Mennonite Weekly Review

More than 100 years ago, my great-great-grandfather Dietrich Gaeddert and my husband’s great-great-grand­father Jacob Stucky met on the banks of Turkey Creek in central Kansas and agreed that members of their respective Mennonite communities would keep contact to a minimum. Intermarriage was strictly prohibited.

Goering

In time, those two groups of Mennonites, Low German and Swiss Volhynian, joined together in the Kansas District, forerunner of the Western District of the General Conference Mennonite Church. Eventually many young people of those two groups did intermingle and marry. Some credit the existence of a Mennonite college with encouraging such fraternization.

By the time my husband and I, both Bethel College graduates, married in 1983, the only vestiges of the earlier prohibition were a few of my elderly aunts raising an eyebrow when learning that my husband was a Schweitzer.

In the late 19th century, Stucky and Gaeddert knew distinctly what a Mennonite community meant. It was a group of people who went to the same church or its branches, lived next door to each other and only married others from the same narrow ethnic background.

Today, we are not so certain.

Mennonite identity in the 21st century is often divided between people like myself, whose family ethnicity is firmly rooted in the earliest days of Anabaptist history, and others, who have joined the Mennonite church more recently and whose family connections to the church are less comprehensive.

Because Mennonite identity has been historically all-encompassing, people who grew up in Mennonite churches and homes but who are not currently active in a Mennonite congregation often still think of themselves as Mennonite.

Mennonite ideas are important to people who don’t live next door to Mennonites or attend an Anabaptist congregation.

In this complex and often tense discussion of who is a Mennonite, culture and theology are increasingly perceived as separate components of Mennonite identity. Thus, church leaders publicly identify beliefs and church membership as the only reason to call yourself Mennonite. Yet cultural and family ties, not openly expressed or understood, remain so strong that Mennonites without them sometimes feel they are always on the outside, no matter what they do or say.

The line between insiders and outsiders has been pronounced in historical Mennonite communities, an outgrowth of the biblical belief to be in the world but not of it.