Mennonite Weekly Review

Strictly speaking, tradition isn’t a good reason for anything. “We’ve always done it this way” raises the question “Does it make sense now?”

But we love traditions anyway, and it’s no wonder. Traditions bring order and consistency. They simplify, or even eliminate, decisions. They’re safe and comforting. They respect the wisdom of the past.

All of which is wonderful, except when they perpetuate mistakes, promote legalism and block progress.

As guardians of ancient truth, churches depend heavily on traditions. And some of them fulfill clear, biblical commands. But we also tend to confuse human preferences with divine mandates. The challenge, then, is to distinguish between godly rituals that preserve timeless values and human ideas that hang millstones around our necks.

Two issues facing conservative Mennonites illustrate the need to discern the value of traditions.

The first involves the seating of men on one side of the church and women on the other. The publications of two groups — the Beachy Amish Mennonite Churches and Southeastern Mennonite Conference — both published an article defending the practice.

The writer offered several reasons for separate seating. One of the strongest was that it “indicates consideration for widows, widowers and the unmarried… . The isolation of these single people disappears as they blend in with the rest of the congregation.” Perhaps the weakest was, “Can a man concentrate on God and his Word without distraction while sitting behind or beside someone else’s wife?”

The second issue centers on a concern in Iowa over Groffdale Mennonite Conference’s requirement that members’ tractors must have steel wheels. According to the publication Agri News, the Mitchell County Supervisors suspended for 60 days a ban on steel wheels, which can damage hard-surfaced roads. The supervisors took the action to enable Old Order Mennonites to continue to sell their produce in Osage.

“Steel cleats on tractor wheels is not just an old tradition,” sociologist Donald Kraybill wrote in a statement presented at a hearing in Cresco on Nov. 2. “It is an explicit religious practice [because] it is a church regulation.” Kraybill said Groffdale bans rubber tires because they might “lead to use of the tractor for transportation and eventually to the use of cars,” which could break up the group’s communities.

Kraybill has observed that Old Order Mennonites and Amish tend not to scrutinize their traditions too closely. “It is acceptable to repeat today what you did yesterday without always assessing if you should do it differently tomorrow,” he and co-author Carl F. Bowman wrote in On the Backroad to Heaven (Johns Hopkins, 2001). “Tradition is still reason enough.”

For all of us, sometimes it is. On where to sit in church, “that’s just tradition” probably satisfies. A rule requiring wheels that damage roads seems harder to justify.

Jesus rejected traditions that led people to fall in a legalistic rut. When the Pharisees asked why his disciples broke a hand-washing rule, Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” (Matt. 15:3).

In any church, traditions can become idols or stumbling blocks. Many favorite rituals enrich our fellowship. But “old” is not synonymous with “sacred” (nor does “new” mean “improved”). Whether in worship styles, use of technology or any other part of life, God’s laws and freedoms separate the good from the merely old.