Are Mennonites denying that Anabaptists were evangelical?

The study of our history offers the enrichment of life, for we learn from the exercises of faith tested in the past. When we select from the past and incorporate it into the present, we need to be honest about our selectivity. We understand our Anabaptist forebears best if we see the larger picture of their setting, their interpretations of Scripture and the faith that shaped their lives. Although we read them through our lens, we need to be honest in reviewing their values.

Many voices seem to reduce the matter of faith to having religion rather than seeing faith as a relationship with God, who has come to us in Jesus. Religion is humanity’s search for God, but the gospel of Christ is the good news that God has come to us, made himself known and is open to accept us. Salvation is not an it; salvation in Christ is a new relationship. Salvation is identifying with Jesus as his disciple and in him being reconciled to God. This life of discipleship is a covenant in which our very lives bear witness to the reality of faith as a response to him, an opening of our lives to him.

In sharing the gospel, the Anabaptists were the evangelists of the Reformation. While Lutheran and Reformed churches were centered around institutions, the Anabaptists were the “hedge preachers” spreading all across Europe.

Where do we think the thousands of martyrs came from if Anabaptists hadn’t won them to a new life of freedom through faith in the living Jesus our Lord. They were mocked for their extensive preaching and opposed to the point of death, but in many cases, when one was martyred, another stepped up to take his or her place.

This conviction for evangelism as sharing Jesus’ call of grace was expressed centuries before the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, so their evangelism is not to be thought of as an expression of fundamentalism. The Anabaptists were advocates of personal privilege and responsibility; each person can come to God. This is not through institutionalized Christianity with its sacraments, rituals or state-church identification.

Much of the current bias minimizing evangelism is often a reaction to the approach of so-called evangelists who use approaches that are more coercive or threatening to people. But we can view evangelism as the total of a transformed life, focusing on everything that makes faith in Jesus an option or a possibility for people. This understanding of evangelism makes each of us evangelists in our lives and professional roles.

Education, for example, should be an expression of evangelism in that when education is holistic it will include the meanings of the gospel in relation to every area of study. We do not manipulate people in the classroom, but we are not fair if we don’t make discipleship of Jesus understood clearly, thereby making faith in him an option for the honest student. Further, our professional roles, or relationships in and through our work, are the living evidence that walking with Jesus as a disciple is the most central aspect of our lives.

Sharing with others, especially in deeds of love to the needy, expresses the gospel in visible form. Our interest in interfaith dialogue is important, but dialogue means that each person hears the other authentically, and unless we are clear about the message of Jesus that we believe, we rob the other of authentic participation in dialogue.
Evangelistic preaching, as with revival preaching within our faith community, is motivational. It is more personal than a theological lecture or an academic exegesis. But all good preaching moves with a goal.

As the late Howard Charles taught, “a good sermon must march.” It is going somewhere. Motivational preaching engages the hearer to respond, to either go forward with the message, postpone decision or even decline the direction to which it is pointing. Either way, the hearer has no doubt about the sermon calling for a response. This is similar to Jesus’ words, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
Again, evangelism is making faith in Jesus a possibility for a person. There is no one style for such evangelism. The Scripture says that God gifts the church with people in a variety of roles; some are prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

It would be refreshing if our seminary programs were concerned about the prophetic in a secular society and about evangelism in understanding and identifying with people in their culture. We seem to be primarily preparing people for institutional roles as pastors and teachers with all the psychological and sociological insights we can provide. But our bias, often because someone approached us in the wrong way in what they termed evangelism, becomes an excuse for us to ignore or reject a better understanding of witness. The meaning of love should include helping people become committed disciples of Jesus.

We do not seem to emphasize missionary ser­vice today as prominently as we did 50 years ago. Carrying Western patterns into another culture rather than contextualizing the message of Christ was indeed a grave mistake. But we can learn from our mistakes and face the difficult challenge of identifying with another culture in applying the meaning of the kingdom of God in a particular setting. Donald Jacobs’ book What a Life gives an amazing description of what it meant for him to identify with the church in Africa as a servant-leader and not be a cultural voice for the church from the West.

Once, when speaking with a faculty group on psychological counseling and aware that many in that discipline look at evangelists as naïve, I asked, “Do you distinguish between ‘sin’ and ‘sins’?” They seemed baffled until I explained what I meant. Sin is our rebellion or estrangement from God in going our own way rather than responding to him. Sins are the wrong things we do while we are going our own way rather than God’s way.

Evangelism is dealing with sin and calls people to repent of sin and turn to God. This is basic. Dealing with the sins in life is something that follows and is often the role of the pastor or counsellor. We dare not minimize evangelism to become a correction of everything. We must be realistic about this and respect what it means for one to call people to a change of relationship with God. It follows that we can then excite them about finding what this new relationship offers in the character of a new life.

If we are to be Anabaptist in the 21st century, we must rediscover the centrality of Jesus in all of life and call people to identify with him. As Paul wrote, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Our order of life in this new relationship is to live as members of his kingdom (Colossians 1:13). And as people who live by this kingdom membership we will be a people of love, peace, justice, humble faith and faithful discipleship. We will hold ethics as our challenge to live by the example and teachings of Jesus, for the Jesus of history is the Christ of faith.

I am committed to nonviolence, but this is because I am a disciple of Jesus and not simply an advocate of pacifism. Similarly, I am committed to other kingdom values that call me to be nonconformed to the secularism, materialism and Constantinianism of our Western social, political and religious order. It is unfortunate that most of the world looks at America with its foibles and identifies it as Christian. As a global citizen, I want to reach the hand of love to people who have a different orientation and in this love seek ways of sharing with them what I hold to be the most important thing in life, discipleship of Jesus.

This article is an attempt to stimulate thinking on what to me is a central aspect of taking the Anabaptist vision holistically. Let’s not just attach the word ‘Anabaptist’ on to our denominational identity or to some perspective we want to promote. Let’s see this heritage as a perspective that helps us interpret both history and Scripture in the present. Our time-binding power as humans enables us to select values from Scripture and from history, our own as well as others’, and channel those values into life again by the power of the Spirit.

Myron S. Augsburger is an evangelist in Harrisonburg, Va.