Having coffee with a friend on Monday, our conversation ranged from all that we have in common to our differences in ethnic-religious heritage. She’s my only good friend of her background, and I am pretty sure she’d say the same for me. We value hearing about the way each of us engages our family and traditions. But we don’t need to extrapolate from what we share with each other to all or even most people from the same people group.
When I got home, at the top of my inbox was an email from a person researching Mennonites. He found a column I wrote years ago, posted on the website Third Way. I vaguely remember someone asking my permission to post that column, which I wrote for ten years for Mennonite World Review (an independent pan-Anabaptist newspaper I used to work for, which recently merged to become Anabaptist World magazine). I could only fuzzily remember the particular article the researcher was interested in, about jury service, so I went to Third Way thinking I’d search for it.
On the website, beneath the top navigation and a photo slideshow with headings such as “Who are the Mennonites?” I found an archive of my Living Simply column. My name and a pull quote and headline are next to one other columnist, a woman who worked for years for MennoMedia. The visual presentation could make it look like I represent Mennonites more generally.
I don’t object to my columns being featured there. I’m proud of some of them (though a few make me wince a little when my thinking has grown more nuanced than it was a decade ago).
But it got me wondering, Am I representative of Mennonites? It’s not false humility—humility of all kinds is where Mennonites are Vikings—that I wonder if I’m the right person for it.
I’m not the wrong person. I’m an ordained Mennonite pastor, most importantly. I prefer to use the word Mennonite for the faith, to specify a kind of Christian, but in popular use it’s often inseparable from ethnicity and culture. There also, my ancestors were German-speaking Swiss people who became Anabaptist centuries ago and emigrated to become Pennsylvania Germans (popularly called Pennsylvania Dutch from Deutsch), some of them Mennonites and some Amish. And in terms of someone knowledgeable about Mennonites, in this case, while I didn’t know the answer to the researcher’s question, I easily came up with three names of scholars who could address it.
Here, it is important to note that if one randomly selected a Mennonite globally, that person would be much more likely to be Congolese, Ethiopian, or Indonesian than North American of European heritage. But would that person be a better representative of Mennonites? Are any of us really representatives of any group to which we belong?
It’s an aspect of human nature to draw broader conclusions from an individual we have encountered. There are multiple kinds of dangers to categorical thinking, especially social categorization.
The average person in the United States pictures my plain-dressing grandmothers, not me, when they think of Mennonites (if they know we exist). I grew up in inner-city Washington, D.C., attended public schools, and belonged to an ecumenical Christian community. My parents taught me how to describe Mennonite and Anabaptist distinctives in a way that explained how I could be Mennonite to people who were sometimes incredulous. There were times when I distanced myself from being Mennonite. But something always brings me back to recognizing how much that is a part of me.
In the end, I may not be able to represent any group to which I belong. Yet I am a good example of a thoughtful person who engages with her heritage while not being completely defined by it. Which is as much as any of us can say, Mennonite or otherwise.
Gathered and Scattered book update
Life has taken some twists and turns this year. Even the anticipated ones have been more challenging than expected. But I hope to have news soon about a publisher for my book and to submit the complete manuscript by the end of the year. My overwhelming feeling at this point is one of gratitude: for the people who made it possible for me to have time to work on this project (including the Louisville Institute), and for all who have shared with me candidly about their insights and experiences.
Reading & listening
A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging, by Greg Jarrell (Cascade Books, 2018)
“The Rise of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s Authoritarian President: The budding strongman has ridden Bitcoin schemes and a repressive crackdown on gangs to become Latin America’s most popular leader.” By Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker. September 12, 2022 Issue
“Did a Nobel Peace Laureate Stoke a Civil War? After Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ended a decades-long border conflict, he was heralded as a unifier. Now critics accuse him of tearing the country apart.” By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker October 3, 2022 Issue
For those who observe the season of Advent as well as Christmas and Epiphany, if you don’t already have Steve Thorngate’s album After the Longest Night, I commend it to you. His wonderful new music includes positive language for darkness, and beautiful traditional words such as the O Antiphons while avoiding supersessionism. It’s available as a digital album or CD from his website.