For more than 50 years, the Paris Mennonite Center has served as an Anabaptist witness to French communities and scholars from around the world. A couple from Kansas will take the lead in discovering its next chapter.

Ben and Laurel Woodward-Breckbill of Newton, Kan., are scheduled to begin a Mennonite Mission Network assignment in August as the center’s co-directors, pending final funding of the position.

The center was established as a collaboration between French Mennonites and Mennonite Board of Missions, one of MMN’s predecessors. Originally a ministry to African students in Paris, the center has evolved to serve the changing needs of post-Christendom France.

French Mennonites and MBM created Foyer Grebel (The Grebel Home) for students from former French colonies. This space, where students lived and worshiped, eventually led to three multicultural Mennonite congregations in the Paris area.

As the need for student housing diminished, the center responded to a need for Anabaptist scholarship, leadership training and ecumenical dialogue, with the help of MBM and MMN personnel. Janie and Neal Blough led this transition 1975 to 2020. They were followed by Matthew and Toni Krabill, who are now serving in Ghana.

Laurel Woodward-Breckbill is a restorative justice practitioner, peacebuilder, nonprofit administrator and host. Ben Woodward-Breckbill is a pastor, most recently serving as associate pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton.

They previously worked with MMN in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in mediation and peacebuilding in 2016-17.

“Our role at the Paris Mennonite center will be to engage with its current partners to discover its next chapter in life,” Ben Woodward-Breckbill said. “It’s important to enter with humility, with curiosity, knowing that it takes a long and slow effort to really get to know where we are, the culture that we’re a part of.”

Laurel Woodward-Breckbill will also teach at a bilingual Montessori school, where their two children will attend.

The Woodward-Breckbills are graduates of Goshen College. He has a master of divinity degree from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She has a master’s degree in conflict transformation from Irish School of Ecumenics-Trinity College Dublin in Belfast, Northern Ireland.