In these last few years that I’ve been involved with Mennonite World Conference and particularly the Young AnaBaptists (or YABs) it has been awesome to connect with people from around the world and be enriched by their perspectives and ways of living their faith. This has opened my eyes and shown me Jesus in a way I hadn’t seen him before.
Today I want to share with you a testimony of how I’ve seen God move in a special way.
In Uruguay, we have beautiful beaches, and most Uruguayans love to take time off during the summer to go to the beach.
This is a time to unplug and rest, but also a time to party for most of the young people. And in church it is also a great time to do something cool with our youth because the pressure to go partying is huge.
So, we organize summer camps – one for the teenagers and one for the young adults of our Mennonite conference. Every year, around 40 teens and almost 100 young adults attend our camps which happen at a campsite right next to the beach! (This is awesome, as we can go to the beach at least twice a day.)
This is now the second year that I’ve led these camps with a friend, and it’s been a huge blessing.
Deep and nourishing chats
During the camp, I had several very deep and nourishing chats with some of the participants, which were often a great blessing to both of us.
One conversation in particular stood out for me. A girl came up to me one afternoon and asked if she could speak with me. I agreed and we sat in the grass in the shadow of one of the trees. She shared with me part of the story of her life and how she’d lately been very hesitant to accept Jesus as her Saviour because she didn’t feel ready. After hearing the messages at the camp, talking to our guest speaker and some others she had concluded that the gospel is much simpler than she thought, and she wanted to make the step to accept Jesus into her life.
I had the huge privilege of helping her make that prayer! And around a month later I received an invitation to attend her baptism. It was such an honour to be a part of it.
Another amazing experience was in our youth camp. On the first day the guest speaker conveyed the importance of sharing what we’re going through with others. Through an interactive activity he showed that everyone is being challenged, that it’s ok not to be ok, and to share this with others for support. This was super nourishing for everyone.
Sharing with others for support
In particular, I was amazed by how a small group of boys of around 13-14 years old immediately took action. All participants had to get up at 7:15 in the morning for morning sport. But from that day on till the end of camp, they got up at 6:00 a.m. They prepared their maté, talked about their challenges, and then discussed ways to build each other up and achieve their goals.
Seeing the fruits of all the previous work is amazing because before the camps, the entire team felt opposition. I faced a lot of challenges, struggling again with things I thought I had already won. But thanks to Jesus who kept inviting us to see all that he was about to do!
I think a verse that reflects pretty well what we experienced during this time is John 10:10: “The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life” (NLT).
Through this challenging time, I was able to see a glimpse of the rich and satisfying life that God has prepared for our youth and young adults and also even for myself.
—Valentina Kunze is the Young AnaBaptists (YABs) representative for Latin America. She is a member of Konferenz der Mennonitengemeinden in Uruguay.
This article is adapted from the speech she presented at Renewal 2024, “Transformed, together we live Jesus” 6 April 2024 in Brazil.
ELKHART, Indiana (Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary) — A collaboration formalized in 2020 between Mennonite World Conference (MWC) and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in Elkhart, Indiana, USA, is opening doors for people across the world to gain Anabaptist pastoral and leadership education.
Through existing programs and new initiatives, pastors and church leaders are taking both for-credit and noncredit AMBS courses in biblical and theological studies, ministry and church history in their home countries.
MWC General Secretary César García, PhD, described the collaboration as a response to a 2003 call for “sharing of gifts” among MWC member churches. AMBS is owned by Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA — two of MWC’s 108 member churches.
Through AMBS’s connection with MWC, the seminary has been receiving a growing number of invitations from national church leaders to support the formation of Anabaptist leaders in their contexts. This has led to increased sharing of gifts as MWC member churches and other Anabaptist organizations have joined with AMBS in response. The seminary’s Forming Leaders Together campaign has been helping fund these collaborative efforts as well.
For example, in October 2023, Andi Santoso (MA 2022), Regional Director for Asia and the Middle East for Mennonite Mission Network (MMN); Joe Sawatzky, PhD (MDiv 2005), AMBS Global Leadership Collaborative Project Specialist, also of MMN; and David Boshart, PhD, AMBS President, were invited to teach a three-day course on leadership for about 30 students from five Anabaptist conferences in India. Each conference sent two women, two men and at least one youth to be trained to teach the material in their area going forward.
“We tested the materials with the leaders in advance and then revised them for contextual relevance, providing spaces in the curriculum for trainers to include case material from their local context,” Boshart said. “This material now belongs to these churches to use and adapt in ways that are most helpful in their settings.”
A partnership formalized in 2019 between AMBS and Meserete Kristos Seminary (MKS: Ethiopian Mennonite Seminary) in Bishoftu/Debre Zeit, Ethiopia, also has been strengthened through AMBS’s relationship with MWC. Together, MKS and AMBS leaders created a customized version of AMBS’s Master of Arts: Theology and Global Anabaptism to educate leaders for the Meserete Kristos Church. The students take a combination of semester-long online courses and short-term intensive courses adapted for the Ethiopian context and taught in person at MKS by AMBS professors. The program has 29 students; the first seven students graduated in 2023.
“Engaging with churches and emerging leaders in context strengthens our Teaching Faculty members because they are gaining broader exposure and appreciation for the global Anabaptist community, especially in the Global South,” Boshart noted.
—Annette Brill Bergstresser is Communications manager at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), a learning community located in Elkhart, Indiana, USA, on ancestral land of the Potawatomi and Miami peoples. AMBS offers theological education for learners both on campus and at a distance and a wide array of lifelong learning programs — all with the goal of educating followers of Jesus Christ to be leaders for God’s reconciling mission in the world. ambs.edu
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 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.
“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.
Netherlands
We live in a society – in Western Europe – that does not speak our language anymore. We have been the dominant culture for ages and ages…be it Roman Catholic, Protestant or Mennonite. The Christian language, Christian imagery, Christian norms and values were absolutely dominant within the Dutch culture. And within a generation that all disappeared.
Oh, of course, we had secularization before. It has been going on for a few decades. And we lived with it.
Our churches have always been small, our congregations too. We like that. We like to know each other.
But there was a turning point, apparently. And we reached it without actually noticing it. Some of us don’t even recognize it still.
It is not only about secularization. It is about a whole culture with all its references that disappears, in the blink of an eye.
But there it is: the people around us don’t understand us or our story anymore. It is like Pentecost in reverse. We speak and tell our story, using the same language as the people around us. But no one understands what we say. The words we use have no meaning – or even have another meaning to our listeners.
We are waking up in a strange, strange reality. Incomprehensible.
This is different than decline. This is a new world.
And I like it.
We are beyond trying to salvage what was. We are beyond trying to turn the tide. We are on the brink of re-inventing ourselves, our churches, our storytelling. We are on a route of discovery.
There is no fallback position. Not even our money can save us now. That is very, very scary.
And I like it.
Exile in our own land
This strips everything down to the bone. Even the gospel. We need to read it, study it, find it again. What is of worth? What is truth? What is tradition? What story? What are ancient answers to even older questions? And what still speaks to us, to our hearts, our souls now? We have to search ourselves, our motives, our confessions. There is no easy way out.
And that is the thing. Our growth must be measured spiritually for now. Not in numbers, but in gentle wisdom. In humanity. In community.
We need to delve deep. We need to sit with the loss of our being at home in this land, this world, this language and mourn that loss.
And the Bible will tell us how.
We have done this before. Different time, place, situation; same problem. We are in exile within our own land and continent: “Rivers of Babylon,” even if we are the only ones left that understand that reference (and we don’t mean the Boney M song).
And here we find new ways.
We don’t tell people about our faith. We live it.
A different world
A lot of our younger people have met the church through AKC – our summer camps. Not a word of gospel is uttered during these camps. But in these camps, we create a world that is utterly different from what these children and young adults know at home or at school. A healing space, without pressure or judgment. A space where they learn that the ways of this world around us may not be the final answer.
We don’t push, we don’t lecture. We have fun, we hold the space for them…and we wait.
At one point, they become curious. They start asking questions: what is so different here? And why?
In the broederschapshuis where I work, all sorts of people come and stay. We don’t share our faith unless asked. But we ask everybody to meet, to work together, to be part of our community while they stay.
In doing dishes together, we encounter God – or at least questions about God. In each question we try to find something that we can learn.
We don’t have answers any longer. But questions of people that don’t know about God or faith show us our way.
It touches me when a young volunteer at our broederschapshuis visits our church for the first time, finds the courage to stand up and testify: ‘There is something here. I don’t have the words for it yet, but it lives in my heart now.’
In our situation, that is a testimony of faith. Because it is true: we don’t have the words. Yet.
Our growth will not focus on numbers, but on being human-with-God. Our mission is our own finding of the Way. And in doing so, we try and live it out.
People notice. People ask questions. We try and answer them and we fail. And that is the beauty of it. That’s what keeps the conversation, the learning process going.
We will grow in not knowing at all. And being hesitantly fine with that.
Thanks be to God.
—Wieteke van der Molen is a pastor and spiritual director within the Algemene Doopsgezinde Sociëteit (Dutch Mennonite church). She is co-director of Dopersduin, a Mennonite Broederschapshuis (fellowship house) and retreat centre in Schoorl, Netherlands.
Why is the Meserete Kristos Church the fastest-growing Mennonite church?
Ethiopia is a multiethnic, multireligious and multilingual nation with more than 120 million people, the second most populated country in Africa. Located in northeast Africa, Ethiopia is a landlocked country.
European powers did not colonize Ethiopia. However, internal conflicts tore the country apart and broke it up along ethnic, religious and geographical lines. The civil wars crushed the economy of the country. Ethnic and religious conflicts damaged the social ties among diverse people groups and increased fear; intolerance and revenge are part of the life of the people. Some people think of poverty, war and family as the symbols of Ethiopia.
Yet people who lost hope get a sense of meaning and direction for their lives when they turn to the Creator of Heaven and Earth. When people believe in Jesus Christ, they not only receive the hope of eternal life but also a new lens of looking at their difficult circumstances to devise better coping mechanisms.
Our understanding of church growth
The Meserete Kristos Church (MKC) understands church growth in two dimensions.
First, church growth is a numerical increase of church members. Congregations are expected to add new believers every year as was practiced in the early church (Acts 2:47).
The second aspect is that the church’s growth is seen in the maturity of the spiritual life of believers. Believers who bear the fruit of the Spirit in their lives and follow the foosteps of Christ bring about positive influence in society. When people share the gospel with others through their practices in life, the possibility of people responding positively to the message increases.
The spiritual growth of individual believers and the growth of the church correlate.
Strategies for church growth
In the following pages, we will describe the 10 strategies/principles that helped MKC to grow fast in the post-Communist era (1991-2024).
1. Fervent prayers
MKC has used prayer as a spiritual weapon to overcome the power of the devil and free people from the bondage of sins. In prayers, we speak to God and listen as God speaks to us.
In all MKC congregations, prayer teams are praying for the church’s ministry, according to the topics they are given. The teams pray for the church to overcome the power of evil that holds people from hearing and believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
There are night-long prayer meetings of all members at the local church level. Full-time ministers spend significant time in prayers. Church leaders pray before business meetings. Believers pray believing that God is listening to them and responding to their prayers according to his will.
At MKC Head Office, a national prayer team meets every month for a day to pray for God to help the church reach out to the unreached people with the good news of Jesus Christ.
Many congregations pray for the salvation of people through the gospel of Jesus Christ using different approaches.
Some local congregations pray for unreached people groups during Sunday services. For instance, Tabour MKC in Hawassa city in the southern part of Ethiopia prepared posters of several ethnic groups, and each week, the poster of one of the ethnic groups is posted on the front stage of the church. The whole congregation prays for that ethnic group for 5-10 minutes.
2. Calling new people to believe in Jesus
“Dear preacher, when you finish your sermon, don’t forget to invite new people to accept the Lord.”
In every local MKC congregation, following the sermon of the Sunday service, the preacher calls new people to accept Christ as their Saviour and Lord. MKC believes that the Holy Spirit touches the hearts of people and convicts of their sins to repent and believe in Jesus. Therefore, preachers are vessels for the Holy Spirit to work.
Many new people believe in Jesus every Sunday. The congregation takes these new believers to the prayer room to pray for them. The evangelists take their physical address and telephone number to follow up. Then, they join the new believers’ class to learn basic Christian doctrines. When baptized, the evangelism department hands them to the pastoral department to provide appropriate pastoral ministry services.
It should be noted that calling people from the pulpit without having nonbelievers in the church is meaningless. Congregations remind members to invite and bring their friends, family members or colleagues to the Sunday service.
Pastor Deneke Hussein, General Secretary of Southern Ethiopia MKC Region, cites a recent encounter: after Sunday service, he went outside and saw a sad woman. He sensed the guidance of the Holy Spirit to talk to the woman. He greeted her and asked, “ You look unhappy, what happened?” The woman replied, “I was desperate about life and came to the church to hear God’s Word. I heard the message and was encouraged. However, no one talked to me.”
Pastor Deneke realized that the preacher did not invite people to come forward to accept Christ as their personal Saviour and Lord. He took her to the prayer room and formally asked her to accept Christ. The woman accepted Christ, was prayed for and connected to the evangelist of the congregation for further follow up.
One pastor from western Ethiopia says: “After a preacher has preached the gospel in a place where many people have gathered, not calling people who want to believe in the Lord Jesus is like planting a seed and refusing to harvest the fruit after it has ripened.”
3. Remaining small and growing
Photo: Liesa Unger
MKC’s policy states that a congregation with more than 1 000 members should be divided into two small congregations.1 From a practical point of view, small churches (with members below 1 000) can provide effective services to their members. Church members also know each other and can have a meaningful fellowship.
A mother church nurtures the new offspring church to become a full-fledged congregation. Then both the mother church and the offspring church continue to grow to bear other new congregations.
Pastor Sebrela Kedir, the MKC’s pastoral ministry department director says that when congregations have large membership, they cannot provide appropriate pastoral services to the members and mobilize all members towards a shared goal. “A pastor can feed and protect the flock well when the number is reasonable. If the church’s size is big, some members are astrayed.
“By keeping the size reasonable, MKC grows in quality and quantity. Disciples of Christ share the gospel with others faithfully,” he says.
4. The responsibility to share the gospel
Anyone who tasted Jesus is good should tell others what he/she tasted.
MKC states clearly that the church exists to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to all people and make them Christ’s disciples. MKC’s Constitution mentions the participation of church members in the holistic ministry of the church by serving the church in the spiritual gifts given to him/ her, prayers, professional advice/consulting, labour, wisdom and financial contributions.2
Before they become church members through water baptism, new believers are given lessons on what the church expects from them once they become full members.
One of the topics discussed is the concept of bringing other people to believe in Christ. The new believers are expected to lead others to Christ as someone led them to Christ. The church encourages them to share the goodness of Jesus they experienced in their lives with other people. Telling what Jesus has done for them to other people does not require having theological training.
5. Implementing a contextually relevant strategic plan
Across all MKC, now people speak the same language: Agenda 2819 is our priority.
In the strategic plan MKC prepared and implemented in 2022, the church laid out the roadmap to sustain the growth of the church. The mission of the church was revised to indicate MKC as a missional/ evangelistic church. It says, “MKC exists to preach the gospel to all people and make them disciples of Jesus Christ.”3
hurch members, the church prepared presentations on Matthew 28:19 ‚Äì Agenda 2819, and awareness creation sessions were conducted in all MKC regions. This reignited the church leaders and members to focus on preaching the gospel and bringing people to believe in Jesus Christ. MKC’s president devoted substantial time to getting this message to all MKC congregations to achieve the goals.
The strategic plan also set specific indicators to track the progress of the church toward achieving 10% annual growth of members. The strategic plan has made the church mobilize resources to achieve the set goals. Above all, the church’s leaders realized they exist to preach the gospel and make those who believe the disciples of Christ.
Pastor Dessu Abebe, the General Secretary of Nekemte MKC Region, said the direction set by the strategic plan is very relevant. He read the strategic plan repeatedly to internalize it because if it is not implemented, the region will fail.
“I called the lead pastors and the elders’ council chairperson of all local churches in my region for three days of training on the strategic plan. I tried my best to help them understand.” He stressed the training alone was not enough to understand fully.
When he meets with the lead pastors during quarterly review sessions, he refreshes the strategic plan and listens to understand their challenges, concerns and successes. Pastor Dessu admitted that the strategic plan is tough and demands a lot of work. Two of the lead pastors in his region resigned because they recognized that they did not have the competence to implement the strategic plan.
The Nekemte MKC Region was able to identify districts where there were no MKC congregations. “We planted churches in three of those districts. We have not thought that way before. The strategic plan guided us where we should focus.”
“The strategic plan helped us to see the bigger picture of where MKC is heading and our specific role as a local church,” said Pastor Shambel Genene, the lead pastor of Asella MKC. The church was engaged in Muslim evangelism even before the strategic plan was introduced. Now, “We aligned our evangelistic activities with the strategic plan of the church to contribute our shares to achieve the common goals.”
6. Ordaining evangelists in congregations
Every MKC local church must have at least one evangelist devoted to preaching God’s Word and leading people to faith in Jesus Christ.
Two decades ago, evangelists engaged in the work of a pastor. MKC revised the ministry guideline to release the pastoral work from the evangelist and focus on evangelism. An evangelist in a congregation shares the good news of Jesus Christ with people to be a model. He/she is also responsible for motivating and equipping church members to participate actively in evangelism and planting new churches. He/she reports his/her evangelistic ministry accomplishments to the lead pastor and the elders’ council quarterly.
Ayalew Balcha is a graduate of Meserete Kristos Seminary and an ordained evangelist at Akaki MKC. He stated that congregations need evangelists to proclaim the gospel to non-believers. He coordinates the evangelistic ministry of the local church and mobilizes the congregation for evangelism.
He has an evangelistic team – an action group – that goes every month on the streets and goes village to village and shares the good news of Jesus Christ with anyone they meet.
Last year, 19 new believers who came to the faith in this manner were baptized and became church members. “We are praying and working hard to win more souls for Christ this year,” he said.
7. Mobilizing resources locally
“Our resources are the people we have in the church.”
Most of the MKC members are not rich people. We have several congregations in rural areas where they engage in subsistence farming. Due to climate change, conflicts, traditional farming style, inadequate access to improved seeds and fertilizers, and other factors, they cannot improve their income.
Most of them are hardworking peasants who contribute to the services of the church through tithes, offerings, special gifts and love gifts. They are poor but generous enough to support the ministry of the church.
Employees and business people who have regular income pay their tithes monthly.
Local churches also collect offerings for evangelism and the mission of the church. In some congregations, Bible study groups organized by the church contribute money to the Mission Funds of MKC.
Birru Robele, one of the prominent leaders of MKC, collects monthly contributions of his Bible study group members and gives them to Misrak Addis Ababa congregation. It supports more than 130 church planters in different parts of the country on a monthly salary of about US$50.00.
Some people cannot continue their jobs after believing in Jesus Christ because those jobs are incompatible with the teachings of the Bible. These people include women who engage in prostitution and engage in the production and sale of local alcoholic drinks. Rehabilitating and changing their incomegenerating means demands money.
Pastor Bekele Bajira, the lead pastor of Bordi Nekemte MKC, said that three commercial sex workers came to the Lord through the evangelistic campaign. They completed the basic Christian teaching and were baptized. Later, the women told him that they did not have food because they stopped their former work. When Pastor Bekele shared their stories with the congregation, members contributed money that was enough to help them start other small businesses.
If we present genuinely the needs to be addressed to advance the cause of the gospel, believers are willing to give what they have,” said Pastor Bekele.
8. Using the language of the people
Photo: Liesa Unger
MKC’s policy states that the gospel should be preached and taught in the people’s language. Since the purpose of the church is to help people hear the gospel, believe in Christ, and become his disciples, it preaches and teaches the word of God in the language people prefer. People usually open their hearts when they hear the gospel in their language.
In a society where the issue of language is sensitive, letting people learn the gospel in their language helps them not associate church ministries with politics.
MKC prepares and avails evangelistic and discipleship materials in various languages. We encourages believers who have a sense of call for ministry to be multilingual. Knowing several languages opens the door for ministry and church planting in various cultures.
Pastor Firew Lemma, education and training department of MKC Head Office, recently travelled to Tigray, northern Ethiopia, to teach church leaders. Having learned the language from his family, he greeted the participants in Tigriegna and observed their warm, welcoming facial expressions. They were surprised that he spoke their language.
Speaking the language of the people we serve is essential to communicate the gospel clearly and to develop good relationships, said Pasor Firew.
9. Placing church planters in unchurched communities
“Till the land with the oxen from that area.”
MKC recruits, trains and places church planters within their own culture. Since the church planters recognize the culture and have already established connections, they can easily share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. MKC assigns church planters in several contexts: strongly Orthodox, Muslim and traditional beliefs. Wendimu W/Mariam, the mission coordinator at MKC Head Office, said that the church planters in the context where traditional beliefs and practices are predominant plant more churches than those in other contexts. In communities practicing traditional beliefs, if the prominent leader comes to Christ, many of the community members follow and believe in Christ.
In that context, “Our church planters pray and work to lead the community gatekeepers to Christ. Once they come to Jesus, leading others to Christ is easy,” said Wendimu.
10. Following the lead of the Holy Spirit
MKC teaches about the Holy Spirit and that believers should be empowered to live a victorious Christian life and witness for Christ. The church encourages believers to listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit to discern God’s will in their lives. The full-time ministers and church leaders pray for believers to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.
In the mission field, the dependence of the church planters on following the guidance of the Holy Spirit makes a difference in their efforts.
Church planters who pray for the sick and share God’s Word as per the guidance of the Spirit lead more people to Christ than those who do not practice these things. When the gospel is preached/ shared with power (demonstrated by the healing of the sick, recovery of mental health, release from the fear of the evil spirits, and the feeling of God’s presence), people tend to believe in the gospel.
This is different from some TV miracle workers. MKC does not organize healing conferences but events to preach the word of God. There, the Holy Spirit does things according to God’s will.
Church planters do not focus on the miracles, but on helping people understand the gospel. The miracles occur when they pray for the needs of the people. God confirms the power of the gospel by liberating people from whatever bondage hinders them from experiencing what God plans for their lives.
In conclusion, God is uniquely drawing people into God’s kingdom amid intense political, social and economic upheaval in the nation.
The growth of the Meserete Kristos Church is a good indication that the conditions on earth do not prevent the expansion of God’s kingdom. The scale and depth of the problem in our context could have destroyed the church. The evil forces trying to create obstacles to the gospel on earth have not succeeded. The wise God used the multifaced sufferings to lead multitudes to his kingdom.
God is doing his work. We, the children of God, must take the gospel to people. We can participate in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ by contributing our money, labour, knowledge, time, talents and whatever we have as our number one agenda.
The main reason for the growth of MKC is that we made the Great Commission our top priority and give what we have for the cause.
Footnotes
1. MKC Constitution Part II, Article 11(2), 2022
2. MKC Constitution Part II, Article 10(1), 2022, page 8.
3. MKC Strategic Plan 2022-2026.
“Anyone who tasted Jesus is good should tell others what he/she tasted.”
Evangelism is a scary word for many of us, but this simple advice offered by pastors in Ethiopia helps to simplify the task. Although we each bear responsibility to share the gospel, it is the Holy Spirit that changes hearts. Our job is merely to speak up about how we have experienced the goodness of God.
In this issue of Courier, we share stories of churches growing in different ways. Bursting at the seams with growing congregations, the leadership team of Meserete Kristos Church shares their 10 step strategy for church growth.
The local congregation of Anolaima in Colombia is growing trees and grass and birds as they plant seeds of the gospel in the hearts of visitors to their “IgleParque.”
And in secular Netherlands, a Mennonite retreat centre and associated camping network live out transforming lives in community, running toward the questions and letting God fill in the spaces.
You will also find testimonies of the church community fostering the growth of faith from the 2024 Renewal event in Curitiba, Brazil: Transformed, together we live Jesus. In our resource section, there is news to pique your interest in the upcoming 500th anniversary of Anabaptism.
Finally, we need to hear from you!
How have you been moved by the sharing you read in Courier? How have you shared that with your wider church community? We are seeking your opinion about what you find most valuable in Courier. Please scan the QR code here or visit here to fill out the survey.
This survey will only take five minutes of your time, but your response will help MWC keep Courier relevant for you and your church. Thank you for your help.
–Karla Braun is editor, writer and website coordinator for MWC. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
“…Making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3).
A global fellowship, 109 national churches, 58 countries, some 10 000 congregations, 1.4 million members, 45 languages: can that ever be unified?
The church is often called the body of Christ. A physical body needs different organs to function. And so it is with the church: you need diversity to function, to be a whole entity.
So it is also in the world communion. Depending on their place in the world, depending on their context, MWC member churches are different. So they can support each other and learn from each other.
Being a faith community in the Netherlands is very different from being in Indonesia or in Myanmar. Living as a very small minority in a country where another religion is by far the majority or in a country torn by violence of civil war is different from living in a country where there has been no war for more than 70 years and where there is freedom of religion.
Old communities have different challenges than new ones, and in that too we can learn from each other and encourage each other.
This unity in diversity is very vulnerable. Too easily we protest that the other does not belong to us because they do not live the faith exactly as we do or because they read the Bible differently than we do.
But Scripture says that unity is given by the Spirit: who are we to break it?
So you have to make an effort, to look for connection rather than separation. And we must have courage to endure one another even when we disagree. For it is the “mortar” of one God and one Spirit that binds together our disparate pieces into a picture of beautiful diversity.
This is how we came to set out the 7 shared convictions of Mennonite World Conference. It took 13 years to get those formulated and approved by consensus in the General Council. Among other things, we wrote down the values we share about God, the Bible, Jesus, peace witness and about worship.
If that sense of connection based on convictions is our basis, then we can talk about the differences. We can approach each other without judging, but instead with interest in what concerns the other.
And if we are brave enough to hold that, we can make a beautiful mosaic, showing the world that we can reach across human borders of nationality, colour, language and more to live in peace with each other.
—Henk Stenvers is president of Mennonite World conference (2022-2028). He delivered this address on Anabaptist World Fellowship Sunday to his local congregation of Doopsgezinde Gemeente Bussum-Naarden, in the Netherlands.
It was 7 October 2023. Husband and wife Simon Setiawan and Sarah Yetty, members of Jemaat Kristen Indonesia (JKI) church from Indonesia, were in Egypt, leading a tour group of more than 40 people from Indonesia and the United States intending to enter Israel-Palestine. They heard about the Hamas attacks on Israel in the early morning. They were concerned about the safety of their tour participants. The Indonesian embassies in Egypt and Jordan were on the phone with them, telling them not to go into Israel.
“After speaking with embassy officers and getting an update from our local partners, we explained the situation to the group. We said we would follow whatever the participants thought was best,” says Simon Setiawan. “The vast majority wanted to continue, upon getting assurances from our local partners that our adjusted routes were in the safe zones.”
So that day, they entered Israel through the Taba Border, crossing into the resort town of Eilat. The wait to cross the border was long. There were more soldiers than usual at the checkpoint. The officers were friendly albeit tense. One officer asked, “You know what’s happening in Israel, right?” and was surprised when the group said they still wanted to enter. The streets were quiet, with only two other tour groups to be seen.
From there, they went north, adjusting their plans according to the latest security updates. On one occasion, they stayed in their hotel because they heard there was a disturbance locally. In another occasion, their plan to stay overnight in Bethlehem was diverted to Jerusalem for security reasons. But they managed to visit Jericho, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, meeting a few other tour groups.
They are making plans to go again this year, subject to the security situation on the ground. “Because we love the Holy Land,” Simon says.
Longing to visit the Holy Land
In 2009, for the first time, Simon Setiawan and Sarah Yetty signed up to go to the Holy Land with their church.
“We’d been wanting to go to the Holy Land for a long time, but we knew it was way beyond our means,” says Yetty, “I was a kindergarten teacher and Simon was helping out with the church’s mission program. We didn’t have much.”
They renewed their expired passports and prayed daily for a miracle.
“Three months before the tour departed, a woman from a Presbyterian church that we never met before paid for our tour in full. She said she had a dream a month earlier whereby she saw someone in a shiny white robe coming to her and telling her to bless a couple to visit the Holy Land,” Sarah Yetty says.
“And then Simon says that because someone paid our way, we have to serve.”
God will be with you
When they relayed this to their pastor, he said they could be tour leaders. “Even though we said we had absolutely no experience, he said we’ll be alright and God would be with us.
“That was our first time, and we absolutely loved it,” Simon Setiawan says.
On that first trip, they led a tour with 11 buses, about 500 people. They had to split the group and go in different directions, with Sarah Yetty leading one team and Simon Setiawan taking the rest.
“We departed with only USD$20 in our pocket. But God kept blessing us, like everyday manna,” Sarah Yetty says.
“After that first trip, the senior pastor asked us to calculate the expenses to visit the Holy Land and set up a business specializing in Holy Land tours. We were also told to study more about the Holy Land and took training about how to run Holy Land tours. Since then, we committed ourselves to offering affordable tours of the Holy Land, so that pastors and church workers, especially those from small towns and villages, could get a chance to go there,” Simon Setiawan says.
“I love taking groups there, being on the land where Jesus was and seeing the Bible come to life. But more importantly, I love being on the tour bus listening to people’s testimonies: of a marriage that has almost ended up in divorce until they arrived in Cana and decided to reconcile. Of a doctor who walked up Mt Sinai with me, and only after reaching the top did he confess to having his 13th stent placed in his arteries just a week prior,” says Simon Setiawan.
“I always say that this is not just a tour – it’s a pilgrimage. Pray that whatever God’s plan is for you on this trip, your eyes will be open to see that,” he says.
We long for peace
“Our prayer is for peace for the people in Israel and Palestine,” says Simon Setiawan.
“Everyone is emotionally invested in the Holy Land. When there is a bit of instability, the whole world hears about it and got scared. When they’re scared, they don’t come, and the local tourism industry suffers, especially workers who live within the Palestinian Authority areas (Jericho, Bethlehem, Ramallah),” says Simon Setiawan.
“We want local industries to thrive, and for ordinary people to be able to live their lives without fear. The people want stability, safety, on both sides. And this is what we wish for them too,” say Simon Setiawan and Sarah Yetty.
—Interim Chief Communications Officer Elina Ciptadi spoke with Simon Setiawan and Sarah Yetty about their experience.
USA
I grew up in Guatemala in evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Our songs, Sunday school teachings and sermons were filled with Christian Zionist theology that declares God’s will to be the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The duty of Christians is to support Israel. Some churches even display an Israeli flag in their sanctuary.
There and in evangelical and Hispanic Mennonite congregations in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and Goshen, Indiana, USA, our worship included songs about the God of Israel who cuts the heads off our enemies. Our readings were primarily from the Old Testament which depicted violence and genocide.
In our worship, we celebrated the deaths of the enemies of Israel.
I was taught to believe that the nation and state of Israel were the people of God. It was sinful to question this belief.
No surprise
It is of no surprise to me that many who come from similar theological frameworks do not question the actions of the Israeli government in this current moment.
They see the state of Israel as a David coming up against a Goliath. They believe that Israel continues to be the little biblical nation it once was and not the world superpower it is now.
I held that Zionist vision of Israel for most of my life. That is, until I studied history and theology at Goshen College in the Hispanic Ministries program.
Theology professors such as Juan (John) Driver and Ron Collins were patient enough to help me deconstruct these violent narratives and reconstruct a new Anabaptist peace theology with a different vision of God, Jesus and Israel.
I learned that the Bible is not flat. There is a mountain in the gospels, where we stand with Jesus and can see and understand the rest of the Bible through Jesus’ teachings, vision and mission.
So, when my Hispanic/Latino(a) brothers and sisters opposed a “Seeking Peace in Israel and Palestine” resolution at the Mennonite Church USA convention in 2015, I knew exactly where that opposition came from.
Come and see
In that instant, I decided to join the “Come and See” Israel-Palestine Working Group (composed of Anabaptist agencies and organizations).
The objective of the working group was to educate leaders about Palestine and Israel and to join a learning tour of the Holy Land which included a visit to both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
More than 110 Mennonite leaders signed up, including most of my Hispanic/Latina(o) brothers and sisters walked to the microphone at the convention in 2015.
Some stated, “I am pro-Israel and will not change my mind.” But that mindset was challenged as we listened to stories from people on both sides of the Israeli separation wall.
In 2017, I again joined a learning tour group. It included leaders from MC USA Iglesia Menonita Hispana (Hispanic Mennonite Church), a few Anglo Mennonite leaders and an African American couple.
In addition to visiting the typical Christian “holy sites,” we went behind the walls which very few visitors cross. We walked through checkpoints, reminding us of the challenges undocumented members of our congregations face in the USA.
We visited Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli settlements.
We enjoyed the hospitality of Christian Palestinian sisters and brothers near Bethlehem, and listened to stories from Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. At Bethlehem Bible College, we learned about the complex Christian theological perspectives on the land.
We planted olive trees in the West Bank, near Israeli settlements (built against international law). The settlers wanted to displace the Christian Palestinian farmers.
We learned that the conflict is not Muslim-Jewish, or Jewish-Palestinian, it is between the State of Israel and anyone who opposes the expansion of its occupation – even against Jewish people of conscience who oppose illegal expansion and the displacement of Palestinians.
Apartheid experience
We began to get a sense of the apartheid experience as soon as we arrived, seeing the strong segregation and oppression of Palestinians under a brutal military occupation.
We felt the tensions and racial segregation. We, Latinas(os), share some physical features with ethnic groups in the Middle East (I was constantly asked if I was Lebanese).
As we passed through Israeli immigration and customs, one woman was held for interrogation. She had been so excited and joyful as we landed. But when she came out of the immigration and customs area, she was almost in tears.
Three days into the learning tour, the African American woman in our group wanted to return to the U.S. She felt unsafe, referencing the Jim Crow times in the USA.
By the end of our Come and See learning tour, we were not able to consider the single story of our Christian Zionist upbringings anymore.
Our belief system and theology had been changed.
Commitment to peace
At the Mennonite Church USA convention in 2017, Hispanic Mennonite and People of Color leaders were some of the first to approach the microphone to speak in support of the Seek Peace resolution.
But our new narratives held the complexity of the stories we heard and of the shared humanity of Palestinians and Israelis.
We committed to read and study The Kairos Document put together by our Christian brothers and sisters in Palestine and Israel.
We committed to speak out!
As we witness the atrocities of the recent violence in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, I am reminded of that commitment.
This is the time to use our Christian political leverage to call for a permanent ceasefire and a just resolution to the conflict.
This is the time to embrace complexity in a world where media often simplifies narratives, promotes misinformed stories and fuels conflict.
This is a moment to relentlessly seek peace.
—Saulo Padilla is migration education coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee’s U.S. National Peace & Justice Ministries.
“There should be justice. They should pay for the terrible wrong they have done.” These and other similar phrases have been repeated in the news in recent months.
In my country, Colombia, I have heard the same sentences too many times on the lips of Christians who claim to follow Jesus, the God who chose compassion over retaliation, the one who taught us to give to our enemies and even oppressors, not what they deserve but what they need.
While I reflect on the images of the atrocities caused by the war in uncountable places in the world, I remember the words of a wise Jewish rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013. Let me quote some of his writings here:
“It is our task [of the Abrahamic faith] to be a blessing to the world…. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.”1
“Nothing is more dispiriting than the cycle of revenge that haunts conflict zones and traps their populations into a past that never relaxes its grip. That has been the fate of the Balkans, Northern Ireland, India and Kashmir, the Middle East…. Retaliation is the instinctual response to perceived wrong.… Historic grievances are rarely forgotten. They become part of a people’s collective memory…. It is this that makes forgiveness so counterintuitive an idea. It is more than a technique of conflict resolution. It is a stunningly original strategy. In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence. Forgiveness breaks the chain.”2
Rabbi Sacks observes – as does anyone who has considered the conflict in Israel-Palestine – that the issues are complex. It would have been implemented if it had been simple to find a solution acceptable to the major parties.
There are long memories involved: Israelis think about “2,000 years of Jewish suffering and the existential need for Jews to have, somewhere on earth, defensible space,” Rabbi Sacks writes, and Palestinians remember “displacement and loss, political impotence and economic hardship, of humiliating defeat and anger.”3
As each group attempts to protect their own space, their attempts to secure it sometimes result in harm that affects the other and turns back on themselves. “Forgiveness seems absurdly inadequate to substantive conflicts of interest and the sheer momentum of suspicion, distrust and cumulative grievance,” Rabbi Sacks writes.
“Yet in the end peace is made, if at all, then by people who acknowledge the personhood of their opponents. Until Israelis and Palestinians are able to listen to one another, hear each other’s anguish and anger and make cognitive space for one another’s hopes, there is no way forward [… As a Jew] I honour the past not by repeating it but by learning from it – by refusing to add pain to pain, grief to grief. That is why we must answer hatred with love, violence with peace, resentment with generosity of spirit and conflict with reconciliation.”4
As I write these words, the cycle of violence and retaliation continues to deepen. It is almost impossible to say anything about that situation without angering someone somewhere, as was the case with the Reconciling response to war in the Middle East statement we wrote in October 2023. And yet, we are called to respond, as a Global Communion, to this and many other terrible scenarios of war we see today. That is why we invite you, in this issue of Courier, to reflect on understanding biblical messages in terms of today’s realities.
Yes, amid terrible atrocities, people, whoever they are, have the right to demand that the perpetrators get what they deserve for what they have done. But, thanks to God, it does not have to be that way. Thanks to God, Jesus shows us another way.
—César García is general secretary of Mennonite World Conference. Originally from Colombia, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
1. Not in God’s Name, 5.
2. The Dignity of Difference, 178-79.
3. Ibid., 189-190.
4.Ibid., 189-190.
Bibliography
Sacks, Jonathan. The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
———. Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. First American edition. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2015.
Germany
After high school, I spent a year in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank, living and working at Tent of Nations, a Palestinian Christian ecological peace project. I learned many things during this time: from cooking on an open fire and caring for animals to recovering from tear gas by smelling raw onion.
But the most transformative and lasting learnings concerned how I understand and follow Jesus.
It was Palestinian Christians who taught me to see that Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem are real places whose histories shaped Jesus. His context, plagued by military, economic and cultural oppression, was not so different from the situation of Palestinians growing up today in refugee camps in the West Bank or Gaza. Now as then, injustice breeds resentment and repression creating spirals of violence and complex patterns of trauma which seem inescapable.
Solidarity with the oppressed
It is in this wounded world that God chose to come and be in solidarity with the oppressed and model a different way to struggle for dignity and freedom – one that sets both victim and oppressor free.
The Nassars, my Palestinian Lutheran hosts, taught me how to put Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies into practice. On boulders originally placed by Israeli soldiers as a roadblock they wrote their manifesto: “We refuse to be enemies.”
I witnessed Daher Nassar invite armed settlers who broke into his land for tea, causing them to retreat confused. At the same time, the Nassars refused to give up on their connection to the land and their dream of a shared future for all.
The Jewish and Muslim members of Bereaved Parents Circle also taught me a new understanding of forgiveness. As they came together to mourn the deaths of their children in the conflict, they realized that retaliation did not bring life. Only forgiveness had the power to set people free from bitterness, free to work for liberation for all.
Reconciliation over recrimination
Having witnessed these living stones before me helped me honestly face my own entanglement in this conflict. Both my grandfathers fought in the Nazi army and contributed to the murder of six million Jews in Europe. Jews refer to this atrocity as the Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe.” This heinous crime against humanity represents the culmination of 2 000 years of dehumanization and terror toward Jews.
It bears repeating that this violence was perpetrated out especially by Christians. Gentiles who forgot that they were adopted into God’s people by grace.
Antisemitism is the trauma that created the need for a Jewish state. Yet this state was not founded on “empty land,” as the common colonial trope goes, but by displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose children and grandchildren still live as stateless refugees around the world. Palestinians refer to this as the “Nakba” – Arabic for “catastrophe”.
These twin catastrophes are the foundational wounds of the two people, and as is common with wounds, we usually pay more attention to our own.
Stories that unsettle
In conversations with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, I was humbled to learn that owning my legacy of my entanglement in violence did not taint me. Instead, it opened up conversations about what repentance and reconciliation can look like.
These activists shared about their slow and painful realization that they had been lied to. While the Shoah was central to Israeli education, they had never learned about the Nakba.
Meanwhile, Palestinian schools portrayed the Zionists only as colonizers, while omitting that they were fleeing genocidal violence in Europe.
From the peace activists, I learned the importance of sharing our stories and allowing for another’s truth to unsettle us. To work for a just and lasting peace between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, we must repent both of our deep-seated antisemitism as well as our colonial imagination and resist their manifestations in our societies today.
There is an image that grounds my hope. Each year, the Nassars invited people to the vineyard to help with the harvest and provide a nonviolent deterrence to settler violence. I remember harvesting buckets and buckets of the sweetest grapes I have ever eaten together with dozens of volunteers from around the world – including some Israelis.
Both the Israelis and my Palestinian hosts took considerable risks in this encounter as there are people on both sides adamantly opposed to any form of coexistence. Yet they consciously took the risk, because they were convicted that peace requires relationships of trust and solidarity that only grow with time and shared labour.
The joy at this harvest and the feast of hummus, olives, and falafel at lunch break has become a foretaste of the kin-dom of heaven I cherish and long to taste again.
—Benjamin Isaak-Krauß co-pastors with his spouse Rianna at Mennonitengemeinde Frankfurt, a congregation of Arbeitsgemeinschaft Mennonitischer Gemeinden (AMG) in Germany. He represents the Deutsche Mennonitische Friedenskomitee (German Mennonite Peace Committee) on the steering committee of Community Peacemaker Teams.
