“Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2 (NRSVUE).
Renewal is the name that Mennonite World Conference has given to a decade of regional events around the memory of the five centuries of our existence as a community of faith.
We are approaching these 10 years of commemorations by focusing on our history from a global, ecumenical and transcultural perspective.
These words from the apostle Paul help us to remember the past and look toward the future.
We express gratitude to God for inheritance of the faith we have received.
But we also come before the Lord in a spirit of repentance and renewal, committed to learning from the past to grow in our relationship with God both here and now and in the years to come.
Transformation
We explore how our Anabaptist tradition has understood discipleship as an ongoing process of transformation.
First: transformation is a journey where we leave things behind and take other new things along the way.
It implies continuous movement. We constantly abandon a place and move forward. We move against the religious spirit that affirms absolute certainty of doctrines, dogmas and ethics, we affirm the need to renew our minds, therefore being open to challenging beliefs and ethics as our spiritual ancestors did in the 16th century.
Second: transformation in the Bible is never an individualistic experience.
It is always communal. We do it together because it requires dialogue and interdependency.
Our community’s diversity of positions allows us to correct the direction we are taking in the transformation process.
Focussed on Jesus
Our brothers and sisters help us discover those things we need to change, leave or incorporate to become like Jesus.
And that takes us to the third biblical comment or component of transformation: the person of Jesus.
Not all change is valid.
As followers of Jesus, we cannot support transformation in any direction. To be faithful disciples, changes in our beliefs and ethics must be made to make us similar to the character and person of Jesus.
As Paul says, “until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
Transformation in unity is a challenge historically faced in the Anabaptist world. Too often renewal movements have faced rejection which has produced divisions. Transformation has not always been toward Jesus’ character.
So today we need to recover the vision of Mennonite World Conference:
We want to be a global church where we follow Jesus, live out unity and build peace.
We are a body of more than 10,000 local congregations in distributed in 110* national churches distributed around the world, with more than 1.5 million baptized believers. We need each other to be transformed to the image of Jesus.
As we thank God for opportunities to be transformed, let us also maintain an attitude of repentance for our divisions.
Let us ask for forgiveness for our hesitance to change.
Let us repent from our pride and the attitude of judging the transformation process of others instead of participating in it with love and patience.
Let’s seek the renewal from a contrite heart that recognizes its need for continuous transformation.
May we be transformed together into Jesus’ image.
—César García is general secretary of Mennonite World Conference. Originally from Colombia, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
*Number of MWC member churches after Executive Committee meetings in Brazil, April 2024.
