Leadership: A word from Mennonite Chuch USA leaders

According to megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who was interviewed in the Dec. 10, 2012, issue of Newsweek, America is “in the doldrums.”

Warren is on the road pitching the 10th-anniversary edition of his bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life. His book sold more than 32 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 50 languages. He hopes his new and expanded edition will figure into a spiritual revival that he says our nation desperately needs.

I wish Warren well, even as I harbor some doubts about his methods and outcomes. I have respect and admiration for the fact that his ministry has always emphasized reaching out to the unchurched.

According to Newsweek, though, not everyone feels that Warren’s message will resonate as well the second time around. Many fault his message as being too simplistic and shallow. “A new generation is looking for a bit more seriousness and depth,” says Michael Horton, host of the White Horse Inn radio ministry.

I believe Warren is correct when he identifies that we are in a malaise. While I think the treatment he is prescribing won’t fully satisfy this time around, I, too, think our culture is hungering for much, much more.

Warren and others lament the drift in America toward being “more European,” meaning less churched and more secular. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The “post-Christendom” phase that Europeans entered decades ago can be an opening for all Anabaptists (and Mennonites in particular)—an opportunity to return to our roots of not wanting our faith to be compromised by political power and wealth.

The Anabaptists questioned and rejected many aspects of Christendom (a unity of faith, culture and government) five centuries ago and may be seen as the forerunners of post-Christendom—a “decoupling” of Christianity, culture and power.

In my work, reading and travels I am constantly bumping up against and relating to “Neo Anabaptists,” i.e., those who have more recently identified with Anabaptist faith but have not been born into it. (I am one of these: I jokingly refer to myself as someone afflicted with what I call Adult Onset Anabaptism, or AOA.) Many Neo Anabaptists look to us in Mennonite Church USA for help and leadership.

Stuart Murray of the United Kingdom, author of the best-selling book The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith, says: “We hope and expect that the experience of those who rejected the Christendom system long before it disintegrated might inspire and guide us as we live among its ruins and move out into post-Christendom.”

While acknowledging that post-Christendom will require gifts from a diversity of faith traditions, Murray and others look to the Anabaptist faith distinctives of peace, community and a costly, Jesus-centered discipleship. To the extent that Anabaptists have been dissidents—marginalized and willing to suffer—they stand as inspiration in a post-Christendom environment in which the missional church relocates from the power centers to the margins of society.

I wonder if we are up to Murray’s challenge. Too many of us suffer from the same malaise: We are drowning in materialism and juggling the all-consuming time demands of careers, families and church life. For many of us, “church” is just a place we go once per week for a worship service.

Are we nurturing communities of faith that radiate a spiritual “seriousness and depth” that people in our culture crave? Or is church just another annoying commitment that places unwanted demands on us?

In Luke 14, Jesus tells the parable of a banquet to which many were invited but most wouldn’t come. Their excuses resonate today: “I’m busy with my business, my family, my social life—maybe next time.”

Jesus is among us today; we may not recognize him, but we are invited to his banquet. What will our response be? The culture is hungering for spiritual depth, for community, for peace—all integral to our faith tradition. As its heirs, will we rise to the occasion and recognize our moment when it is upon us, or will we miss it? If we miss it, what will our excuse be?

Russ Eanes of Harrisonburg, Va., is executive director of MennoMedia.