Mennonite Weekly Review

Jokes about Mennonite thrift are older than that stash of rubber bands you can’t throw away. “You know you’re really a Mennonite,” says The Mennonite Starter Kit (Good Books, 1993), “when the fact that someone would save old bread bags to braid into doormats doesn’t strike you as odd.”

Rhoda Janzen taps this lode of humor in her new memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. As a child she “pined for store-bought treats” in her school lunches but instead got items like persimmon cookies “thriftily made … from the bruised culls sold half-off at the Japanese fruit stand.” Their “putative nutritional strength was a distant consideration from our mother’s number one criterion in preparing school lunches. This was cost.” And, unfortunately, “trading wasn’t an option. I had nothing the other kids wanted… . Everything that went into our mouths was homemade and chemical-free.”

More than a few of us can identify with that. In many a Mennonite household, “use it up, wear it out, make do or do without” wasn’t Scripture, but it might as well have been. In real Scrip­ture, “go to the ant, you sluggard” (Prov. 6:6) provided a model of industry and prudence.

Now it turns out mother really did know best. As financially straitened Americans pare their excess, the trend that some call the “new frugality” looks a lot like the homemade favorites that filled the old lunchbox. Today’s recession-induced simplicity matches a growing desire to cut waste and spend less, to live greener and eat healthier. The cycle of thrift has spun around again.

They say if you keep an article of clothing long enough it will come back in style. And so it is fashionable now, as in the days of old, to spend less than one makes. It’s even cool to shop at thrift stores. Since Men­nonites never cared if it was cool, we got ahead of the curve and were ready when others caught up. Last year our 107 thrift shops in the United States and Canada raised $9.8 million for Mennonite Central Committee. That’s a lot of second-hand pants.

The new frugality makes a virtue of necessity. But before the veteran careful spenders get too smug, we might remember that a thrift of older vintage, grounded in our core values, can dwell dangerously close to vice. The Bible warns of thrift that be­comes parsimony. “Do not eat the food of a stingy man … for he … is always thinking about the cost. ‘Eat and drink,’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you” (Prov. 23:6-7).

Better that we should be prodigal, in the positive sense of the word. “Prodigal” can mean wasteful, describing the errant son in Jesus’ parable. But it can also mean lavish, which fits the father’s generosity toward his son, and God’s toward us.

During the Christmas shopping season, the urge to spend recklessly spreads like a virus. This is the time to remember you can’t fix a price on generosity. A gift can be both frugal and lavish, just as another can be costly but little valued.

This time of year marks a financial make-or-break for business owners. Did they go into the black on Black Friday? Per­haps the season is a spiritual barometer for all of us. It reveals who we are as givers and receivers, as consumers and stewards.

“One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty” (Prov. 11:24). Our frugality and finances may rise or fall, but let there be no poverty of generosity.