Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is A Mennonite Woman: Exploring Spiritual Life and Identity by Dawn Ruth Nelson, published by Cascadia Publishing House, 2010, 184 pages, $18.95.

Funk Wiebe

Dawn Ruth Nelson thinks Mennonites have a serious problem. The spiritually formative environment of previous generations in close-knit rural Mennonite communities is gone, leaving a vacuum being filled with consumerism and other life patterns. The Mennonite community faces a new spiritual challenge.

Nelson builds her case by first describing her grandmother’s traditional life, typical for Pennsylvania Mennonites at the time, showing the influences that shaped her spiritual development. That life was bounded by work rhythms, generous hospitality, a stable community, plain clothing, clear church practices and the use of the German language. Mennonites lived apart from society.

Children absorbed the practices of Mennonite life without direct instruction. Nelson says she retains traces of values such as modesty in dress and resistance to consumerism. They are not easily discarded.

But that pattern of absorbing spiritual values has changed. Modernity has moved in, forcing out the secure spiritual framework and tempting Mennonites into a new world. Their earlier experience of God, strongly rooted in a communal and agricultural lifestyle, has been stripped away. They are without the resources of a former way of life in which spirituality was embedded in daily practices.

Nelson believes people no longer know how to pray or use the Bible as a devotional tool, not just a study document. She admits “bankrupt” is a strong word, but for some people it is the best word to describe their inner life. Mennonites must learn new practices to recover spiritual strength.

The term “spirituality” was not an entry in the 1958 Mennonite Encyclopedia. Terms like spiritual formation, spiritual growth and spiritual director must now become part of our vocabulary and practice. Nelson’s thesis is that spirituality development (“being formed into Christ”) must now become an intentional part of church life.

She cites her own experience as a member of a peace witness in Ireland from 1979 to 1991 where the group lived in community. When that community fell apart she lacked resources to know how to deal with the conflict. She recognized that commitment to community and its emphasis on ethical teachings without a personal relationship with God wasn’t sufficient to sustain her or the community. It needed more.

She sees a hunger, a searching for a new spirituality, among Mennonites that will emphasize a stronger relationship to God in addition to commitment to the community.

Nelson recommends the pattern developed at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary for its spiritual formation programs as one that congregations could use to develop their own programs. For her, the key elements for a Mennonite spirituality for the 21st century are an everyday embodied sacramentality, non-conformity, community, service, Gelassenheit or meekness, and the person of Jesus and the Bible. She would like to see Mennonites incorporate the ancient practices of “spiritual friendship, spiritual conversation, spiritual direction to bolster spiritual conversation within the church.”

While her primary audience is those with roots in the former Mennonite Church, her prophetic words are also true for other Mennonite denominations.

Nelson is serving as the first woman pastor of a church in Franconia Mennonite Conference.

Katie Funk Wiebe lives in Wichita, Kan. A new book, The Voice of a Writer (Kindred Productions), honors her life and work.