Most weeks we publish a seven question interview between Hannah Heinzekehr and a different Anabaptist talking about their life, work, spiritual journey, etc. You can view past interviews here.

Name: Jake Lee
Congregation: Harrisonburg (Virginia) Mennonite Church
Occupation: Associate Pastor

1. Tell me about your earliest memory of church.

I remember two big red fire trucks that were super fun to play with when I would go to my grandparents’ church. I remember fighting hard not to graduate to a class where I couldn’t play with the trucks.

My other memory of choking on a Velamint—kind of like lifesavers that were square without a hole in them. Anyway, in the middle of a service I choked on one and somebody had to perform the Heimlich on me. I also remember in a dark hallway where there was a picture of a white Jesus with long brown hair and a beard.

2. What does being a Mennonite mean to you?

Being Mennonite for me is reading the scriptures and the world through the lens of Jesus. I grew up in a Protestant culture where we read Jesus through the lens of Paul and that changes things a lot.

What really drew me into wanting to be a Mennonite was the idea of embodying the Kingdom here rather than talking about a disembodied Kingdom somewhere else. It was about resisting evil nonviolently: Not getting out of the way of it and not being violent.

And community is something that Anabaptist theology and Mennonites have at times done well and offered as a gift to the world and the church.

I was on the fringe of every [church] group that I had ever been with. I remember thinking, it would be really great if there was a group of people that was about community and embodying the Kingdom of God and resisting nonviolently.

I came across the Mennonite church USA website and I started reading the Confession of Faith. Right now, as we talk a lot about the statement of faith and how to be a church body in the middle of difficult times, it’s interesting to people that the statement of faith has made such a difference in somebody’s life. It was compelling to me and it’s especially compelling in the world we find ourselves in right now.

I wanted to be a part of this voice for Jesus in the world.

3. You’re a pastor now. When did you first realize that you might be called into congregational ministry?

I was in college, I wasn’t in the church, and I was working in a pizza place. There was this amazing alternative music station that came out of San Francisco, near where I grew up. I just started telling people about it. “Man, this is amazing stuff. You gotta check this out!” And people were listening to the station and they even started putting the bumper stickers on their cars.

I noticed that I had some pull with people. I began thinking, What am I gonna do with that pull? Am I going to lead people to an alternative rock station out of San Francisco or am I going to use this for some other purpose? I realized that probably the thing I would love to draw people to most was Jesus, even though I hadn’t been in church for years.

The calling is obviously not one moment, but that was one of the first moments where I began thinking that maybe God wants me to share Jesus with people in a way that’s compelling. Because my family grew up with a lot of poor church experiences, I really had a heart for people who experienced brokenness in congregations and I wanted to redefine or renarrate that church experience for people. That’s where it began for me: a desire to pay attention to being a pastor and helping people understand who Jesus is and what church is about.

4. If you had to choose one thing, what was the most important learning you had during seminary?

I went to a southern Baptist seminary, Golden Gate, just north of San Francisco. It was closest to where I lived so that I could remain in ministry. It was an incredible experience. It’s kind of an outlier of the system. A lot of women were there because they didn’t feel validated at other denominational seminaries.

In that experience I had an Old Testament professor who would not let us get away with anything. He wanted to make sure we saw every discrepancy, paradox, and conflict in the scriptures. He wanted to make sure we had our eyes open to a lot of that.

At that time in my life, I really couldn’t go to bed until I had everything figured out and tied up in a neat bow. That professor really helped me live in a place where I couldn’t know everything and wouldn’t know everything and had to go to bed at night with the gray areas. That was one of the most profound lessons. Taking Scripture seriously, but allowing it to push me beyond what it is or isn’t saying into a deeper trust in God.

5. What’s been one surprising thing about being in congregational ministry?

I’ve been in ministry for 19 years. I thought I would say “I don’t know” a lot less by this point. But I feel like I say “I don’t know” way more now than I ever did when I first started in ministry.

I keep finding more things that I can’t figure out. So I don’t know if that’s helpful or not. I’ve discovered that there’s a lot I don’t know in walking with people in their beauty and in their brokenness. There’s a lot I thought I should know from the scriptures that I don’t know anymore. In actual experience with actual people, I find that I don’t have it as figured out as I thought I would by now.

6. What would your hopes and dreams be for Mennonite Church USA?

Because I think of being a Mennonite as embodying the Kingdom of God where we are and God’s reconciliation of all things, my hope and dream for Mennonite Church USA is that we would embody a different way through a culture of redistricting the vote, polarizing in order to prop up our camps and caving into culture, specifically by dividing from one another. My big hope and dream for MC USA is that we would not embody that way, but that we would embody a third way in which we begin with grace and we hang on to each other in grace. That’s my hope, and it’s been dashed a bit. But I’ve been a part of the church long enough to know that we’re all broken. I hope we would embody beginning with grace, leading with grace and following with truth, and staying together in the midst of our differences.

7. If you had to recommend three texts (books, movies, music, etc.), what would they be?

• The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright was transformative for me. It changed how I read Scripture and understood Jesus.
• Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus by Robert Farrar Capon. This book made me uncomfortable with grace, and opened my mind a little bit more about what grace actually is.
• Any telling of Les Miserables. Any movie, play, and the book of course. That story embodied is really, really a powerful text in the world.