Goshen College caves – Peacemaking, Convictions and Heritage

Goshen College caves – Peacemaking, Convictions and Heritage

When people look to their future do they look to their past? Is it true that a generation which ignores history has no past and no future?

Heritage is a treasured gift that is received from the previous generation as an inheritance. Behind the heritage of the story and the land lies the heritage of promise, and behind that promise stands a faithful God. – from the Worship resources for Mennonite Heritage Sunday, October 25, 2009

Heritage and history are just part of the foundation on which the Mennonite church was built. A foundation forged in conviction and sustained by faith in God, adherence to Christ teachings on peace and peacemaking, simple living and service to others and the strength of family and community.

Christ’s teachings on peacemaking are at the heart of the Mennonite church. A comment in the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 1995 says: “In continuity with previous Mennonite confessions of faith, we affirm that nonparticipation in warfare involves conscientious objection to military service and a nonresistant response to violence. Our peace witness also includes peacemaking and working for justice. Peace witness is needed even when the nations in which we live are not at war. Ministries of mediation, conciliation, and nonviolent resolution of everyday conflict can express our commitment to Christ’s way of peace.“ (Article 22, Commentary # 3)

This is what I grew up learning and knowing about Mennonites. A God-centered and Christ-centered people, who stood strong against war, who worked as a community to help bring peace and Christ’s teachings to the world, who supported those around them – not only in times of need – and a people willing to make a difference.

Though growing up in a Christian home, I had never heard the term 1-W nor did I know what it meant. I grew up in an extended family of Catholics, and never knew what it meant to be a Catholic. I only saw the actions of those who who were Catholics first and then Christians. I grew up not understanding that Christ is the head of the Church. I grew up with aunts, uncles and even my own father serving in the military. I did not grow up knowing the positive power of peacemaking, nonresistant or nonviolent resolution can make in one’s life, how it can open up our hearts to Christ.

Eventually I learned what “conscientious objector” meant and what it stood for and why it was important. I learned that a conscientious objector was making a statement on her/his own beliefs and that for most those beliefs were rooted in a love of mankind, a love that Christ gave to us through His own life.

SHMC may be a small church but from what I know of it, it is a church that is dedicated to peacemaking, understands first hand the importance of God, Christ, family, friends and country. Mennonites that understand the obligation to honor Christ Kingdom, as their for fathers and mothers; a people of strong religious conviction, who were killed for holding fast to that ideal in feudal Europe. They paid a heavy price for their belief, a price that can never be paid back but it can be paid forward.

John D. Roth, professor of history at Goshen College reminded us, and the world, that our “commitment to peacemaking doesn’t fall solely on this issue.” He encourages us to “keep finding the balance between courageously expressing Christian convictions that may go against the grain of popular culture with a more gracious embrace of the community in which we live.”

To outsiders it may seem a trivial issue, but to Mennonites it is not. Is The Star Spangled Banner Christ Centered? Does it glorify Christ? Or is it an explicit celebration of war, song that declares in it’s final stanza, “Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ “

If Mennonites allow popular culture to erode ‘deeply held’ convictions how far will it go? Will Mennonites and other peacemaking people have a voice? Will popular culture be allowed to dictate issues? Will the call for repealing the death penalty, a call for an end to war or a call be heard over the sounds of bombs bursting in air, the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion and the cries of the wounded and dying?

Jeffrey P. Harrington

Topeka, KS

Southern Hill Mennonite Church

02/17/2010

(Thanks go out to Jesus Radicals and the Goshen College Record)