Mennonite Weekly Review

Peggy Landis, our missions commission chair, closed our two-hour goal-setting meeting last month in an unusual way. Recognizing the long-term service of three of our members, she gave them each a loaf of homemade bread.

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

It was a symbolic act, she said, a metaphor for the work they had done, much of it without fanfare in the congregation, all of it selfless and helpful to the lives of others in the community and around the world.

A nice touch, I told her.

It got me to thinking how rich and life-giving this metaphor is. It reminded me of a recent reading of Joyce Rupp in her book Fresh Bread.

Inspired by Rom. 11:16, Rupp writes: “I, a handful of dough, am asked to be the leaven for a whole batch of people so that faith will rise in hearts. It is humbling to be your [God’s] leaven. It is risky to be your holy. It is goodness to be your dough.”

How true, I thought in this case. Time and again during his 20-year tenure, Ervie Glick, as chair of the Developing Countries Capital Project, would appeal to the congregation to assist a Middle Eastern or Latin American refugee family settle into the community. Or he would round up a team of volunteers to help build a sand dam in Kenya. Or raise $6,000 over budget to help a church plant in China, or another $5,000 to put on a church roof in Trinidad.

There was never a problem reaching the fundraising goal or getting volunteers. The cynics could call it “conscience money,” with some cause, since the DCCP project was set up as a “tithe” in the 1990s when the 300-member congregation decided to add a $2.4 million sanctuary and classrooms. If we were going to spend that much on ourselves, the reasoning went, we needed to help other struggling congregations around the globe who didn’t even have a place of worship or needed repair to a deteriorating one.

The leaven was working nonetheless, because, as Rupp pointed out, a whole batch of people had faith rise in their hearts — both the giver and the recipients. The projects raised the vision of the people back home as much as helped the new believers at the other end.

Then there was Marty Miller, working for more than 10 years as service project facilitator for Mennonite Disaster Service, ready to round up volunteers to help with hurricane- or flood-ravaged communities in Mississippi, Louisiana or Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Or taking teams of volunteers to Latin American countries, where he grew up as a missionary kid.

Time and time again, we have seen faith rising in the hearts of both the volunteer and the recipients.