About the Faith & Life Commission
Anabaptist churches around the world live their faith diversely, addressing local challenges and opportunities while adhering to Shared Convictions.
The Faith & Life Commission enables MWC member churches to receive and provide counsel on Christian faith and practice, as well as on Anabaptist witness in the world today. This Commission encourages MWC member churches to develop relationships of mutual accountability regarding the convictions they hold and in the lives they live – locally, internationally and cross-culturally.
“The Faith & Life Commission is one nerve centre among many by which we do not ‘build the koinonia’ but tend, nurture and maintain the unity the Spirit creates. We thus hope in our small way not to impede, but to speed the signals the life-giving Spirit is sending along to the various parts of the body, or mosaic, to mix metaphors,” says Thomas R Yoder Neufeld, Faith and Life Commission chair.
What does the Faith & Life Commission do?
Members of Faith & Life and some other MWC representatives have engaged in dialogue with World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC). After years of planning, this process got underway in March 2023 in Canada.
Dialogue members have collaborated on a statement for the Zurich 2025 ecumenical worship service in Zurich, Switzerland. It will include remembering the past, lament for division and persecution, gratitude for steps toward reconciliation, desire to live in unity and commitment to common witness and engagement in justice and peace.
“In 2023 we launched the dialogue report on Baptism and Incorporation into the Body of Christ, the Church (2020) and a study guide to the report by Tom Yoder Neufeld. We continue to invite churches to engage with this report and send their response to it by November 2024,” says Anicka Fast, Faith and Life Commission secretary.
In the past year, Faith & Life has been sharing stories about entry into the global Anabaptist tradition and what the challenges are to unity in our various regions. These stories nurture initiatives to support member churches in living out unity in an increasingly polarized world.
In 2023, the Global Anabaptist Education Networks (GAEN) entered a relationship with the Faith & Life Commission, with two of its members becoming part of the Commission, pending General Council approval in 2025.
“Education networks are key to transmitting Faith & Life Commission resources to GAEN member schools, and supporting its goal of strengthening the church through Christ-centred faith formation,” says Anicka Fast.
Plans for the next year
Leading up to the commemoration of 500 years of Anabaptism in 2025, Faith & Life is envisioning some workshops for the General Council meetings in Germany in May 2025. The workshop materials will be made available to all churches after the meetings.
A major focus of the workshops will be on baptism, both because it’s the 500th anniversary of the first “believers baptism” in Zurich, and because Faith & Life has been centrally involved in helping MWC member churches engage the materials coming out of the Trilateral Dialogue on baptism.
“Most importantly, we want to encourage our churches to take this as an opportunity to strengthen and deepen our understanding and practice of baptism, especially its relationship to grounding our discipleship,” says Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld.
Other than baptism, two increasingly urgent topics will be on the Commission’s scope:
- Unity in diversity – continuing to work at helping our communion of churches deal with the real challenges of being one in the face of great diversity.
- Creation care – in the urgent pressure that the climate crisis brings, Faith & Life sees an urgency to extend beyond human relationships. Sustainable ways of living are an issue of faith and life.
“We are seeking ways to help our church family to engage with creation, as per God’s mandate for people to work it and take care of it in Genesis 2:15. We will be publishing a brief document on this topic this year,” says Anicka Fast.
“We have also been listening to Commission members emphasizing the importance of producing theological resources for the global church that respond to felt needs especially in the Global South. Within this are some passionate discussions about how to connect these theological resources with today’s youth and young adults. We hope to work at this in collaboration with GAEN and the Creation Care Task Force,” says Anicka Fast.
“In essence, we are helping churches to be faithful in discipleship and to learn to live with diversity. Since the church is God’s peacebuilding project, everything we do to assist the church to be more faithful is peacebuilding. In this way, Faith & Life lives the MWC tagline Following Jesus, Living Out Unity, and Building Peace,” says Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld.
