About

I am someone who embraces the richness of a number of streams converging within my ecclesial context in the Mennonite Church.  My home is Anabaptism, but I have been open to learn from other streams within Christianity.  My journey has been shaped by the convergence of a number of spiritual streams—liturgical, charismatic, evangelical, Anabaptist.  All these different spiritual streams flow in unique ways within our Anabaptist context.  At Sunnyside Mennonite Church, I believe we are richer as a congregation for having made room for them to converge.   

For me, Church is not an abstract idea, but a flesh and blood incarnated community of Jesus.  The community that we are a part of is not some independent group that we create.  But, we are a part of a communion of saints—the Body of Christ throughout time and space—that in a mysterious way reveals Jesus Christ in the world.   

My personal faith journey began as I was born into the home of Mennonite missionaries to Northwest Mexico.  This experience of growing up in another culture has had a profound influence on my life as I have learned how to live in different cultural realities and be at home.  I have grown to embrace this third-culture perspective as a core part of my identity.  I believe this is part of how God has named me.

As I came of age, my sense of identification with the Mennonite Church waxed and waned.  In recent years and in unexpected ways, I have found myself digging into the soil of my faith heritage–the Anabaptist tradition.  This has been stimulated even as I have engaged in conversations and relationships beyond our theological stream (Emergent, Orthodoxy). 

These conversations (face to face, through books, through cyberspace and through large and small group gatherings) have provided new questions which have deepened my engagement with the Anabaptist tradition within which I came to faith in Christ. They have also deepened my awareness of the ways God’s manifold wisdom is expressed through the broader Church. 

My journey has been one of trying to integrate my personal experience with Christ and the part of Christ’s body which I embrace as my spiritual community in a way that is not cut off from the whole Body of Christ throughout history.  I have attempted to both embrace my own story which grows out of the Anabaptist story, while connecting it to a broader story of the whole Church—the great cloud of witnesses across time and space. 

 The Conversation with Orthodoxy 

The engagement with Orthodoxy has become an essential part of my ongoing growth and development as a follower of Jesus.  It has challenged and enriched my view of the Church and our high calling as a community that gathers for worship and scatters for mission.  This conversation has become a deeply integrated part of my own theology. 

When we leave our home and travel to other cultures, we are aware of differences that cause discomfort.  This has been a part of the conversation with Orthodoxy.  At times I have felt points of tension and incompatibility, but other times I have been aware of a deeply enriching experience with Christ because of the engagement.  I have encountered Jesus in new and fresh ways as I have made space for this conversation even when it meant living with dynamic tension and creative paradox.  It has meant living with mystery.

 

Within our Anabaptist theology we hold deeply to a view of Church as the community of believers.  We would reject a privatized version Christianity—Jesus and me.  Who needs the Church?  Anabaptist tradition has taught me that Church is the community of the Spirit.  We gather for worship.  We read Scripture together and discern what God is saying in community.  The conversation with Orthodoxy has only deepened this commitment to worship God in community, to read and interpret Scripture in Community, to be mutually accountable.  The way I understand the Community of the Spirit has been deepened and broadened to include my brothers and sisters in Christ throughout the history of the Church.  I have come to see myself as accountable not just to the local expression, but to my brothers and sisters around the globe, and to those witnesses who have gone before us.  I have come to see myself as a part of the Church together with them.  I am mutually accountable with them to be the Body of Christ. 

  

Menno Simon’s favorite verse was 1 Corinthians 3:11:   For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.  My journey has been one of exploring how we are building on the same foundation.  It has been about entering a greater level of appreciation and accountability to the building of living stones that Christ has been building for almost 2,000 years.  It has been a journey that has produced greater humility—recognizing that the foundation isn’t being laid in our generation.  Rather, we are building upon the witness of those who have come before us.