Thank you to everyone who participated in this morning's session. You will find the substantive content of the presentation reflected in the preceding post. What follows here are copies of sketches made on whiteboards by various participants in response to class discussion and the prior presentation on "How the Mennonite Church got to the 21st Century". I have elaborated somewhat on the sketches. However, if you were part of a group that presented the sketch, feel free to provide clarification and detail in the comment section.
You may also wish to engage with the following question. It was suggested that there were two books published in the latter half of the twentieth century that encapsulated the North American Mennonite ethos of that generation (they were described as "iconic, whose like will not be seen again . . ."). The first book is John Howard Yoder's
The Politics of Jesus. The second is
The More with Less Cookbook. The question was asked: Does
More with Less truly reflect a Mennonite/Anabaptist ethos?
Discuss.
In the meantime, please consider the following sketches as alternatives to the depiction of a new Mennonite church as presented in the previous post.
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| IMAGE A: The different circles of our lives intersect at a common, Christocentric focal point. Boundaries are less important . . . ? |
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| IMAGE B: The comments are self explanatory. BTW - Is that what I look like? |
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| IMAGE C: Is there a place for distinctions between categories of membership or affiliation with the congregation? |
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| IMAGE D: I can't recall the particulars of the sketch. It was noted that the Catholic Church has also changed since the Reformation. We should consider what has been learned by and within that community. |
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| IMAGE E: Sorry - I can't recall the context of this sketch. |
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IMAGE F: I understood this sketch to be grappling with relationship and accountability
between individual and congregation. |
I was intrigued with the diagrams Russ used in the first session of his series to illustrate past and present definitions of church membership. The later diagrams illustrated increasing openness in defining the boundaries of church. The final diagram shifted the focus to the candle at the center of the church, with the boundaries of the church being quite porous. My concern with porous boundaries is that I don’t think it is possible for a group, and for a church not to have boundaries. Indeed, to deny boundaries is self-defeating. Those who deny boundaries are in fact defining themselves in a very specific way – as not having boundaries. But this is itself a boundary. I quite agree that there are limits to defining ourselves in terms of boundaries. I am also very sympathetic to the idea of light at the center as being another way to defining a church. I would suggest we need a dual approach to self-definition, and here I am borrowing from anthropologist Paul Hiebert’s categories of bounded and centered sets. So instead of “Maybe its about the center, not the boundaries,” I am proposing “Maybe its about both the center and boundaries.”
ReplyDeleteSo here is a description of another diagram. Christian groups would all surely define themselves as centered in some way in Jesus Christ. So imagine a small circle with only the words Jesus Christ in it. Then imagine a series of ever widening concentric circles around this initial small circle. The first wider circle would represent the early disciples of Jesus, interestingly including Judas Iscariot)! The next slightly bigger circle would represent the early church, defined very much by the teachings and life of Jesus Christ. Then you have an expanding church, and also a church farther removed from the teachings and life of Jesus Christ. As we move outward in expanding circles, you have ever broader definitions of what it means to be a Christian and a Christian church – liberal Christians, syncretisms of various kinds, etc. At the outer boundary, it might be quite difficult to even recognize the church as Christian, at least from the point of view of a conservative Christian. But, there is a boundary, nonetheless. Boundaries are inescapable.
With this diagram, the circles closer to the center would represent richer and fuller and more faithful concepts of the church. The early Anabaptists represented an attempt to move inward to a circle closer to center.
Now add one more element to this diagram. Insert some small arrows into these circles, each pointing either inward or outward, and each representing an individual person – you could draw a stick figure in the middle of each arrow. Some of these arrows point inward, and some of these arrows point outward. If you focus on centered sets as a key to defining a group, then the key to defining a Christian would be that the direction of his/her arrow would be pointing to the center – Jesus Christ. Some of these arrows point outward, and over time, they will be located in the very outer circles, very loosely defined as Christian, but their direction is such that eventually they will no longer be in the bounded outer circle. At some point, one has to say that a person is no longer a Christian, and no longer a part of the Christian church.
Elmer Thiessen