Robert S. Kreider, who died Dec. 27 at the age of 96, believed in collaboration, community, cooperation and connection. These were a few of the words spoken in tributes after the memorial service Jan. 2 at Faith Mennonite Church in Newton, Kan. Quirky and curious, a fount of visionary ideas, Kreider’s passion for connecting institutions and people made him one of the foremost Mennonite leaders of the 20th century.

Mennonites today need Kreider’s vision for bridging differences between theologies, ethnicities and traditions. He understood that diversity can be beautiful and a source of strength when we find a common purpose.

Kreider was a uniter, as the headline on MWR’s obituary said two weeks ago. He devoted his energies to causes that made Anabaptists better together: Civilian Public Service, Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite World Conference. He led projects that celebrated a shared identity: the Mennonite Experience in America series of history books, the acquisition of copper plates from the 1685 printing of Martyrs Mirror. He inspired generations of students at Bluff­ton and Bethel colleges, molding the char­acter of campus communities in Ohio and Kansas.

Kreider wrote for many publications, including MWR, and served 12 years on its board of directors. He saw in this newspaper the vision he shared for connecting diverse branches of the Anabaptist tradition.

One MWR article that exemplified Kreider’s inclusive world view was “We All Came on the Concord,” a 1983 essay on the tricentennial of Mennonite immigration to America. He observed that although most American Mennonites did not descend from the 13 German families who stepped ashore in Philadelphia in 1683, “I like to think that as a Mennonite people we all were on the Concord.”

He offered a personal example of claiming a story that is not strictly one’s own. He recalled visiting the Molotsch­na region of South Russia, where Mennonite col­onies thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With him were with his wife, Lois; one of his daughters; and Charles Christano, a Mennonite leader from Indonesia. There was “no trace of Dutch-Russian Mennonite blood” among them. Yet the visit was a spiritual homecoming because “with [the biblical] Ruth we could say, ‘Your people are my people.’ ”

A colleague described Kreider as a man of the people. He knew it wasn’t just the leaders who made history. What was the glue, he asked in the Concord article, that held together the scattered Mennonites of Colonial America? It was, he suggested, the same thing that bonds the Amish today: “The gracious arts of hospitality and visiting. . . . One senses that women were really the glue,” opening their doors to relatives and strangers who brought news of distant communities.

Kreider was a maker of lists, and the Concord article was true to form: “Glue” was just one of seven themes. Another was “Splits.” He wrote of the need to learn from our history of “biblical and unbiblical ways of contending for the faith and the presence and absence of grace in reconciling differences.” A colleague observed that Kreider preferred pluralism; he disliked certitude and authoritarian power.

Human relationships, and the ways the past can inform the present, fascinated him. Always there was a lesson to be found: “Our history, if we have the eyes to see, is parable for us — parable to teach, to nurture, to inspire,” he wrote in the Concord article. “We see tracings of the work of the Holy Spirit.” Those who knew Robert Kreider saw those tracings in his life and in his imprint on the Mennonite world.