The standard accounting of evangelical Christians in North America as God-and-country hawks and Mennonites as countercultural doves is problematized in The Activist Impulse. The authors of the fourteen chapters in this edited volume do more than take apart the stereotypes and myths. Through careful scholarship, accessible writing, and keen historical and social analysis, they piece together a fascinating and elaborate mosaic of the evangelical-Anabaptist nexus. The portrait that emerges is of evangelicals and Anabaptists as spiritual sibling who sometimes disagree the stronger for having so much in common. Not the least of their commonalities is the impulse toward activism based on a serious reading of the Scriptures and the call of Jesus to not only believe but be doers of the gospel. The book is unparalleled in documenting how the crosscurrents of thought, practice, biblical hermeneutics, church politics, and outside social forces have mixed and matched the members and ideas of these two movements in interesting and unexpected ways.
A case example of this crosspollination is the Missionary Church. A largely mainstream evangelical denomination today, its early name was the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church. In a chapter entitled "Practicing Peace, Embracing Evangelicalism: Missional Tensions in the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church," Matthew Eaton and Joel Boehner argue that the Missionary Church's present accommodation and blessing of members enlisting in the military, for example, emerged gradually--and in departure-- from a historic belief that held peace and purity in tandem. They outline a two-step process that led to a reversal of the original peace position of the Missionary Church: The first shift occurred as the denomination began to view peace and nonresistance as an individual attribute of personal holiness. The second shift occurred when evangelism and missions replaced personal holiness as the primary emphasis of the Missionary Church. The result was that the "distinctive" of nonresistance, like that of traditional Mennonite dress, came to be seen as nonessential--even detrimental--to what the denomination, increasingly influenced by mainstream evangelicalism, now saw as the central mission of the church: evangelism. How the transformation happened makes for fascinating reading in their chapter.
While Eaton and Boehner's chapter will be of the most direct relevance to students of the history of the Missionary Church, the other fourteen chapters give context for understanding the forces and flows that have shaped a variety of other groups like the Missionary Church as products of both evangelicalism and Anabaptism.
* Steven M. Nolt's essay "Activist Impulses Across Time: North American Evangelicalism and Anabaptism as Conversation Partners," for example, places the influence of evangelicalism within two major streams: that of the Reformed branch and that of the Holiness branch. Clearly Missionary Church pedigree grows out of the Holiness-revivalist branch of the stream, but to the extent that it and other Anabaptist-related denominations in the book dealt with the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, they too were shaped by the systematic theological emphasis of the Reformed version of evangelicalism. Nolt's helpful definitional work of terms like "activism," "Anabaptism," and "evangelicalism" as well as his survey of multiple intersecting issues between the two groups makes for enlightening contrasts. For example, while the gravitational pull of evangelicalism served to draw groups like the Missionary Church fully into its orbit, the resistance to that pull shaped and defined groups like Old Order Amish and Mennonite and German Baptists in a nonconformist direction as they rejected evangelicalism's innovations of revival meetings, Sunday schools, and foreign mission work.
* In "Anabaptism and Evangelicalism Revisited: Healing a Contentious Relationship?" by John D. Roth, notes: "By the late twentieth century, `evangelicalism' for many Mennonite denominational leaders had become synonymous with the aggressively patriotic, and often militaristic, political agenda of the Moral Majority, the high-profile lifestyles of flamboyant televangelists, the dispensationalist apocalypticism of the 'Left Behind' series, and the kitsch culture of the spiritual self-help industry. On the basis of these impressionistic stereotypes, any form of evangelical influence in Mennonite communities was inherently negative. Far from being a source of renewal, 'evangelicalism' had become a problem from which the Mennonite Church needed to be saved." But Roth, ends his essay with a proposed framework for conversation between evangelicals and Anabaptists, questioning this almost allergic reaction to evangelicalism. "Too often, the term "evangelical" was reduced to a negative caricature that, not surprisingly, was found wanting when compared with the very best qualities of the Anabaptism-Mennonite tradition. Furthermore, the allergic rejection to all things 'evangelical' by some leaders reinforced a long-standing tendency among Mennonites to foster an identity of opposition--that is, defining who they were by focusing on what they rejected."
* In "Intellectual Hospitality as Historical Method: Moving Beyond the Activist Impulse," John Fea argues, that both evangelicals and Anabaptists "have been guilty of using history without submitting to the guiding principles of the historical discipline, thus exploiting the past for their respective agendas."
* Benjamin Wetzel seeks to revise a harsh historical reading of a key Mennonite bishop who was involved in the shutting down of Goshen College in 1923 in "Fundamentalists, Modernists, and a Mennonite Third Way: Reexaming the Career of Daniel Kauffman."
* Nathan E. Yoder continues the revisionist historical work on Kauffman in "'I Submit': Daniel Kauffman and the Legacy of a Yielded Life." Yoder documents Kauffman's interpretation of the foundational Anabaptist virtue of submission and its expression in Kauffman's view of authority in the church. The essay includes this telling quote from the era of the Goshen College controversy when Harvard and Chicago Mennonite grads began to teach at the school but conflicted with the "board of farm preachers who were afraid to let go of the old traditions."
* In "A Cord of A Cord of Many Strands: Reexamining Grace Brethren Identity and the Fundamentalism of Alva J. McClain," M. M. Norris and Jared S. Burkholder explore the founding of Grace Theological Seminary in 1937 and the founding of the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches. They write: "For McClain, American fundamentalism represented a means to enhance the Anabaptist tradition, fashioning it for his contemporary context."
* Jared S. Burkholder's essay, "The Question of Evangelicalism and Defection Among Lancaster and Franconia Mennonites," similarly takes on standard historiography that often interprets "fundamentalism, and therefore evangelicalism, primarily as an outside and corrupting phenomenon." Instead, Burkholder argues and compellingly illustrates, "conservative Mennonites, rather than being victims of outside infiltration, successfully adapted features of American fundamentalism for a uniquely Anabaptist context."
* In "'Pool Tables Are the Devil's Playground': Forging an Evangélico-Anabautista Identity in South Texas" Felipe Hinojosa recounts the arrival of plain-dressed Mennonite missionaries from Pennsylvania to the U.S.-Mexico border area in 1936 to establish a mission in the region--and how over the intervening years "Latina/o Mennonites actively forged an evangelical and Anabaptist identity that was unique to their communities--one that better reflected their own cultural and ethnic context." Hinojosa tells how the white Mennonite missionaries and then voluntary service workers were positively different than most Anglos in that they chose to live and work on the Latino/a side of the tracks. At the same time, however, they willingly embodied the larger racial prejudices in American society when those same white Mennonites refused or were told not to date or marry those they were evangelizing.
* David R. Swartz's chapter "Re-baptizing Evangelicalism: American Anabaptists and the 1970s Evangelical Left" explores the oft-overlooked movement of social justice evangelicals and how they drew on Anabaptist themes. "Progressive evangelicals, aghast both by the disintegration of a political tradition they were just starting to embrace and the vitality of an emerging religious right, looked to the historic tradition of Anabaptism for resources. . . . In Yoder's Politics of Jesus, the evangelical left found a vision of the church as a community of peace that could address the problem of violence in the world. In Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, they found a sharp critique of American materialism and global inequalities. In Longacre's More with Less cookbook, they learned that kitchens were moral spaces where a theology of simple living could be practiced. From Anabaptist women in the Evangelical Women's Caucus, they learned to apply the logic of the 'priesthood of all believers' to gender."
* In "The Evangelical-Anabaptist Spectrum: The Political Theologies of Francis Schaeffer, John Howard Yoder, and Jim Wallis" Geoffrey C. Bowden provides a comparative analysis of these three prominent thinkers and ends with this conclusion: "Yoder's call for Christians to pursue peace from within an eschatological theology asserts that God's rule has commenced and that the powers and principalities that characterized the old aeon, though they still exist, are passing away. Nevertheless, Christians must maintain hope for the future completion of God's rule by witnessing to that kingdom amidst the practices of the old aeon.
Read more ›
