Sept. 7, 2009 issue
Learning from the early church
How did the cross go from a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice to a sign of aggression against enemies? An AMBS prof finds lessons for today
By Mary E. Klassen Associated Mennonite Biblical SeminaryPage:
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ELKHART, Ind. — Alan Kreider says missionaries just go and see who’s on the other end of the phone.
Alan Kreider, retired professor of church history and mission at AMBS, views a session from the Resident But Alien DVD project with AMBS graduate Andy Alexis-Baker, who wrote the discussion questions that accompany the DVDs. — Photo by Mary E. Klassen/AMBS
For Kreider, a retired professor at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, that phrase sums up a 13-year relationship that has resulted in a just-completed DVD project.
In 1996 Kreider was a mission worker in England when he received a telephone call from John Peachey, director of a Youth With a Mission center north of London.
That phone call started a chain of events that led to six DVD presentations in which Kreider and YWAM students look at the early Christian church and how it was effective in attracting people to faith.
The initial contact came at the time when YWAM was considering how to mark the 900th anniversary of the first Crusades.
“The YWAM leaders in England told me that my writing on the early church had given them a vision for new ways of responding to mission, especially in the Middle East,” Kreider said.
As YWAM organized the Reconciliation Walk, a three-year effort in which volunteers walked from Germany to the Middle East with a message of apology, “They asked me to teach about how the cross moved from being a symbol of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice to being a symbol of Christian aggression against enemies,” Kreider said.
Over the next several years, he taught about the early church in the YWAM discipleship training program several times, including three times in Turkey and once in Jerusalem.
Through these encounters, Kreider met people from very different ecclesial and cultural backgrounds — charismatic, Anglican, Pentecostals.
“I was bowled over by their freshness and their sacrificial commitment to Jesus Christ,” he said. “Something in their spirit was akin to the early Anabaptists. It was an immense privilege to be there.”
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