Mennonite Weekly Review

LANCASTER, Pa. — A crowd assembles along the sidewalk in front of East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church on a Monday evening.

Villegas

Pastor Ron Adams blesses the food, and hungry people file through the entryway and into the fellowship hall.

The line passes by the kitchen, where a group from the church piles spaghetti, salad and bread on each plate. For 10 years this community meal has been a weekly rhythm in the life of the church. Tonight 150 people — including members of the church, homeless from the streets and hungry neighbors — will enjoy food and fellowship.

I follow the crowd through the food line and find a seat at one of the tables. A woman says she hasn’t seen me around before. I explain that I’m visiting from North Carolina, and she graciously lets me know where to find free evening meals. She and a few other people talk about which church prepares the most delicious food. It’s a tie between the Catholics and the Mennonites.

I look up from my spaghetti and see Adams wandering among the tables. “Pastor,” I hear a man greet him as Adams stops to talk. Through this ministry he becomes a pastor to the people who wander the city. And members of the East Chestnut Street congregation find themselves drawn into the lives of the people they eat with.

Marilou Adams, a member of the congregation, says to me: “This is not social work. This is just what it means to be the church.” Ron Adams continues Marilou Adams’ thought: “At this meal we sit down with sisters and brothers one day a week and become part of the same body.”

For Lancaster County Mennonites, the city was not always a place to extend the church’s table fellowship. The line between the sanctified church and the irredeemable world passed between the farm and the city.

While many in the conference did not approve, some Mennonites began worshiping in a house on East Chestnut Street in the late 19th century. “Many were the adverse criticisms made, doubts and fears expressed,” wrote Martin G. Weaver in Mennonites of Lancaster Conference (1931).

While Mennonites worried about their sisters and brothers who ventured into the city, a Lancaster newspaper welcomed the congregation: “The locality for the new church is a very favorable one, and it is hoped that the congregation will be successful in accomplishing their object” (The New Era, May 19, 1879).

Urban expressions of Anabaptism are nothing new. For 130 years, the city has not been foreign territory for the Mennonites of Lancaster Conference.