July 21, 2008 issue
Can we save mutual aid?
By Stephen KrissPage:
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I picked up the phone after walking into the church building, late for worship at my home congregation in western Pennsylvania. It was a woman whom I had helped to baptize while pastoring there. Her house had caught fire the day before, and she was staying at a nearby Comfort Inn with her husband and sons. She called to ask for prayer.
Stephen Kriss is a teacher, writer, pastor, student and follower of Jesus living in Philadelphia.
It was also a cry for help.
I began to think about how the church responds in the midst of crisis.
As Mennonites, we have made much of mutuality. We’ve institutionalized care but still bring casseroles to those with newborns and trays of food to the families of the recently deceased.
Yet, as a recent article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal suggests, the financial realities of contemporary life are challenging our abilities to provide mutual aid.
The article suggested that even among intentionally uninsured Anabaptists, the stress of costs is pressing toward reconsideration of what we can do.
While the challenge of health-care costs seems insurmountable, I think there are greater factors at work among us.
Increasingly, we don’t feel like there is an “us.” To be Mennonite these days is a multifaceted thing, sometimes unrecognizable to previous generations.
John Ruth, esteemed storyteller, pastor and historian here in southeastern Pennsylvania, suggests that a sense of “peoplehood” has held us together in the past. Folk traditions, shared geography and theology made us a people together. In that shared experience and practice, mutuality flowed freely and frequently.
Ruth himself was a recipient of that mutual aid, from a community that supported his storytelling vocation through film, speaking and writing.
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