It was a bad year for a vision, but God gave one to Ezekiel anyway. His prophetic vocation began “in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month” (Ezekiel 1:1). 

Becoming a prophet wasn’t his idea. Ezekiel was always supposed to be a priest, which by some accounts would have meant beginning his service at age 30 (Numbers 4:3; 1 Chronicles 23:3). 

This would’ve been Ezekiel’s priestly year, but instead he was “among the exiles by the river Chebar” in Babylon, part of the mass of people brought as hostages of the Babylonian Empire along with deposed King Jehoiachin (Ezekiel 1:2). 

You can’t be an Israelite priest without Israel’s temple and Israel’s land. So there was Ezekiel, son of Buzi, of the right descent and the right age but in the wrong country. 

Not good. Did Ezekiel wonder who he was supposed to be now? Did he feel like he had lost his sacred center?

Becoming a prophet is not the kind of career change you choose. God made Ezekiel a “sign for the house of Israel” (4:3). He called his prophet to perform strange, symbolic acts and to speak things about Israel that would make a Babylonian soldier blush (chapters 16 and 23). 

But by far the most mind-bending thing Ezekiel would report to the people as their prophetic watchman was that God’s glory had lifted out of Jerusalem and gone to hover over Israel’s remnant in Babylon (chapter 10). 

It was worse than anybody could have imagined, and it wasn’t just Ezekiel who felt it. In that shattered age, the people had lost their sacred center.

I wonder if many of our Anabaptist churches are sitting by the waters in Babylon. Who are we now in this new place and time? Have we lost our sacred center?

In the past, Anabaptist identity was unselfconscious. It’s just what it looked like when people sought to put the New Testament into practice by following Jesus in everyday life. We glorified God in worship and were empowered for life together by the Holy Spirit. 

The faith had a distinctive lived shape — peace, simplicity, humility, zwieback — but it wasn’t trying to be distinctive. It was just following and worshiping and abiding in Jesus.

But something changed. Like Ezekiel, who trained to be a priest but found himself by the river Chebar, the landscape changed. For many years we imagined our church as one thing, and then history gave us something else. Blame society or another generation or everybody. 

Or maybe it was us. Ezekiel witnessed how God withdraws his holy presence when his people abandon their commitment to him. They “drive me far from my sanctuary,” says the Lord (8:6). 

When we wrench off the church’s trinitarian, incarnational, creedal and scriptural baseplates, we lose our sacred center. The Thief comes in the night and snatches the lampstand, and we’re left wondering why we’re sitting in a dark room together.

The loss of our sacred center may be why we struggle to have an imagination for the future of the church. What’s the special sign our congregations carry into the world? 

Beyond the vapors of nostalgia, we’re not entirely sure why our congregations should continue, much less why we should plant new churches — or sometimes even why we should have children.

In my experience, we end up rifling for off-the-rack stories. I’ve been in enough Mennonite rooms to see it, heard the calls to plant churches and build missional scaffolding while lacking a compelling vision of who we’re supposed to be. 

Some of the stories we reach for fit better than others, but they all suffer from the same weakness: Authentic stories grow and have a life of their own and don’t take well to transplanting. 

These are the days of Ezekiel for us in the Mennonite world. We’ve been bracing ourselves against the “stormy wind” out of the north for a long time (1:4). Not good. 

But it seems to me that there might be something new rising, “a great cloud with brightness around it” (1:4). 

It’s not so much a promise as an invitation. God’s calling us to turn again to the living Jesus who sparked our movement in the first place, to encounter him in reverent prayer and worship and to embrace the whole of scripture’s teaching. 

It’s only then that we can rediscover our sacred center, Christ’s heart for our future.