Mennonite Church USA

The road map of faith is a thing of our own making; it is our response to the gift of the leading of the Holy Spirit. This map can guide us past the next horizon and around the next corner of challenge to a new discovery of God’s presence and purpose.

This issue features The Corinthian Plan, designed to provide health care for all pastors. This is a not-yet-achieved aspiration for mutual aid that has come from the imagination of many thoughtful and full-of-faith people. Its birth came by consensus and approval of our delegate body in San José, Calif., in 2007.

It is a spirit-led venture of faith that now focuses on congregational decisions to make it work. Its implementation relies on the vision and faith of many, many decision-makers in hundreds of congregations across our church.

The last 25 years of our social and political life in the United States has espoused the merits of individual initiative and taking care of self. Do for yourself and expect others to be able to do the same for themselves. But the catch is that not everyone is privileged with the same opportunities to do for themselves. Thus the gap between rich and poor has widened. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance.

The last quarter-century of me-first opportunism, now run rampant, has collapsed into individual and corporate greed, with people reaching beyond their means just because everyone was doing it, and has brought our society to the brink of economic ruin.

In this recent era, our traditional Mennonite frugality, our constant eye for the best buy, has made us hard bargainers and sometimes self-sacrificial in what we spend even on ourselves. Now in these hard times the temptation to dig our heels deeper into such values and practices could become even stronger, some say. But not me. I have more faith in our character than this. These are temporary habits. The value of “do for yourself” and “just make the best deal” is not found among our longer-held and deeper values as followers of Christ.

To the contrary, the value of biblical mutual aid is synonymous with being Mennonite in the eyes of the American public. This has remained central to our witness. Generosity of spirit and practice is our deeper and better instinct and has been practiced much longer than any me-first practice we may discover lurking in our souls. Looking after the good of others is an old notion among us—born not only of common human kindness but generated by lives lived in faith in God and by paying attention to the promptings of the Spirit.

It may look like a small thing, even small enough to avoid doing in your congregation and mine—to join others in a program of carefully planned mutual aid to share the burden of support of health care for all our pastors, for their sakes and for all our sakes. But this is not a small thing. It is not just about a congregation’s ability to find its next pastor, though this is one consequence of the plan. The Corinthian Plan of health care for all our pastors stands as a witness for who we say we are—for our vision of lives lived in community with each other and with our neighbors, whose well-being we also take upon ourselves to share.

My prayer and confidence is that in the coming months, through joining in The Corinthian Plan, congregations will rise to the occasion of such a witness, one by one, affirming our deeper values of faith and mutual aid, of sharing and generosity, which are the hallmark of our witness. And having done this, we can depend upon the Spirit to point us to even greater witness, as yet unimagined.

James Schrag is executive director of Mennonite Church USA.