By Celeste Kennel-Shank
Mennonite Weekly Review

	Pauline Thompson and Immanuel Sila share a meal at Mennonite Voluntary Service national orientation Jan. 24 in Chicago. — Photo by Celeste Kennel-Shank/MWR

Thompson, who volunteers at a community center for children and at an office providing services to immigrants, also worries about supporting her mother, who immigrated to the United States from Greece, after her father’s recent death.

“It’s hard, and a little nerve-wracking,” she said. “A lot of times, I’ll feel like this is a stupid financial decision.”

But Thompson, a Goshen (Ind.) College graduate, also sees blessings in struggling financially as she helps others with similar challenges.

“I hope it means I can better understand the people I work with,” Thompson said. “I want to learn to live simply and not to be above people or not to have struggles.”

Thompson’s situation exemplifies some of the challenges faced by MVS — part of Mennonite Mission Network, an agency of Mennonite Church USA — as it attempts to build racial, economic and cultural diversity in its volunteer units.

“We need to be engaging the whole church in the idea of service,” said Immanuel Sila, an MVS unit administrator for Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota. “The North American church is not just white and middle class.”

At a national MVS orientation in Chicago Jan. 21-25, Sila said increasing diversity fulfills the declaration of Gal. 3:27-28 that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female.

When Sila spent two years as a recruiter for Mennonite volunteer programs, he found service is more possible for middle-class young adults whose parents can help them with debt and other big costs.

Under the current financial structure of MVS, funds are received from congregations and from the organizations where volunteers are placed. Churches with fewer financial resources are not able to send as many young people into service, Sila said.

The financial realities of rising college debt and health-care costs compound the problem, Sila said.

Sila’s desire to build more diverse units is rooted in the idea of empowering the communities MVS serves, not just sending in volunteers into urban areas from white, middle-class rural communities — which is the profile of most current MVS volunteers.

“We need to believe that the people we serve can also serve,” Sila said.

Evaluating its progress in building diversity, MVS looks in part to the Maryland-based Catholic Network of Volunteer Service, which collects data on MMN among other Christian service programs.

The 2007 Membership Survey Results released by CNVS show that 82.4 percent of volunteers in Christian service programs are white. Nearly 7 percent are Hispanic, 6 percent are Asian and more than 4 percent are black. More than 70 percent of volunteers had completed four years of college.

MVS mirrors these broader groupings, Sila said.

Building diversity might mean re-envisioning the structure of MVS, started in 1944, in a way that invites more immigrants, children of immigrants, people of color and lower income people.

“Racism is sometimes unintentionally denying people access,” Sila said. “I don’t think the system [of MVS] right now is conducive to integration.”

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