Mennonite Weekly Review

I studied his face and demeanor closely — tousled hair, closely cropped beard and mustache, an open shirt collar, granny glasses, a friendly, almost whimsical smile and clear eyes. A fun-loving, yet serious guy I would want to engage.

Dick Benner, of Harrisonburg, Va., is a consultant to Media for Living, producer of outreach tools for churches.

I don’t know this man, but the photo credit inside MissioDei, an infrequent publication from Mennonite Mission Network, told me it is the face of Mauricio Chenlo, director for Hispanic Church Planting Academy and church planting generalist consultant.

Whoa! What a long and institutional title for a person who, from his photograph, looks very non-institutional, intuitive and inviting. Not foreboding, not at all mysterious or calculating, certainly not distant or off-putting. The contrasts were striking, so much so that I wanted to take him off the page and chat with him.

Then it struck me why I was so taken with this man. He seemed so awesomely authentic in the last week of a political campaign so entirely fabricated that it seemed surreal. Somehow, though, beneath all the rhetoric and posturing, was a changing of the political order not seen in perhaps a century.

Chenlo’s face, of all things, brought this home with stunning graphic reality.

I believe the new administration in Washington will usher in a tsunami of change in how we are governed and respond to government. The old order is passing and a new day is dawning. President-elect Barack Obama described it as “not only a new kind of politics but a new attitude.”

I couldn’t help but make comparisons to the changing face of Mennonite Church USA. Chenlo’s charming smile and demeanor on the cover of this booklet brought this home like no other. In the pages that followed there was a detailed profile of Mennonite church planters, from 1990 to 2005, a study done by researcher Conrad Kanagy.

I was struck by how the political and church transitions track so closely.

Here we are with an African-American president-elect who has the almost insurmountable task of giving direction to an encrusted Washington guard who will resist his impulses at every turn, so deeply entrenched are they in the ways of intimidation and divisiveness, so accustomed to a class system that has kept them in power.

Mennonite leaders do not use intimidation and divisiveness for control and would vehemently deny that we have an entrenched class system. Yet these new church planters, as exemplified in Chenlo, have, according to Kanagy, “a low profile on the margins of the broader church, outside congregational, geographical and political centers of the denomination.”