Mennonite Weekly Review

If Mennonites are a body with many parts — each with its own gift, as 1 Corinthians 12 says — the Mennonite Brethren are the ones with the gift of letting the Spirit move them to release what they feel inside.

MBs emphasize a faith that comes from the heart and aren’t afraid to talk about it. They’re more likely than most to describe their college’s football coach as a man of God or to declare they have a broken heart for those who don’t know Jesus.

This depth of Spirit-filled faith, unabashed and freely shared, is something all Mennonites can appreciate as MBs celebrate their 150th anniversary this year.

“MB” doesn’t stand for “Mostly Baptist” — although, as MB writer Katie Funk Wiebe noted in Who Are the Mennonite Brethren? (Kindred Press, 1984), some “think of themselves more like Baptists under a different name.”

But MBs wouldn’t mind being called “Missionary Believers,” as a denominational leader suggested during the U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches assembly in 2008.

In fact, missions and evangelism rank at the top of the MB priority list. This emphasis on sharing the faith and winning converts grows from the church’s roots in pietism and revivalism in mid-19th-century Russia.

The MB movement was born out of frustration with the lifeless weight of tradition that some Russian Mennonites felt was killing their church’s spirit. Inspired by the preaching of a Lutheran pastor, Eduard Wuest, 18 families broke away from the established Mennonite church on Jan. 6, 1860, in the village of Gnadenfeld in what is now Ukraine.

Wuest preached the new birth — a personal conversion experience, as opposed to an assumed faith based on being born into a Mennonite family. The “brethren” of this revival movement wanted to restore a church based not on birth but on spiritual rebirth.

This pietist influence produced a church that at times has felt as much at home within mainstream evangelicalism as within Anabaptism. Lifting up a conversion experience and inner spirituality, some MBs have downplayed the teachings on peace and social concern many other Mennonites hold dear.

But MB ideals — as expressed in a 2008 study book on the international MB Confession of Faith — call for holding inner spirituality and outer transformation together like two wings of a dove.

“The spiritual wing deals with the inner life, intimacy between God and our souls,” write Nzash Lumeya of Congo and P. Menno Joel of India in their chapter in the confessional study, Knowing and Living Your Faith. “The socio-cultural wing relates to social, cultural and environmental transformations.”

That sounds like the best of both Anabaptism and evangelicalism. If both of these wings stay strong, Mennonite Brethren will continue to bless the Anabaptist movement, and the world, with a Spirit-filled witness, calling us to a revival we all need.