I am so thankful for the Jan. 7 column by Richard Showalter (“Ethiopia’s Astounding Leader”) describing the peaceful path practiced by the newly elected “Jesus-centered”
Mennonites today are found on every continent of the world (save for Antarctica, of course). But in the mid-19th century, the original Anabaptists’ spiritual descendants lived only in North America and Europe. It was a lily-white church.
It seemed unlikely that a topic with apparently little common ground — the relationship between humanity and divinity —could serve as a starting point for Christian-Muslim dialogue.
Yet it did, with help from a contemporary story of Mennonite peacemaking.
Challenges accompany the joys of growth as tens of thousands of people new to Ethiopia’s Meserete Kristos Church swell the denomination.
Now with more than 600,000 participants, the world’s largest Anabaptist conference struggles to train enough pastors, find adequate meeting spaces and keep vehicles maintained for its teachers, who travel to distant outposts on rough roads.
