Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Continuing the Journey: The Geography of Our Faith — Mennonite Stories Integrating Faith and Life and the World of Thought, edited by Nancy V. Lee, published by Cascadia, 2009, 404 pages, $23.95.

Marlin Jeschke, of Goshen, Ind., is retired from teaching at Goshen College.

This book is the second volume of memoirs by members of Eastern Mennonite University’s Anabaptist Center for Religion and Society. ACRS offers “space for discourse of the elders,” according to Ray Ginge­rich, editor of the memoirs series. The group’s purpose is the “promotion of an Anabaptist understanding of church, community and higher education” and the “recovery of Anabaptism as essential to the survival of our church institutions.”

The 16 chapters, each sketching the life and career of retired educators and administrators living in the Harrisonburg, Va., area, are prose photographs of Mennonite leaders whose experiences range from the Great Depression until today. Their stories reflect Mennonite uncertainties about education. This gave a zigzag shape to many careers, at least in their early years.

The stories also report cultural transitions — from the era of Mennonite Church regulations on clothes and the role of women, to today’s acculturation. Those writers do not seem to look back on the era of regulations with bitterness but rather with a touch of bemusement.

Some stories confess changes from fundamentalist and dispensationalist beliefs to today’s Anabaptist vision. Some accounts report changes in mission from the era of pre-World War II models to today’s focus on development and dialogue. In such ways these mini-autobiographies portray almost a century of change in the Mennonite Church.

Different readers will resonate with different chapters, depending upon whether their interest is in educational administration; Latin American, African or Asian missions; or on one or another discipline of academic study. One or two memoirs include a critique of Eastern Mennonite University or the church. Some offer straightforward autobiography. Some add a dash of philosophical commentary.

Some retrospectives on Eastern Mennonite’s institutional and curricular history from school to college to university are not easy to follow or always interesting, nor are one or two indulgences in parochial stories of Lancaster, Pa., families and farms.

What strikes this reviewer is the uncertain beginning to many of the 16 careers sketched here. One after another, the authors report tentativeness about going into education. Not sure of vocational direction, they took a mélange of undergraduate courses in disparate fields such as music, Bible, science and languages. They recount what might look like false starts, testing different fields of study and vocations.

And yet, as one writer puts it, “When I look back, it seems that I never had to make truly agonizing choices, nor was I tortured by some terrible mistake.” None of the 16 retirees speaks of any regrets about his or her career. All breathe a sense of gratitude for the privilege of offering leadership to the church, its mission and its educational task.

“The attempt to retrieve the honest shape of an earlier life is hard work,” says one writer. He is right. For that reason many readers will appreciate this book, and also for additional reasons: deeper acquaintance with those who relate their life stories here; review of the almost century of transition in the Mennonite Church reflected in these careers; and, not least, reminders and awakened memories of many kindred experiences in our own lives. Reading these memoirs should inspire us to write our own.

Marlin Jeschke is professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at Goshen College.