The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective was developed in 1995, and is the most recent systematic statement of belief for Mennonite Church USA. 

Over the course of the next several months, we will be releasing “roundtable posts”, featuring two to three members of Mennonite Church USA congregations reflecting on an article from the Confession of Faith and how it impacts their ministry, congregational life and theology. We’ll move through the articles in numerical order. You can read all the past posts online. 

Today’s authors are reflecting on Article 9: The Church of Jesus. Writers appear in alphabetical order. 

Lois Barrett is Professor of Theology and Anabaptist Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She was also on the committee that drafted the 1995 Confession of Faith.

I learned a lot of things while I was on the committee drafting the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective in the 1990s, and most of what I learned was related to this article on the church.  Article 9 is the overall article about the church, introducing the more specific Articles 11 through 16. During the process, one committee member asked, “Do Mennonites have anything unique to say about the church?” I came to the conclusion that what Mennonites have to say about the church really is different from what many other Christians believe—perhaps more different on this subject than on any other.

I learned more fully than before that:

• The church is a community, a new society, not just a collection of spiritually-minded individuals. Modern and postmodern worldviews want to treat the church as just another voluntary association, created by the social contract of autonomous individuals. But the sum of the church is more than its parts. God has a job for the church. The church as a social entity is called to join God in God’s mission in the world.
• The church is a political body, with God through Christ as ruler, demanding our primary allegiance. Other articles including The Church in Mission, The Church’s Relation to Government and Society, and the Reign of God give a good sampling of the political language of the New Testament.
• The church is called now to be a sign (foretaste) of the reign of God: past, present, and future. In the years following the writing of the confession, I coined a term to describe this aspect of the church—  We are called not to be premillennial or postmillennial or amillennial, but to be protomillennial, a prototype of God’s intended future.  People should be able to look at the church and say, “Oh, that’s a glimpse of what God’s future will be like!”

Does the church always live up to this calling? No, of course not. But we should not discount the many congregations who are intentionally moving in this direction. We can share their/our stories. We can celebrate the ways in which people are glimpsing the reign of God in the present.

Nehemiah Chigoji is Senior Pastor at Upland (California) Peace Church.

The church is a family of disciples of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the centerpiece.

A disciple is a follower of Jesus, being changed by the Holy Spirit into the image of Jesus and committed to the mission of Christ and the church.

The church is a family. What a beautiful concept. Until we think of actual, real-life families. They are often messy and complicated. There is love, but there is also frustration. There is affection and support, but there is also pain and heartbreak. There are significant differences, despite shared DNA. But despite all these difficulties, we don’t quit being part of a family –either because we have no choice or because we have made a commitment.

When it comes to church, that commitment is to Jesus Christ, where we become part of a born again family (John 3:3). The mission of God’s family is to warmly welcome and reach out to our neighbors. To some degree, the church today has lost its credibility in our world and needs to be restored and revived. We need to become known again for our love for each other (John 13:35). We need to pull people toward Jesus by our witness as a family.

Sometimes the new family members God pairs you up with in our journey with Christ are unexpected. I have certainly experienced this in my congregation. We were already an interesting group when I first joined: a traditional Anglo church of mostly seniors mixed with a few random immigrants from around the world, some of whom were just learning about Anabaptism, myself included. It became even stranger when I, an African, started leading the congregation a few years later. Then, in another twist, First Mennonite Church of Upland merged with an Indonesian Mennonite church, Gereja Kristus Injili (GKI) of Pomona. We changed our name to Upland Peace Church to reflect a new family. People often ask, “How did you pull it off?” Really, there is no secret. It was hard, but we were blessed to have enough committed followers of Jesus to make it happen. Church with a diverse group of people is doable – with Jesus Christ being the centerpiece. It is through Jesus that we learn how to trust and practice grace. It is because of Jesus that we believe we belong together.

While Anabaptist theology puts emphasis on community, Article 9 importantly makes it clear what that community must be built on. And our community is not built on shared ethnic identity, shared culture, a shared religious legacy or being peace and justice activists. Rather, it is a personal, individual commitment to following Jesus, which is manifested in the grace and mercy we show to each other in God’s family. Without Jesus, we don’t make sense. Without Jesus, most of us would not bother to be together. Our responsibility from here moving forward as the church is to be the kind of family that helps people to trust Jesus Christ and become disciples.

Joe Sawatzky is a Church Relations Associate for Mennonite Mission Network.

According to the early chapters of Acts, the foundational narrative of the church of Jesus:

The church is an expectant community, a people which yearns for God in worship.  Preceding Pentecost, the disciples “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer” in anticipation of the promised Holy Spirit (1:14, 5, 8).  After their numbers have increased, the disciples are again “devoted”, among other practices, to “the prayers” (2:42).  Though this kind of eager yearning for God is not the sum total of faithfulness, neither can the church that claims to love God forsake to seek God’s presence.

The church is a people built on the word, the scriptures fulfilled in Jesus.  “Peter, standing with the eleven”, explained the phenomena of Pentecost through his knowledge of the word.  Spiritual proclamation proceeds from the perception of Jesus’ relation to the whole, so that through the words of the preacher the prophecy of Joel preludes Jesus while the testimony of David anticipates “the resurrection of the Messiah” (2:16ff.).  Such proclamation constitutes the church, for without Peter’s declaration that “these are not drunk” but filled with the Spirit in accordance with the word, the community of worship and mutual care does not form (2:15, 41-47).

The church is a people of mission, a community that exists for the salvation of the world.  It is instructive that, although the disciples “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer” following Jesus’ ascension, the Holy Spirit did not come upon them until a festival day, when “there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven” (2:5 NIV).  God’s purpose for Jesus’ followers is not that they remain an ethnic enclave—“are not all these who are speaking Galileans”—but a channel of blessing to the nations—“in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (2:7, 11).  In our bifurcated world, it bears repeating that mission includes both teaching about Jesus and meeting physical needs in his name (2:42, 45; cf. 6:1-7).

In short, the church of Jesus is a people of prayer; a people of the word; a people of mission.

David Shenk is a former mission worker in Ecuador with Mennonite Mission Network.

A little over a year ago, I returned to the United States after having completed a 4.5 year assignment with Mennonite Mission Network in Quito, Ecuador.  In Quito, I worked for several years as the coordinator of the Colombian Refugee Project, a ministry of Quito Mennonite Church largely funded by Mennonite Central Committee, which serves over 300 refugee families annually through aid programs and by offering refugees a welcoming space at Quito Mennonite Church.

One phrase that I heard many refugees express that often comes back to me was “this church has become my family.” It’s hard to convey the profoundness that I feel in these words, which came out of the mouths of people who had lost everything, suffered the horrors of war and were now marginalized strangers in a foreign land far from their immediate or extended family. In the context of our faith community, those words meant that through our mutual acts of love, acceptance and commitment, my refugee brothers and sisters had forever become a part of my family and me a part of theirs. This has had life-changing significance for me.

Article 9, “The Church of Jesus,” in the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective is full of challenging statements about who the church is and how the church is to act.  I was most struck by two statements, that the “church is the household, or family, of God” and “the church welcomes all people who join themselves to Christ to become part of the family of God.”

If our churches truly commit to welcoming all people who join themselves to Christ and those people become part of our family, then we must be prepared to treat the undocumented immigrant, the person of color, the financially poor, the LGBTQ and other marginalized groups and individuals as our true brothers and sisters, sons and daughters.  And this welcome must go far beyond simply being willing to open our church doors on Sunday mornings for people who are different from us.  It means recognizing their gifts, affirming them in positions of leadership and being advocates for them in the struggle for dignity and equality.  If we look around our churches and we see only people who look like us, talk like us and live like us, then I think we must ask ourselves what we should be doing differently-for a church that does not reflect the diversity evidenced in our broader communities is inevitably, and possibly inadvertently, excluding part of its own family.

While I recognize that this is a challenge in our local congregations, it is even more complex when we think about ourselves as a “worldwide community of faith.”  At the 2015 Mennonite World Conference Assembly in Pennsylvania, the Deacon’s Commission Offering video stated that, “Most of the growth in our churches is taking place among people who are financially poor. Meanwhile, 95% of our wealth remains in the hands of North Americans and Europeans.” Globally we must reflect deeply about the implications of a family in which a few members control the vast majority of wealth. We must act creatively to challenge the paradigms of oppressive global economic inequality that have seeped into the church so that our church can truly “proclaim the reign of God and provide a foretaste of the church’s glorious hope” for everyone.