Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — When Cyneatha Millsaps visited Bethel College for the first time recently, she found a network of connections had preceded her.

While spending several days at Bethel College as pastor-in-residence, Cyneatha Millsaps, top right, had breakfast one morning with the student chaplains. Counterclockwise, starting from Millsaps, are Naomi Graber, student chaplain from Elkhart, Ind.; Sharayah Williams, campus ministries student assistant from Kalona, Iowa; Will Peterson, student chaplain from Bonner Springs, Kan.; Kelsie Miller, Goshen, Ind.; Dale Schrag, campus pastor; and Maya Kehr, student chaplain from Goshen, Ind. — Photo by Erin Myrtle/Bethel College

Millsaps, lead pastor at Community Mennonite Church in Markham, Ill., is on a mission.

She wants to share with young people her vision of what the church — both her own congregation and the denomination — can be.

She visited Bluffton (Ohio) University last spring, and this fall combined a visit to Hesston College for its Anabaptist Vision and Discipleship Series conference Oct. 30-Nov. 1 with three days as pastor-in-residence at Bethel Nov. 2-5.

“She said she always wondered why folks at Community Mennonite Church thought Bethel was such a special place,” said Dale Schrag, campus pastor. “She assumed it was simply because [the late] Larry Voth — a former pastor of Community Mennonite and former director of development here at Bethel for whom Voth Hall was named — loved Bethel College, and Community Mennonite loved Larry Voth.”

But, Schrag said, while that connection is true enough, Millsaps also experienced “something more, something very special” during her time at Bethel.

That may be due in part to another connection Millsaps discovered, to the Mennonite community she credits as the place where her vision for church began to germinate.

Millsaps grew up in south central Elkhart, Ind., only a couple of miles from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. As a child, she knew nothing of AMBS, but was very much aware of a group that had coalesced there and then organized Fellowship of Hope, an intentional Christian community, in her neighborhood.

One of the Fellowship of Hope children was Ruth Harder, with whom Millsaps became reacquainted when both women were students at AMBS and who is now associate pastor of Bethel College Mennonite Church.

Millsaps grew up in a home where her mother suffered from mental illness, she told the Bethel students, faculty and staff who gathered for the weekly chapel service. Fellowship of Hope members brought groceries or paid rent when Millsaps’ mother was unable to provide.