Struggle for faithfulness bonds national churches.

Thousands of miles separate the Colombian Mennonite Church (IMCOL) and Mennonite Church USA. But a common struggle for greater faithfulness bonds these churches in ways that bring them as close as the heartbeat of Christ.
Following Jesus: A baptism in Colombia. Photo by Linda Shelly.

While Anabaptists in these countries know that Christ’s good news includes salvation for souls and shalom for communities, they sometimes question their witness and identity. Some people wonder how to integrate the social and spiritual aspects of Christ’s call in cultures embattled with economic and political turmoil. Some people ask, Do we need to integrate these in order to be faithful? Some people give up, having been criticized for focusing too much on peace or on evangelism.

But Christ’s disciples don’t have to make these false distinctions, say church leaders across the globe, including Linda Shelly, Mennonite Mission Network’s Latin America director, and Peter Stucky, pastor, long-term IMCOL leader and Mennonite World Conference Executive Committee member for Latin America. They work together to help Anabaptists reclaim their full-bodied identity as citizens of Christ’s kingdom even when they live in troubled countries.

“Living the gospel and living Anabaptism are not two different things. Rather, Anabaptism provides a specific way of understanding what it means to follow Jesus,” says Stucky, pastor of Teusaquillo Mennonite Church in Bogotá.

Christ centered: A worship service in Colombia. Photo by Linda Shelly.

“We create false separations between being Anabaptist or Mennonite and evangelizing and spreading the gospel, or between working for justice and peace or praying and seeking the gifts of the Spirit that can disunite us and tear apart the body of the Lord.”

Shelly says, “Peter talks about how the early Anabaptist movement was so clearly a movement of the Spirit, including both their radical actions for justice and their rapidly spreading faith.

“Today the term ‘Anabaptist theology’ is too often understood narrowly to refer to the justice and peace distinctive of our faith. And when we talk of the work of the Holy Spirit, evangelism and church-planting come to mind. … But true Anabaptist theology is all of this together.”

Walking with Christ through civil war: It is easier to talk about this integration than to live it out in daily life. Stucky has worked at this integration in a land besieged by a longtime civil war.

When Stucky became pastor of Teusaquillo Mennonite in 1995, he wanted to avoid the polarities: the spiritual and social action, between those who pray and those who work for justice, between those who fast and those who provide food for the hungry.

He had no plan to carry out this vision, but the country’s troubles took care of that. When Colombia’s civil war intensified in the 1990s, many needy people appeared at the church. Over the years following its inception in 1973, the church had become traditional and staid, but this situation shook up the status quo.

Suddenly dozens of needy people were on the church’s doorstep. They included displaced people, the handicapped, prisoners, street people, undernourished, hungry children and those whose lives were threatened by the violence.

“Many people responded with enthusiasm and joy to the free invitation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Stucky says. “He has washed them with his precious blood, forgiven them, cleansed them, raised them up, dried their tears, restored them and changed their lives.”

Many of these people had never belonged to a church but now discovered a way to be Christian that integrated a concern for justice, human rights and a new world, he says. Many of these people often hated the guerrilla, the paramilitaries and the armed forces.

In the new community of Jesus, they learned to forgive and live into Ephesians 2:14: “Christ is our peace. He made the Jews and the Gentiles one single people, destroyed the wall of separation and annulled in his own body the enmity that existed.”

Even with this great harvest of transformation, the older members of the congregation found it difficult to accept new members, he says. They felt displaced in their own church with a lack of pastoral attention. They felt insecurity for themselves and for their children. Some left the church.

“This was a jolt for the congregation, a collision of cultures, an impact of people who were different, needy, traumatized and disoriented,” he says. “This demanded intense attention, a great amount of time, love and human and economic resources.”
Most members of the congregation grasped the challenge, knowing God was at work. Two responses included the formation of a Justice and Peace Committee and a Committee for Displaced People, both of which meet the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of the distressed.

“In this crisis, we have learned that the local church is the primary agent of mission (see below),” he says. “We have specialized institutions and we thank God for them. We need them. However, it is tempting to transfer the needs that continue to confront the church to specialized institutions.

“The first focus of mission is the local church. It is there that the people arrive. The contact and the work with them transforms the local community.”

Journey with Jesus spreads to Colombia’s north coast: A holistic witness of Jesus has also spread to the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. Justice and peace work and a humanitarian response to an epidemic led Mennonites to the area in the 1990s. Church members were serving in a way so linked with their faith that people who got to know them wanted their faith and their church.

Because these emerging churches were so distant from other congregations, the Colombian Mennonite Church asked Mennonite Mission Network workers Gamaliel and Amanda Falla to go to the North Coast in 2002 to start a central church in Barranquilla and help consolidate a new North Coast region for the church. The work has grown to include five new churches.

One annual event that symbolizes the sharing of a holistic gospel is Pan y Paz, or Bread and Peace. Church members distribute bread while sharing the gospel through street/park activities that focus on Jesus’ way of peace. The public nonviolent witness commemorates the United Nations International Day of Peace.

Though economic hardship is a stark reality for people ministered to through congregations, the congregations also struggle with this reality, Gamaliel Falla says.

“This is one of the poorest areas of the country,” he says. “Our leaders struggle to have the basics to sustain themselves, even as they reach out to others.”

Latin America, North America no strangers in identity struggle: Shelly, Newton, Kan., works with many churches across Latin America. Some of their challenges are similar to those in North American churches, and, she says, “we can learn from each other.”

“Many Latin American church conferences are similar to our own,” she says. “They have some articulate leaders who hold together the passions for peace and social justice and evangelism and church planting. Yet many members and congregations who give priority to one passion or the other are critical of those who give their priority in another area.”
But she believes Anabaptism—which emphasizes being Jesus followers rather than only Jesus believers—connects the individual and communal aspects of faith.

“Sometimes, when people first come to Christ, they commit to a congregation not only because it fits them theologically but also because it integrates their personal faith with reaching out to the community in ways they couldn’t do alone,” she says. “They see people not only talking about their faith but living it out for the good of others.”

Centering on Christ will do more than anything to dissolve the polarities and dichotomies that so tempt Anabaptists, Stucky says.

“An Anabaptist Mennonite church is a Christ-centered church,” Stucky says. “The totality of our being, work and purpose has it origin in Jesus Christ. It exists because of him and for him that he may be known, exalted and loved.”