Fourteen years ago, in January of 2012, I began writing a column for The Mennonite, a predecessor to Anabaptist World, under the heading of “Global Anabaptism.” The assignment came to me as a gift. 

For most of my early career, I regarded myself as a historian. Though trained in 18th-century European history, when I arrived at Goshen College in 1985 I shifted my focus to the Anabaptist-Mennonite story and began to think of my vocational calling as “scholarship for the church.” I loved that work, which included teaching, oversight of the Mennonite Historical Library and nearly three decades of editing an academic journal, The Mennonite Quarterly Review. 

But in 2005, my life took a surprising and fortuitous turn when I accepted an invitation on behalf of Mennonite World Conference to participate in a formal dialogue with representatives of the Lutheran World Federation. The conversations focused on the mutual acrimony of our Reformation-era beginnings, especially on the condemnations in the Augsburg Confession (1530), which had provided Lutheran princes with a theological rationale for the violence inflicted on Anabaptists in the 16th century.  

That experience had two consequences that would profoundly change my life. First, from my Lutheran counterparts I caught a vision of a Christian life shaped at least as much by a commitment to reconciliation within the body of Christ as it was to purifying the church of all suspected contaminants. 

For them, ecumenism was not, as I had originally suspected, a soggy porridge of abstract doctrinal agreement. Rather, they came to the conversation seeking a path to forgiveness. For them, as William Cavanaugh has written, “the church becomes visible not through its holiness or purity but through its penitence and repentance.” 

The experience marked a kind of conversion for me. What would it mean to rethink Anabaptist history in a penitential mode? To decenter ourselves as the champions of faithfulness in God’s movement and to recognize instead our profound need for the distinctive gifts of Christians in other traditions? 

The second outcome of that experience was my introduction to the global Anabaptist church. I had known, of course, that there were Anabaptist believers in places other than Europe and North America. But I mostly thought of them as a derivative branch of the family — second cousins to the true tribe of Menno — who were likely more closely aligned with evangelical or Pentecostal theology than with Anabaptism. 

But in 2010 a new assignment with MWC revealed to me a world of remarkably enthused and courageous Christians — in many cases, quite ordinary people who had been transformed by their encounter with Jesus and were eagerly testifying in deed, as well as word, to the Good News. 

The Anabaptist churches I came to know in Africa, Asia and Latin America were certainly not perfect. But over and over again I witnessed remarkable expressions of Christ’s loving, healing and caring presence flowing out from their communities into the world. 

The living reality of the global church forced me to rethink the trajectory of Anabaptist history and how I had been telling the story. In 2011, the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism emerged as my attempt to reframe the long legacy of Anabaptist scholarship at Goshen College around this new reality. The work of the institute is modest, but its vision has been shaped by a conviction that the renewal of the Anabaptist- Mennonite church in North America will depend, to no small degree, on our willingness to pay attention to the vitality of the Anabaptist movement outside of our own context. 

That ecclesial landscape today can often seem bewildering. Groups in the Anabaptist tradition tend to be suspicious of creeds, liturgies and hierarchies, preferring local autonomy over global solidarity. Faced with the mystery of the Incarnation, we opt for the particular over the universal. We are inclined to define faithfulness in the language of discipline, purity and boundaries. In our current context, when the urge to secure identity through division seems to be ascendant, a commitment to penitence and repentance may seem inappropriate or even weak. 

For 14 years, this column has attempted to be attentive to that tension — to honor the particularity of identity while inviting readers to the possibility that our spiritual well-being depends on the gifts of the wider church, both within and beyond the Anabaptist family. 

Now the time has come for fresh perspectives, for younger voices to share their insights. So I bring this column to an end with a deep sense of gratitude. Thanks to the editors of Anabaptist World for the opportunity to share my learnings and questions. Thanks to readers for your words of criticism and encouragement. And thanks be to God for the gift of the church — beautiful, broken and blessed.