Mennonite Weekly Review

NEW YORK — A newly renovated townhouse in Manhattan rang with the sounds of homecoming Sept. 19-21 as former housemates reunited and mingled with current residents during a 50-year anniversary celebration at Menno House.

Former residents of Menno House placed photos of themselves on a wall-sized timeline of house history. — Photo by Lowell Brown

In the kitchen, several generations of former tenants traded stories about the changing neighborhood. “When they took down the hospital nearby, on Second Avenue, thousands of rats flooded the neighborhood,” said Gene Reynolds, who served as a volunteer at another local hospital from 1961 to 1963. “We had a big hole right there under where the sink was, and rats would come out of that hole. At night we used to go down into the basement with a bat and just club rats.”

Owned and operated by Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship since 1997, the 19th-century townhouse was first purchased by Mennonites in 1957, when Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions created a New York voluntary service center for conscientious objectors to the military draft. In 1977, after the draft had ended, the building became a Mennonite student center, housing young adults and hosting activities later sponsored by Mennonite Board of Missions.

Today, Menno House is home to Mennonite Voluntary Service and Mennonite Central Committee volunteers, as well as students, interns and social service workers.

The keynote address was brought by John Rempel, a professor at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Ind., and MMF’s pastor when the congregation purchased Menno House. Rempel identified the Menno House history as a series of experiments.

“Embrace the city and its people, with all their diversity,” he said, and at the same time “embrace Christ, the whole Christ — friend of outsiders, prophet for the poor, Savior from sin, Lord of life.”

Menno House currently contains 10 rooms for residents, three rooms for city visitors, a Peace and Anabaptist Library and an office shared by Lowell Brown, the house manager, and Sylvia Shirk Charles, pastor of Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship.

Myrna Burkholder, manager from 1977 to 1982, was honored with original calligraphy for her vision in implementing the residential structure that still guides Menno House today.

Reunions and reminiscences were punctuated with music, art, poetry and food. North Bronx Mennonite Church Pastor Ruth Wenger — who was a resident with her husband, David, and son, Stefan, in the late 1970s — led a hymn sing. Pianist Francesco Lecce-Chong and violinist Amy Kauffman performed a Brahms sonata they had presented at a Menno House fundraiser in Lancaster, Pa., in May.

On Saturday evening, dinner was served under festive paper lanterns and a clear sky. Afterward, singer/songwriter Gina Holsopple, manager from 2001 to 2003, performed, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a 1983 to 1985 resident, read poems set in the immediate neighborhood of Menno House.

Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship’s Sunday service concluded the weekend of celebration, with a prayer Shirk Charles adapted from Nathan Showalter’s rededication of Menno House in 1977: “We ask … that the euphony of Good News about Jesus reverberate within the plaster of its East Side walls, and find sympathetic vibration … among the homes and peoples of this neighborhood.”

“This [anniversary] is a sign of Mennonites living meaningfully in the city,” Rempel said.