Gerald J. Mast is professor of communication at Bluffton (Ohio) University. This article is drawn from his presentation last fall at the conference at Bluffton on Mennonite Education: Past, Present and Future.

I published a book in 2012 entitled Go to Church, Change the World: Christian Community as Calling. In the book, I invite people to receive the life of the church as the primary vocational calling of all Christians—the calling we receive in baptism to be joined with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection and thus with his body as it is present in the world today.

I claim that the practices of the church—reading and understanding the Bible together, offering and receiving baptism, joining together in the Lord’s Supper, sharing resources and discernment, and serving the life of the world—are all activities by which we learn those habits of truth and excellence that the world needs to become transformed and holy—a dwelling place for God.

Such churchly practices help change the world, even though they are often neglected or performed poorly or displayed within flawed contexts that are frequently full of conflict and failure. God is accomplishing God’s work through God’s people despite our weakness, I’ve been assuming.

However, because the book highlights the life of the church when it is at its best, readers sometimes respond to the book by expressing disappointment that their experiences of church involvement fall short of the examples of world-changing faithfulness that appear in the book. As a result of such conversations and some additional study, I’ve adjusted my thinking about the church and failure.

I’m now convinced that Christ’s healing and hope flow through the church to the world because it is weak and full of conflict and not merely despite such failure. Go to church because of its weakness. Go to church because of its conflict.

The weakness of the church

How can the weakness of the church strengthen our faith and witness? My colleague Alex Sider, who teaches theology at Bluffton (Ohio) University, has written a book entitled To See History Doxologically about how to receive the often disappointing and faithless history of the church as an occasion for praise and thanksgiving rather than as a project of control or meaning management.

While Sider’s book focuses on the way we tell the story of the church, his argument could be extended to the way we discuss or display the life of the church to one another and the watching world as well.

Drawing on the picture of salvation history exhibited in the book of Hebrews, and by critiquing the work of modern political historians and theologians, Sider argues that the salvation being brought about in the life of God’s people is a gift that is received amid frequent faithlessness. The story of God’s people in the Old Testament, for example, is riddled with leaders who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, some of whom are described as entirely corrupted and others who exhibited both obedience and disobedience. The group of 12 disciples chosen by Jesus included not only Judas the betrayer and Thomas the doubter but Peter, who both takes up the sword to defend

Jesus and denies any relationship to him when the going gets tough.

Such biblical stories remind us that God’s work is being received and offered in the life of an often faithless and failing people; as a result, we can actually experience the gospel as both radical gift and plausible promise. The fallible church offers the gospel as radical gift when it acknowledges this gift as good news, which we flawed and failing humans are only able to receive thankfully, rather than control strategically. The fallible church offers the gospel as plausible promise when it demonstrates that our weakness is a condition of possibility for exhibiting God’s living city rather than being a compromise of perfection that threatens to sidetrack the march to Zion. Ordinary and flawed people like us are precisely the instruments that God chooses to display God’s great salvation.

This approach is confirmed by Anna Jansz of Rotterdam’s letter to her son, as found in Martyrs Mirror. Jansz was a young adult Dutch Anabaptist martyr who made the transition from being a revolutionary Münsterite to a spiritualist Davidite and who before her execution at age 29 on Jan. 24, 1539, in Rotterdam left a letter for her son that has become a classic Anabaptist text. In the letter, she tells her son: “Do not regard the great number, nor walk in their ways.…But where you hear of a poor, cast-off, simple little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ; from there do not depart.”

Anna’s statement to her son about the “little flock” is typically regarded as a description of what is sometimes called the persecuted church—the church that is regarded as a threat to the established order. And while that is certainly part of what is meant here, I also think that for Anna Jansz this experience of a poor, cast-off flock included her experience as a Münsterite—which constituted a much larger part of her church experience than being affiliated with the group led by David Joris. Moreover, both the Münsterites and the Davidites were failures not just in the sense of being persecuted by the authorities but also in the sense of representing visible moral and theological failures, including the lapse into polygamy and the use of the sword by the Münsterites as well as the sexual utopianism and esoteric spiritualism of the Davidites. And these radical church projects were also failures in the sense that they were not savvy enough to survive, as was the Mennonitism that eventually appropriated Anna’s story and testimony for its martyr literature.

Anna’s experience reflects in a perhaps more dramatic way the deliberate decision of Menno Simons in 1536 to finally leave his respectable position in the Catholic priesthood and join a completely discredited and fragmented Anabaptist group—“sheep without a shepherd,” as he put it. In Menno’s conversion testimony, the violent and misguided actions of the Münsterite Anabaptists are responsible for ultimately convincing him to give up his comfortable and successful clerical career. Discussing the armed Anabaptist takeover of the Olde Klooster monastery that led ultimately to a massacre of these Anabaptists by the authorities, Menno writes: “After this had transpired, the blood of these people, although misled, fell so hot upon my heart that I could not stand it, nor find rest in my soul.”

Menno also discusses the influence of many other Christian reformers, such as Luther, Zwingli, Bucer and Bullinger—all of them church leaders he regarded as partly right but also partly wrong. In other words, Menno Simons, like Anna Jansz, was converted to Anabaptist faith through the failure and weakness of the church, not by any exhibition of great spiritual success. And so it is not surprising that in the early editions of Menno’s writings, he described the Münsterite Anabaptists as “dear brothers who erred only a little when they sought to defend their faith with the sword.” While such statements were edited out of later editions of Menno’s writings, they do accurately reflect the sometimes forgotten fact that the Mennonite church is named after someone who joined the Anabaptist movement primarily because of the dramatic mistakes, failures and sins of the revolutionary and polygamous Münsterites, and was himself baptized by the former Münsterite Obbe Phillips.

Mennonite historians have often been tempted to cover over the flaws of early Anabaptist leaders and communities. And Mennonite churches today inspired by the Anabaptist Vision often seek to burnish a public image of Christ-centered cities on a hill, proof that the Sermon on the Mount can actually be achieved. Such a sense of moral superiority has no doubt made it difficult to acknowledge the sins and failures of the church and thereby established a dishonest basis for the church’s reputation.

Perhaps the time has come for us to invite people to join our churches not because we are more Christlike or biblical or spiritual but because our churches are places where sins are forgiven and weakness is vindicated. Such churches would reflect Anna Jansz’s description of the church inhabited by Christ: a poor, simple, despised, rejected and cast-off little flock that teaches the cross. In such a church, failure is a reminder that the Lamb’s triumph is not a success story but a resurrection story. And we know that a resurrection story will involve conflict.

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