Mennonite Church USA

I love my country. Some readers may be encouraged to hear me say that. Others may wonder if I have lost my moorings as a Mennonite-Anabaptist. There is both “promise and peril” (as the resolution from the 2007 Delegate Assembly in San José suggests) as we determine how to “live faithfully as Christians in the U.S.A.” The precious part of the promise for me is the religious freedom we enjoy, known by Anabaptists since our arrival in Penn’s colony in 1683. There is peril in this same freedom when we are tempted to wed the aims of our government and our cultural values with God’s intention.

In the late 1960s we lived in Kenya, East Africa, participants in Mennonite Central Committee’s Teachers Abroad Program. I enjoyed listening to Voice of America on short-wave radio. It was news from “home” and spoken in American English, different from the African English or the British English I heard around me. I read the entire international edition of Newsweek. It was like a letter from home.

I learned in my early 20s in Kenya that I am and always will be an American. At our school, we Americans were expected to bring something good to our students to help them be healthy, wealthy and wise. But because we were American, some held us in suspicion. One African teacher told me that he assumed all Americans at our school were informants for the CIA.

In those years of reading Newsweek, I learned of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Our government boasted putting a man on the moon. I read about the Kent State shootings of student protesters of the Vietnam War. I was in East Africa in part to obey American law in my alternative service obligation to Uncle Sam because of that war.

Because I love my home, my love for country did not abate, though often I was angry with my country and wept for it. Often I was embarrassed in my attempts to explain my country to students and fellow teachers. But I don’t remember denying who I was—I was an American.
In 1999, before the birth of Mennonite Church USA, a difficult debate occurred at the combined Mennonite Church-General Conference Mennonite Church convention in St Louis.

Should we be called Mennonite Church USA? We took our cues from Mennonite Church Canada and decided we needed a parallel name. But people agonized: Should we be a national rather than a binational church? Should we “separate” from Canada?

I’m glad we acknowledged who we are. Had we not decided to be a national church, we would not be able to ask the important questions of faithfulness as Christians in the USA at any convention, let alone engage in a churchwide study.

We are far from having one mind about our earthly citizenship. We are more political than our forebears. This moment of history is crucial. We have experienced a change of power and direction in Washington. The stock market has crashed, unemployment is increasing, and we hold on to what we have, born of anxiety about the future. We are still mired in two foreign wars of our making.

I love my country—not for its wars or for its occasional arrogance toward others. I love it because it is my home—the place God has placed me to live a life committed to Christ—to offer a foretaste of his reign on earth and in heaven. America is my mission field, where I can see God at work and join God in that work. Mennonite Church USA is my church—its entire name a reminder of my place, my identity and my call to witness. As God’s agent of God’s healing and hope to all, I love the place God has planted me.