in them not because we have a message of superiority or answers for them, but because our faith in its best forms requires it. Our faith in these days calls us to engagement, to the most difficult places that are centers of influence within the global culture. We belong in these cities because we don’t fear the future and because I believe that Jesus asked the right question in the Gospels, “What good is it for us to have all that we want and to lose our own soul?” Unless we are willing to find places for our young adults to be creative risk-takers for the sake of their own community’s future, we will have none together.

I believe out of all that I have seen that we must provide these venues and possibilities for global engagement. The soul of the future of our movement of following Jesus is at the core of how we imagine and situate ourselves in this age of global connection. I believe that its possible that the message of Anabaptism has been preserved for such a time as this. I believe that these communities of engagement may allow us to find a new way that takes us beyond our ethnic communities and past the paradigms of mission and into a hopeful future.

Experimental emergence

These are experiments. For the last 18 months, I have been gathering data, listening, wondering, reading, traveling—and this is the best thing that I can suggest to engage the world and to engage our creative emerging leaders. I believe though that it will create something, that something new will emerge. It’s an experiment without distinct parameters. Rather its creating a culture and a space for something new to emerge, though I can’t predict what it will be.

We’ve done this before—with Mennonite centers in Europe, with PAX and alternative service—all of which has served to invigorate our faith and to cultivate brilliant, gifted and committed leaders. This is the tradition that I am seeking to walk within and at the same time to embrace our historical moment—and the relative ease within which US American and Canadian citizens can move about the world. We’ve rarely risked proactively or move in a way that wasn’t responsive to a particular world crisis. This is a response not to a global crisis, but to a crisis which may be our own and a time in which what we think, how we interact and and how we question and believe as an alternative form of Christian tradition is relevant and represents new possibilities.

An invigoration?

We’ve before attempted to reinvigorate what it means to be Mennonite. Most often it was by re-trenching rules and by retreating from communities that tempted us to stray. Our Dutch sisters and brothers risked it by secularlizing in a way that offered their young adults both wealth and relatively little commitment to a lifestyle that was in any way radical. This is something different. It’s a movement rooted in our values, that recognizes our global connectivity and invites our young leaders to engage the world both individually and in communities.

A community like what?

What does this look like? Shane Claiborne talks about missional orders and commitments. Dorothy Day constructed open communities that lived in solidarity with those who struggled. This would create a network of persons and places to move within and to move toward. This is an invitation to bring creativity and question, both. It’s an attempt to create new communities that would invigorate traditional ones. It’s not just a sending but a connecting communities together around the world.

• Communities would be defined by the core values of the Anabaptist Network in the UK but embodying practical hospitality with an honest level of openness to whosoever.

• Communities would be coordinated by one or two persons in each location who have the ability to define the community in collaboration with others within the local setting and within the larger network.

• Communities would be defined by connection—both locally and globally. They’d be supported creatively with combinations or work and service. Funds could be drawn from jobs and creative fund-raising. The possibility of microenterprise could be explored as well.

• Communities may or may not share the same residences. They could be networks of persons committed together who live separately.

• Communities would share learning objectives. What are we engaging together? The communities are communities of engagement—not of service or mission. Engagement requires something to be engaged particularly. We could find a level of expectation and commitment to learning and exploring together.

• Communities would be defined by creativity and compassion. This is a nondogmatic and questioning approach to Anabaptist that confesses as Hans Denck does in the early stages of the Anabaptist movement—that at times he really wondered if it was worth his friends’ deaths. Martyrdom because of religious reasons is not a popular posture in global cities at this time. Too many of us are so committed to our beliefs that we’re willing to die for them rather than face the possibility that we might have to change our perspective and realize our connectivity rather than our uniqueness. Meister Eckhart suggests that movements of the Spirit always begin with compassion.

• Communities would be defined by a willingness to engage the spiritual/religious conflicts and questions both of Anabaptism and the cities that they locate within. We know that religious conflict is heightened in postmodernity and we’ll need to find a way to move not only into dialogue but collaboration with those who are building cultures of peace who may believe quite differently than ourselves.

An architectural perspective

In writing this, I realize that I am primarily an architect, not an engineer. I have no literal sense of how this would work or why it would work. Architects sometimes create beautiful or develop strange plans that are philosophically relevant to the time but impossible to construct with the constraints of finance, resources and gravity. This though seems possible and I can imagine some of the construction process, but not all of it. I am hopeful that it would create space though that brings forth life that is relevant not only for ourselves and not only those we wish would become like us or one of us, but in a way that creates new imaginative possibilities for those quite different from us as well. And maybe in that process we just may become quite different from ourselves as well. It’s a risk that seems both necessary and worthy and the possibility of engaging seems like it would open us up in transformative ways with new questions and perspectives.

What good is it if we have all we could want and lose our own soul as a people anyway?

Revised, Philadelphia 23-03-07