Mennonite Weekly Review

As people in the United States prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, we mark an encounter between immigrant and indigenous groups on this continent.

The traditional history tells us of the Pilgrims in New England meeting the Wampanoag people, who helped save them from starvation. While that story is only one picture of European-indigenous relationships — many others were characterized by violence and oppression — there is also a lesson about the power of cultures meeting.

As learning from a new culture allowed European colonists in New England to survive, so cross-cultural relations today are helping Anabaptist beliefs survive in a globalized world.

One crucible for the multicultural Anabaptist church today is Paraguay. Russian German Mennonites settled there in the 1920s and ’30s, after Paraguay offered religious and educational freedom, and farmland in the Chaco, an arid region.

Some had left Canada because of restrictions on their German-language schools and questions about their refusal to serve in the military, establishing Menno Colony in the Chaco in 1927. Other Mennonites arrived from Russia with the help of Mennonite Central Committee, establishing Fernheim Colony in the Chaco in 1930.

From those German-ancestry groups, Mennonite churches in Paraguay have grown to include people of mestizo, or Spanish and indigenous, descent as well as members of a number of indigenous groups through mission work, service and living as neighbors. Fernheim colony and churches in Asunción have a variety of relationships among the groups, said Alfred Neufeld, a theologian and author, as well as a lead planner of the Mennonite World Conference assembly in Paraguay in July.

Coming from that context, Neufeld wrote What We Believe Together, a commentary on the 2006 Shared Convictions document by MWC’s General Council.

The commentary is an aid to new Mennonites who are learning for the first time about an Anabaptist perspective on Christianity. The book also provides an opportunity for people who grew up in Mennonite families to consider why they became and remain members of the church.

What We Believe Together could also be fodder for healthy theological debates in each Mennonite denomination, and between members of different denominations. From a core of shared beliefs, we can be more free to have the kind of discourse that helps us clarify our beliefs as denominations, congregations and individuals.

We can agree that “[t]o be different from the world, we need to entrust all areas of our lives to God,” as Neufeld writes, while exploring why some Anabaptists believe being different from the world has more to do with plain dress while others believe it has more to do with active peacemaking.

We do not need to agree on every issue to be part of the same global family of faith. The lesson of affirming common values while respecting differences is one many of us have learned from our own families, especially when we gather on the holidays.

This Thanksgiving, let us reflect with gratitude on how the cross-cultural encounters in our global family of faith encourage and challenge us to grow in our understanding of what it means to be disciples of Christ.