Mennonite Weekly Review

This spring a front page of MWR highlighted that our future looks both brown and plain. Articles profiled the growth of immigrant Anabaptist communities and conservative Anabaptist groups, the latter often recognizable by their plain clothing.

Stephen Kriss is a teacher, writer, pastor, student and follower of Jesus living in Philadelphia.

This reality puts less distinctly garbed Euro-American Mennonites in a contested space for identity. It requires us to respond to questions and to reshape our own sense of “Mennoniteness.” The world has difficulty inter-preting our lack of distinct dress and the fact that now most Mennonites in the world aren’t white folk.

Enter, visibly, this summer a third force: the young, well-organized Pink Mennos, advocating full inclusion of gays and lesbians, at the Mennonite Church USA convention.

Church historian Phyllis Tickle writes in The Great Emergence that the last great struggle of the current Christian Reformation will be around issues on homosexuality and biblical interpretation.

Tickle enters this conversation unanxiously. She suggests it’s a conversation that’s par for the course as we move toward the next great age of the church.

The every-500-years Reformations that Tickle profiles are part of the life of the church, part of the continued spread of the Good News. Tickle — a hopeful octogenarian prophet who doesn’t readily tip her hand about her own theology — suggests God is working out a larger plan to extend the gospel again.

The challenge with the entrance of Pink Mennos at this stage in MC USA’s history is the pull they exert on what still feels like a fragile denomination trying to knit together different streams of Anabaptist expression and experience.

The centrifugal force of our postmodern times, coupled with our Mennonite penchant toward schism, makes it difficult to hold together a church. The varied streams of Anabaptism flow toward what seem like incompatible versions of community, discipleship and peaceableness.

If Tickle is right — that this tension over biblical interpretation is the last great struggle on the road between where we are and what the church is becoming, and that all of that is usable under God’s great intent for the gospel — it’s a challenge we must live through with hope and integrity.

But how do we do this? And who do we become in the midst of it?