Monthly Archive for October, 2009

That was going to be the title of my book.  After hear­ing a num­ber of peo­ple in my home com­mu­nity strug­gle with the con­cept of being Men­non­ite in var­i­ous cul­tural con­texts, I thought a book like that would help to give clar­ity to the argu­ment.  Essen­tially I was going to say that some­times peo­ple are Men­non­ites by seed (ie. being born into a Men­non­ite fam­ily), by creed (ie. adher­ing to an Anabap­tist Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive), or by deed (ie. act­ing in a way that is sim­i­lar to other Men­non­ites), and that all of these are valid and unde­ni­able expres­sions of Men­non­ite iden­tity whether they are doing so inten­tion­ally, will­ingly or oth­er­wise.  Is it a bad thing that I could sum­ma­rize the whole book in one sen­tence?  Maybe the clever title would sell me a few copies alone.

My book was going to be infor­ma­tive, uplift­ing, inclu­sive and hope­fully a lit­tle humourous as well.  A few things hap­pened along the way to get in the way of putting together a man­u­script: first, I real­ized I was nowhere near qual­i­fied to assem­ble such a vol­ume, sec­ond, I started to actu­ally meet Men­non­ites in other cul­tural con­texts and finally, I got sick of the argu­ment and didn’t want to pub­licly align myself with any of the annoy­ing groups who spoke loudly on this subject.

For me, and all the peo­ple in my church and fam­ily net­works grow­ing up, being Men­non­ite meant a few things.  As Mex­i­can Men­non­ites, we were all first or sec­ond gen­er­a­tion immi­grants in south­ern Ontario, so we car­ried many of the reg­u­lar stig­mas attached to that label.  It meant we were sup­posed to adhere to either a fairly con­ser­v­a­tive or very con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tian­ity with low to mod­er­ate evan­ge­lism.  Those who were cham­pi­ons of the cul­ture then also cel­e­brated the value of com­mu­nity and humil­ity.  Those who rejected the faith and/or cul­ture did so because they opposed the rigid­ity with which the tra­di­tions were imposed, they despised the enforced self-deprecation and low self esteem, and/or they wanted a larger guilt-free con­nec­tion with main­stream soci­ety.  When youths (or oth­ers) there would accuse the lead­ers of being hyp­ocrites in that con­text, it gen­er­ally meant that they opposed the Phar­isees in Jesus’ time, but lived out an empty rit­u­al­is­tic form of reli­gion all the same.

When I got to Uni­ver­sity I met more dis­en­chanted Men­non­ites.  What sur­prised me was that these were rich kids, of rich par­ents, who knew about and engaged with the world around them, and attended (if only irreg­u­larly) churches that both nur­tured the indi­vid­ual expres­sions of faith as well as the com­mu­nity expe­ri­ence.  To me, they were Men­non­ites with­out all of the embar­rass­ing bag­gage I asso­ci­ated with the term.  As I lis­tened to their sto­ries, I began to hear about more ways that Men­non­ites could be hyp­ocrites.  There’s no need here to go into details, but themes of hoard­ing wealth while boast­ing about their char­ity and cul­tural nar­row mind­ed­ness were common.

So, it was with some inter­est that I have been read­ing the ongo­ing dis­cus­sion that has been printed in the Cana­dian Men­non­ite about faith and cul­ture.  After expe­ri­enc­ing the cross-cultural highs of the most recent Men­non­ite World Con­fer­ence gath­er­ing, it is nat­ural to ask how this con­nec­tion can be strength­ened and main­tained, and nat­u­rally our ten­dency to cul­tural preser­va­tion is brought up as a road block.  Terry Smith’s let­ter to the edi­tor cau­tioned us not to hold on too tightly to our cul­tural iden­tity.  Mr. Smith is him­self an edi­tor, and wrote a while ago in The Mes­sen­ger, the jour­nal pub­lished by the Evan­gel­i­cal Men­non­ite Con­fer­ence where I was once a mem­ber, that we should dis­con­nect our under­stand­ings of faith and cul­ture.  His sug­ges­tion was that we should only refer to our faith/denomination as Men­non­ite, and use other terms for our cul­ture, such as ‘Low Ger­man’.  At that time, I still thought my deed, seed and creed book idea might work so at the very least this would dis­rupt my pub­lish­ing career.  I wrote my own let­ter to the edi­tor, essen­tially say­ing that a name change wouldn’t work and that a mind change was more pos­si­ble and nec­es­sary.  Also, it seems to me there were always school­yard con­se­quences to giv­ing your­self a nickname.

Instead, I think we should feel free to use the term Men­non­ite to apply to a greater num­ber of cul­tural groups.  There are fourth and fifth gen­er­a­tion Men­non­ites in DR Congo, cer­tainly they qual­ify as cul­tural Men­non­ites.  There are sub-cultures all over the world where the only thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ates them from their neigh­bours is that they adhere to Men­non­ite teach­ings.  That sounds like a Men­non­ite cul­ture to me too.

Much of the cur­rent strat­egy to level the eth­nic play­ing field revolves around high­light­ing the role that peo­ple of all cul­tures play in Men­non­ite churches, schools and orga­ni­za­tions, espe­cially non-traditional eth­nic groups and assign­ing these peo­ple into posi­tions of lead­er­ship is a very tan­gi­ble way of doing this.  (Please don’t read this and think that I am sec­ond guess­ing any spe­cific lead­er­ship assign­ments that have been made.)  As a white male with a name like Loewen, I stand to lose from any kind of affir­ma­tive action selec­tion process, but my oppo­si­tion to this mind­set isn’t purely self­ish.  Mostly, I don’t like this kind of top down men­tal­ity.  The solu­tion is not to give more power non-traditional groups, but for all of us to have less power together.  If we are using cul­tural par­ity at the lead­er­ship level as our only mea­sur­ing stick, I think we are neglect­ing the more impor­tant work that is hap­pen­ing at the grass­roots level.  Almost all of us have expe­ri­enced some form of Men­non­ite cul­tural dis­en­chant­ment, but we can’t respond to it by adopt­ing an in and out men­tal­ity.  We need to live out an ongo­ing simul­ta­ne­ous cri­tique and repair of our­selves and our com­mu­ni­ties.  The next gen­er­a­tion of teenagers will have issues with us no mat­ter what.

It’s almost impos­si­ble to escape real­ity TV these days.  Every new TV sea­son presents us with a vari­ety of new shows and con­tin­u­a­tions of older series.  Almost every chan­nel on the TV dial devotes some of its weekly sched­ule to real­ity based pro­gram­ming, that is, except for the faith based chan­nels.  Now, I don’t mean to rip off Larry Nor­man, but why should the devil have all the good TV shows?  Surely there is an aspect of the Chris­t­ian life that we can sub­jected to this kind of pub­lic scrutiny and pro­vide some level of pub­lic entertainment.

One of the most recent suc­cess­ful for­mats is to have an insti­tu­tion (ie. restau­rant, band, broad­way musi­cal) use the show to hire a new staff– or cast– mem­ber.  This not only makes a good show but also serves to adver­tise the insti­tu­tion.  Using this as a model, I’m think­ing about putting together a pitch to the var­i­ous faith chan­nels, I just haven’t decided if I should pitch myself as a con­tes­tant or as the host.

What we would need is a large and once pop­u­lar church fac­ing dwin­dling atten­dance num­bers and a pas­tor near­ing retire­ment.  It seems to me that this sce­nario isn’t ter­ri­bly rare.  Rather than going through the reg­u­lar process of search com­mit­tees and call­ing regional over­seers, or what­ever other denom­i­na­tions do, why wouldn’t a church like this want to use a real­ity show to pick their next pastor?

We could start with a group of can­di­dates, twelve is prob­a­bly an appro­pri­ate num­ber, and put them through a num­ber of chal­lenges.  Church mem­bers, and of course the view­ing audi­ence, could observe all them doing hos­pi­tal vis­i­ta­tions, lead­ing per­sonal and fam­ily coun­selling ses­sions, and sit­ting through long com­mit­tee meet­ings.  Each week, one or two of the can­di­dates would be elim­i­nated, and the one deter­mined to win that par­tic­u­lar week’s con­tests would be asked to preach the ser­mon that Sun­day morn­ing.  This could be even more bor­ing than it sounds unless the show’s pro­duc­ers and the church’s exec­u­tive board agrees to mix things up a bit.  Of the 12 can­di­dates, less than half would be from the orig­i­nal denom­i­na­tion the church is based in, there would have to be at least a few women, and there would have be rep­re­sen­ta­tion from var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties and lev­els of edu­ca­tion.  So far it prob­a­bly only sounds inter­est­ing to the­ol­ogy nerds like me, but this doesn’t have to be real­ity, just real­ity TV.

Instead of a search com­mit­tee, the church could put together a research com­mit­tee, made up of peo­ple who look into the past of all of the can­di­dates to see if there are any skele­tons in their closet.  Old churches and col­leges would be good sources of juicy details of days gone by, but why stop there?  Old rela­tion­ships and fam­ily prob­lems would spice up the show quite well.

Some church mem­bers could be assigned the task of push­ing them on hot-button the­o­log­i­cal issues.  Could they han­dle the pres­sure of Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists, social jus­tice advo­cates, expe­ri­en­tial highly spir­i­tual peo­ple, and indif­fer­ent neu­tral minded folk all try­ing to see if they were a safe pick?

Oth­ers could be assigned to present the can­di­dates with var­i­ous temp­ta­tions to test their level of piety.  Peo­ple may be inter­ested to know if they drink too much or they may be uncom­fort­able if they drink too lit­tle.  If the can­di­dates are unmar­ried the con­gre­ga­tion will need to know that they will respect the pro­fes­sional bound­aries and not date within the flock they are shep­herd­ing, but if they are will­ing to cross the line it would be help­ful for some peo­ple to know what their type is.

In mak­ing the final deci­sion, the con­gre­ga­tion or view­ers could vote along any num­ber of lines.  They might get caught up in the glam­our of it all and select the best look­ing per­son or the one with the flashiest per­son­al­ity.  They could make the safe pick and choose the per­son with the clean­est past.  They may even try to be respon­si­ble and pick the one with the sound­est the­ol­ogy or the best inter­per­sonal man­ner.  We’ll never know until some­one decides to foot the bill and put this on the air.  Either way, I’m pretty sure all of the mar­riages from the mar­riage based real­ity shows turned out well, so why couldn’t this work too?