AMBS celebrates the Class of 2019

GOSHEN, Indiana — Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) celebrated the achievements of 20 graduates earlier this month at its 73rd commencement service.

The graduating class included two Canadians, as well as eighteen students from eight other countries — Australia, Germany, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States — on five continents. The graduates range in age from 25 to 62.

Of the 20 graduates honored during the commencement service on Saturday, May 4, at College Mennonite Church in Goshen, 12 earned a Master of Divinity (MDiv); two earned a Master of Arts: Peace Studies (MAPS); one earned a Master of Arts: Theological Studies (MATS); and one earned a Master of Arts: Theology and Peace Studies (MATPS). Four students received a Graduate Certificate in Theological Studies.

Thirteen of the graduates are serving in ministry roles or seeking pastoral or chaplaincy assignments. Four are pursuing mission, church planting, service and/or peacebuilding work; one will teach high school; one will seek a second degree from AMBS; one is pursuing opportunities where her faith and health interests intersect; and one plans to work with linking theology and business. At least half of the graduates were engaged in pastoral ministry, conference ministry or mission work (not including internships) while earning their seminary degrees.

This year’s class includes nine students who completed at least part of their seminary studies at a distance, some through the MDiv Connect program, which began in 2013.

Ten of the graduates are affiliated with Mennonite Church USA; one with Mennonite Church Canada; and five with Mennonite Churches in other countries. One identifies as Baptist; one as Anglican; one as Church of Christ and one as nondenominational.

Along with honoring the accomplishments of the 20 graduates, the commencement service also recognized the three administrative and teaching faculty members retiring from AMBS this academic year.

Dean Beverly Lapp, vice president and academic dean, commended Loren L. Johns, professor of New Testament, who is retiring June 30 after 19 years of service; Ben C. Ollenburger, retired professor of biblical theology, who retired Dec. 31, 2018, after 31 years of service; and Sara Wenger Shenk, president, who is retiring June 30 after nine years of service.

After Wenger Shenk conferred the graduates’ degrees and the graduates received their diplomas and certificates, Ollenburger presented them with a charge. He echoed commencement speaker Meghan Larissa Good’s call to celebrate amidst the struggle for God’s kingdom and charged the graduates to continue in their ministry wearing the armor mentioned in Isaiah 59 and Ephesians 6, including “shoes suited to proclaiming the gospel of peace.”

Not only are those shoes fit for proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, he said, but “those same new shoes are good for dancing, and the gospel is the greatest music ever composed, so even while you are wearing armor and wielding weapons, yield to the Spirit’s song, and dance to the music.”

Graduates urged to pursue ‘ministry of celebration’

During her commencement address, which you can watch below, Good encouraged the graduates to embrace a ministry of celebration.

“Our primary work,” Good said, “is to do two things: to proclaim to the world its glorious destiny and to rejoice ahead of time in the victory that is overcoming everything.”

Good, of Phoenix, Arizona, is teaching pastor at Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, Arizona; a member of the AMBS Board of Directors; and author of The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today. She reflected on one of her favorite passages, 2 Corinthians 2:14-17, where Paul envisions Christians as the captives of Christ’s victory parade.

Captives in Roman military parades were walking to their deaths, but Paul’s metaphor suggests that the captives are celebrating, which means they “must know something that no one else does,” Good said.

“We are commissioning you for a ministry of celebration. We are sending you out as the world’s most joy-filled captives,” Good declared. “Wherever you go from here — wherever God’s call takes you — what you are going to do is you are going to wear your weakness openly and declare at the top of your lungs, ‘Look what the power of God has done! The God of the universe is toppling tyrants, beginning here with me. Praise God that I’ve been taken captive by the mercy of the Lamb.’”

She explained that practicing ministry as a captive means remembering that God will heal the world, whether we wake up early and engage in that work or spend a day eating Cheetos under the covers. It is about “getting over ourselves” and letting go of the idea of one’s indispensability, instead focusing on “the incredible joy of getting to participate in this story,” Good told the graduates.

“Most of us come into these kinds of ministry with a burden to save the world and keep it on track and help things come together, and everything in the world seems to resist that effort,” Good said.

“This will cause you to feel overwhelmed and exhausted and to question your qualifications for this work,” she continued. “Hear me, future leaders, the broken world is not out there waiting for you to go and save it. It has been saved and it will be saved by Jesus Christ.”