Mennonite Colleges and Changed Lives

Last Thursday night during the study break held in our church fellowship hall, students and professors who gathered to eat ice cream and cookies also received a final exam drawn up by our youth pastor John Schrock. The exam had a lot of interesting questions about First Mennonite Church on it, most of which I was able to answer or at least debate. Questions like: “where did the money for our stained glass windows come from?” And “how many area churches are derived from the Swiss Mennonite settlement?” Having absorbed the stories and legends that shape this church’s identity, I knew the answers to questions like this. But there was one question that I missed by a very long shot. The question was: how many professors at Bluffton College are members of First Mennonite Church? Rather than follow the good example of the ambitious and industrious students who spent fifteen minutes going over the names on our church mailboxes to see how many professors they could recognize, I quickly wrote down a number that I thought was a decent guess—12. Not even close. According to Pastor John Schrock’s calculations, there are presently 28 members or associate members of First Mennonite Church who are active members of the Bluffton College faculty. If we throw in faculty emeriti, that number would rise substantially. And if we did a tally of all the members of our congregation who are or have been educators—elementary and high school teachers, college and university faculty, and Christian education teachers, no doubt the number would exceed a hundred—although, being the numerically challenged person that I am, perhaps I should simply say that there are without doubt a lot of teachers in this church.

And the word from the book of James this morning is: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” If we apply this text to First Mennonite Church, we could aptly conclude that this is a congregation that will be judged by very high standards. And that’s because according to James we who teach spend a great deal of our time wagging our tongues and therefore have the capacity to do both great harm and great good. In other words there is a lot at stake in the work of teaching. My reflections this morning are an attempt to grasp just how much might be at stake in the specific teaching context of Mennonite higher education in general and Bluffton College in particular. And given how invested this congregation is in Mennonite higher education, I can think of few matters that have greater implications for our mission and well being as a people of God.

While it is no doubt conventional wisdom among us here that Mennonite colleges make a positive difference in the lives of people—an assumption that remains unfortunately controversial in the broader church—I am not convinced that even we who support Mennonite church colleges have fully grasped just how significant an impact our church colleges can have on the world. Three quick anecdotes can perhaps illustrate both the expected and unexpected ways that Mennonite higher education changes lives.

The first story comes from Perry Bush’s recent history of Bluffton College and illustrates what we might describe as a standard aspiration for church colleges: that they might strengthen the convictions and commitments of Mennonite youth and call them to lives of service and peacemaking. Perry tells the story of how the distinguished Mennonite sociologist J. Winfield Fretz decided to attend Bluffton College against the advice of his church pastor, who thought that Bluffton had become a den of modernism. At Bluffton, Fretz came under the influence both of C. Henry Smith and a Christian socialist student by the name of John Keller, and as a result devoted his life both to the Mennonite church and to the study of sociology. As he reflected on the impact Bluffton College had on his life, Fretz wrote this wonderful sentence: “I frequently shiver as I think of what I might have spent my life doing had I not gone to Bluffton.” What an incredible testimony to the power of Mennonite higher education to strengthen commitment to the church and its teachings. I’ve often thought that this sentence should be used in an advertisement for Bluffton College.

The second story is about a current student at Bluffton College whose experience illustrates a less common but growing aspiration for Mennonite church colleges—that they might become mission posts for the particular values and commitments associated with the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. While this is not a new idea for Bluffton College, the interest in this possibility from other Mennonite institutions is certainly a new development. I have drawn this story from an essay written by Zach Walton, who is currently a junior at Bluffton College. In the essay Zach describes his conversion from a “young, fiery, ultra-conservative fundamentalist waiting for the wrath of God to fall on the wicked” to a “nonviolent Mennonite praying for peace for all nations.” The essay tells of his family’s military heritage and of his attraction to the religious right as a high school student, elements of personal identity that were called into question for the first time when Zach took the Christian Ethics course that is part of Bluffton College’s general education curriculum. In that class, Zach writes, “I realized that the very core of my world-view was corrupted by violent assumptions foreign to the teaching of Christ and therefore must be abandoned. I was confronted with the Gospel of peace and it overtook me.” Zach concludes his essay by affirming Bluffton College both as an institution that models faithfulness to Christ and as a place filled with “prophets, pastors, and teachers” who call students to radical discipleship. Echoing the sentiments of J. Winfield Fretz, Zach writes “I am the person I am today and can tell this story of radical transformation and renewal because Bluffton College has continually chosen to stay faithful to the Gospel by stretching the witness of peace and justice to the surrounding world.” While such a dramatic conversion experience is perhaps not typical of the Bluffton College experience, Zach Walton’s story nevertheless illustrates what is possible in Mennonite higher education and also highlights the kind of change that takes place in smaller increments and in less dramatic ways for so many students at Mennonite colleges.

The third anecdote is a personal story that illustrates a function of Mennonite higher education that has until now received very little attention: its capacity to impact the world of ideas and knowledge beyond its institutional borders and thus to make a difference in the lives of people who never have had an opportunity to attend a Mennonite college. Nearly fifteen years ago, in the fall of 1986, I was a young college student living and studying in the exhilarating atmosphere of our nation’s capitol. As a student at Malone College, I was participating in the American Studies Program, a semester program run by what was then known as the Christian College Coalition. Rebelling against my conservative Mennonite upbringing, I had immersed myself in the dizzying whirlwind of politics and power that shapes social and cultural life inside the Washington D.C. beltway, and I have to admit that I loved every minute of it. That joy turned to a moral crisis for me, however, when our seminar instructors assigned as required reading a book by an author with a last name that had a frustratingly familiar ring to it: John Howard Yoder. The title of the book was The Politics of Jesus and our instructors presented it to us as a sort of foil to the argument they had been advancing all along—that God’s redemption extended to all of God’s creation and included the institutions of governance as provinces of Christian vocation and transformation. Yoder’s book challenged or at least seriously qualified that claim by arguing that Jesus’ life and teachings presented a model for political engagement that made the church the primary agent of political witness for Christians and placed Jesus’ nonviolence squarely at the center of the gospel message. To make a long story short, that book transformed my theological moorings, refocused my vocational interests and renewed my commitment to the church and the church’s mission as understood in our Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage. Even though my parents had forbidden that I should attend a Mennonite college, the gifts of Mennonite higher education had visited me in Washington D.C. as I studied American politics with 25 other evangelical students and with three instructors who were intrigued by but not yet convinced of the claims made in the Politics of Jesus. I should mention that several years later in the midst of graduate school dizzy with the wild and wonderful ideas of postmodern theory and tempted to neglect the particular Christian witness to which I was committed, I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be able to attend a lecture by one of the single most prominent American postmodern theorists—Fredric Jameson—who to my complete amazement and disbelief devoted his whole lecture to an analysis of—you guessed it—John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. Only weeks after that lecture, I attended a circle of Christian graduate students in the humanities from the Reformed tradition who, I discovered after I got there, were huddled around copies of The Politics of Jesus trying to figure out how to answer its claims which they found compelling but difficult to swallow. There is that poem about being chased by the hound of heaven which I have been tempted to rewrite according to my own life experience of being chased by the hound of Yoder. And while Yoder is an unusually well-known Mennonite writer, I was fortunate in college to read not only Yoder, but also Willard Swartley, J. Denny Weaver, and other Mennonite writers who were either assigned or suggested by professors of mine. These texts and their writers were shaped by the world of Mennonite higher education and were the means by which the Mennonite church reached me at some very crucial moments in my life, even though I never attended a Mennonite college or seminary. In that sense my own testimony can echo J. Winfield Fretz and Zach Walton: I hate to think of what my life would have been were it not for the intellectual gifts to the church made possible by Mennonite higher education.

In my remaining time, I would like to sketch briefly my own understanding of the character of these gifts, which I think is described well in the Bluffton College mission statement: “Shaped by that historic peace church tradition and nourished by a desire for excellence in all of its programs, Bluffton College seeks to prepare students of all backgrounds for life as well as vocation, for responsible citizenship, for service to all peoples and ultimately for the purposes of God’s universal kingdom.” Eloquent though it may be, in many ways the majority of this mission statement could describe almost any church-affiliated liberal arts college. It is the opening qualification—“shaped by that peace church tradition”—that makes this particular mission unique. All of these things that good Christian liberal arts colleges do, we do, but from that peace church perspective. It may be well for us to ask “what is ‘that’ historic peace church perspective? In the mission statement “that” simply refers to the General Conference Mennonite Church and its Eastern and Central Districts. What then is the specific peace church perspective of the Mennonites that we claim shapes our whole higher education project? The answer to that question could of course take a week-long conference to answer and there are people here who can answer that question better than I can. Nevertheless, I want to suggest three distinctive features of a Mennonite peace church perspective that I believe should make a significant difference in how we teach peace to our students and “contribute to the intellectual, cultural and spiritual welfare of the local, national and global communities.”

The Peace Church Vision and the Truth Struggle

The first distinctive feature of the Mennonite peace church perspective has already been stated well by Bluffton College academic dean John Kampen in his sermon last year for College Sunday here at First Mennonite Church. As you may recall, Dr. Kampen’s sermon offered a provocative reading of the Bluffton College motto—The Truth Makes Free—by placing it in its biblical context, which was a fierce rhetorical and cultural struggle among religious authorities about the nature and content of truth. Likewise, for Mennonites, peace is not simply a synonym for liberal tolerance or successful diplomacy or conflict avoidance. Rather, peace qualifies and defines the struggle for truth, for liberation, and for freedom.

Our church, born as it was in the fires of Reformation Europe, has preserved in its founding stories and narratives the identity of a church that insisted on nonviolence not as a matter of preference or convenience or even philosophy but rather as a controversial social practice of Christian believers who were committed to freedom of conscience against the will of the state and the social majority. The Anabaptist Vision of a church committed to discipleship, Christian community, and nonviolence even in the midst of persecution and harrassment has enabled the spiritual descendents of 16^th century Anabaptism to identify with the struggles of disenfranchised and oppressed peoples everywhere for liberation and justice. We know that being for peace is meaningless unless that peace commitment is made in the context of struggle against the sins of society and of humankind, including the overreaching of political and economic powers and the exploitation of the poor and the voiceless. And finally, we know that truth is not to be found floating high above the hope and terror of human struggle but rather in the midst of it. And so we don’t expect the project of peace church education to be free of controversy or immune to the problems of the communities from which its students and faculty are drawn. Peace church education is about vulnerable engagement with the surrounding world, not protectionist withdrawal from it.

The Peace Church Vision and Christian Separation

At the same time, a second distinctive feature of the Mennonite peace church perspective will be its nonconformity with the surrounding culture and its expectations. I used to think that separation and nonconformity were words absent from the General Conference Mennonite vocabulary until I stumbled across a Bluffton College baccalaureate sermon by then president Lloyd Ramseyer published in the October 1959 Mennonite Quarterly Review entitled “Christian Nonconformity in a Conformist Age.” In the sermon, Ramseyer laments the growing power of popular culture and argues that students educated at Bluffton College should be empowered to resist that popular mainstream culture around them along with its attendant evils and injustices. “It is people like you,” Ramseyer urges his student audience, “with Christian commitment and a college education, who should take the lead in this fight against the entrenched forces of prejudice and wickedness.” Ramseyer identifies three such entrenched forces: the abuse of alcohol, racial prejudice, and war. I would like to quote extensively from his discussion of war because it illustrates beautifully how Mennonites at their best have made peace convictions an expression of nonconformity to the social order.

The current trend is to think of armed might as a necessary and first line of defense against communism and its attendant evils. Will you, without thought, be squeezed into that mold, or will you think for yourself? Will you be creative and brave enough to suggest other ways which will go further toward maintenance of peace and good will than armed might?

Do you really believe that the way of violence is the Christian way? Do you believe that Jesus meant what he said when He said that we should love our neighbors as ourselves? If you really believe it, are you willing to stand on that belief, or will you be squeezed into the world’s mold?

A central task of peace church education is to help young people resist being “squeezed into the world’s mold,” by giving them the vocabulary, the reasoning skills, and the convictions that will empower them to live lives of resistance to the expectations and desires sold on television, on billboards, in films, in the halls of Congress and in the malls of America. This means that our students will need to develop both a comprehensive understanding of the status quo and an informed hope that the world could be otherwise. It is this sense in which I believe that James in our text for today was arguing that wisdom from above is first of all pure before it is peaceable. The resources of world as we know it are not adequate in the Christian struggle for peace. Our church colleges must finally return to the story of Jesus, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the alternative community of the church as the only adequate resources to show a different way and to offer the strength for resistance.

The Peace Church Vision as Essential to the Gospel

I believe that the struggle for truth and nonconformity to the world are dimensions of the Mennonite peace church witness that make it distinctive. But I have also come to the conclusion that these are not only features of our peace witness but also the conditions of possibility for its survival. The bishop in my home congregation was fond of saying in his typical awkward way: when we give up nonconformity, nonresistance will soon go out the door. Lloyd Ramseyer makes something of the same claim far more elegantly in his sermon. He laments:

The Mennonite church, too, suffers from a dilution of its message, from the desire to be popular, from the urge to grow in numbers, from an aversion to being classed as a peculiar sect. Four hundred years ago our church fathers suffered imprisonment, torture, and death for the things which they believed. Ever since that time there have been frequent migrations of church members seeking lands in which they would have freedom to worship God and follow the practices which they believed to be right. Now these same principles and doctrines for which our fathers sacrificed are being considered secondary in importance. In our desire to gain in numbers we hesitate to make these beliefs a condition for church membership. It is time that our own church leaders face realistically the issue as to whether these beliefs are a vital part of the Christian Gospel, or merely something traditional among our people, something which is good but not essential.

Ramseyer clearly believes that Christian peace convictions are central to the gospel, not an optional addition and yet his question still remains to be decisively answered by the Mennonite churches and its colleges nearly fifty years later. And so in closing I want to affirm that the centrality of peace to the gospel is the third distinctive of the Mennonite peace church tradition and thus also of Mennonite higher education. A Camerata Singers program from last year put it this way (or something like this) “It is the conviction of Bluffton College that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling all things unto himself.” In other words, the work of Jesus on the cross is by definition the work of peace. For decades J. Denny Weaver has been building the theological case for precisely this scandalous biblical claim, hounded no doubt as I have been along with so many others by John Howard Yoder’s provocative, persuasive, and unforgettable reading of the gospel story which he concludes with the following claim: “A social style characterized by the creation of a new community and the rejection of violence of any kind is the theme of New Testament proclamation from beginning to end, from right to left. The cross of Christ is the model of Christian social efficacy, the power of God to those who believe.” It is my view that the Christian church in general and the Mennonite church in particular have only just begun to come to terms with the implications of this sweeping claim. Furthermore I suggest that if we accept as President Ramseyer hoped that nonviolence is central to the gospel of Jesus Christ and if we at the same time claim that Jesus Christ is Lord of the whole universe, then our work as a peace church and our work as peace church colleges has only just begun. If, for example, we seek to integrate the values and faith of “that historic peace church tradition” into “all facets of the educational program, including not only the curricular and co-curricular programs, but the very life of the college community,” as the Bluffton College mission statement calls for, Bluffton College and hopefully all of our Mennonite colleges will become centers for a new way of thinking, rooted in the gospel of peace and extending the authority of that gospel to every arena of human involvement, “taking every thought captive to obey Christ” (II Cor. 10:4).

If we do this well, we will find that students encounter the gospel of peace not only in Christian ethics classes, but in sociology classes, in English classes, in education classes, in communication classes, in science classes, in psychology classes, in math classes, in history classes, and in Bible classes. We will find further that not only are the church’s young people strengthened in their faith and strangers to the peace church tradition overtaken by the gospel of peace, but we will also discover that our claims about Jesus and nonviolence will be debated and discussed in surprising places beyond the sanctuaries and classrooms of the Mennonite church. No doubt that historic peace church tradition will not be accepted by all who encounter it, maybe not even by most. But our mission cannot be judged by standard criteria of effectiveness. That’s because we are first of all called to be faithful or, as James puts it, “the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” In yielding to such wisdom, we are assured not of effectiveness but of fruitful lives. Or, as James concludes, “a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” May we be fruitful laborers on behalf of God’s peace. Amen.