By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

This liturgical revival — introducing new formats of worship and music — is seen by some as a natural part of the Mennonite church’s growth. Gatherings like those of the Bridgefolk ecumenical group, where participants spend much of their time in common worship, have been central to this effort in their own way.

But how can canonical prayer or other innovations — liturgical dance, icons, chant — ultimately fit with more traditional Mennonite forms of reverence?

“We’re not trying to force the church to be something it can’t be,” said Seattle (Wash.) Mennonite Church Pastor Weldon Nisly. “We’re trying to nurture.”

The result may be more of an amalgam than an outright adoption of different practices.

“The Spirit can’t be stopped,” Nisly said. “That’s what Bridgefolk is all about.”

Though efforts at blending new worship elements are gaining acceptance among some Mennonites, there are other points of contact where individual conscience must serve as the arbiter. Even then, the answer is not always clear.

Taking the eucharist

One key issue is the matter of the eucharist — whether Mennonites participating in the Catholic mass should take the Lord’s Supper.

Because it has been involved in a variety of ecumenical efforts, observers say the community at St. John’s Abbey, where Bridgefolk meets, is perhaps more permissive than other monastic communities when it comes to distributing the eucharist. According to Catholic doctrine, the bread and wine of the mass are literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus.

Under conventional Catholic teaching, no person who approaches the mass celebrant will be refused communion under normal circumstances.

On the other hand, Catholic priests are not allowed to actively invite non-Catholics to receive the elements.

The result is that those who wish to participate approach the sacrament with an open mind and “let their faith and conscience be their guide,” Nisly said.

More than likely, no questions will be asked.

So do Mennonites sometimes take Catholic communion — a practice that would have sent the early Anabaptists into fits of despair?

Some do and some don’t, Bridgefolk participants said.

Mennonite scholar Gerald Schlabach, a Bridgefolk founder who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, has written about this dilemma.

To him, it is an issue central to the ecumenical movement and yet only symbolic of the divide among Christian traditions.

In any event, a few Bridgefolk participants said, whether to share the eucharist is not what Bridgefolk is solely about. Instead, sharing and praying together, and learning what can be learned about one another, is enough of a calling for now.

Healing rifts

“In one sense, when the time comes that we can partake together at the table of the Lord without any reservations whatsoever — in a communion so full that both of our traditions may name its fullness equally well in their own ways — then our work will be done,” Schlabach wrote in 2002.

To many who seek to heal the rifts among Christians, such a unity, despite centuries of violence, disagreement and misunderstanding, sounds a lot like heaven — a place yet to be attained.

And as Schlabach wrote, waiting, for now, may have to be enough.

“In the meantime, we gather together in Bridgefolk precisely because we have discovered a unity worth celebrating and exploring, even though we still are in a ‘meantime’ . . . living between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of that Christian unity which is both a gift and a calling.”