Leadership

Among Christians, Mennonites are doers, if anyone is—so much so that I wish I could count the times I have heard versions of an admonition attributed to St. Francis, who counseled that in our witness we should let our deeds speak for us; we are to use words only if necessary. It is no surprise that the Letter of James is a favorite of Mennonites, who laud the idea of doing the Word, not just listening to it. Mennonites affirm, at a deep, intuitive level, that “faith without works is dead.”

Put me at the end of the line if this is an attempt to debunk our laudable and practical discipleship. Far from it. But I do wish we would not bury our voice in our deeds as much as we do. I am fond of the story of a Mennonite farmer who went to a nearby town after a flood to help neighbors he did not know. At the end of the day, a grateful flood victim asked the farmer why he had come to help. The Mennonite farmer, with faithful, albeit unconscious allegiance to St Francis and the writer of James and bolstered by his inbred sense of humility, replied, “Oh, it also rained where I live, and the fields were too wet to plow today.”

Imagine what might have happened if the farmer had answered, “It is my Christian obligation to help my neighbor in need.” Or perhaps, “I am a Mennonite, and we want our Christian faith to be expressed through helping hands.” If you don’t like these responses, create your own. But fashion something that gives a “word witness” that explains the “deed witness” of the Mennonite farmer.

There are deeper dimensions to our habit of allowing deeds to stand unaccompanied by words. Sometimes I wonder if we would rather just “be Christian” without saying that we are Christian, as though the name would somehow rob the punch from our deeds. We want to “be Mennonite” but some of us think it is unnecessary (even unhelpful) to name our identity on the signs outside our places of worship. We receive admonitions from well-meaning people who say they want to be “missional” but don’t want to hear the word. There are many of us who would like to be against racism without using the term “antiracist.”

Jesus witnessed in both deed and word, in either order. When he taught, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no,” he was offering us more than a prohibition to swearing oaths. What might happen if we decided to be forthright in our speech about who we are, what we believe and how we are joining God in God’s activity in the world? (By the way, I am using missional language here.)

Maybe we are sometimes reluctant to identify ourselves by our Mennonite name because some of us are embarrassed by some of the identifiers of the past, now discarded. Others may fear the name cannot attract others because it has been held hostage too long by a narrow culture. Some of us will be reluctant to call ourselves Christian because there are Christians who speak and behave in ways we cannot own. We shy away from the word missional because some have decided it is just another buzzword. Or maybe our reason is much simpler—it may be easier, like the Mennonite farmer on an MDS errand of mercy, to just not have to explain why we showed up.

How will people know who we are and what we stand for without our speaking of it? It is not a matter of choosing between words and deeds. It is a matter of knowing this is a pair—each is incomplete without the other. May our deeds be finished by our words and our words confirmed by our deeds.

James Schrag is executive director of Mennonite Church USA.