A teaching resource from the Faith and Life Commission
What does it mean for member churches of Mennonite World Conference to share an Anabaptist identity? What is the value of Anabaptist “tradition” – and what does that word mean in a global context? What are our Anabaptist understandings of mission and fellowship?
In 2009, the newly appointed Faith and Life Commission was asked to produce three papers that could be used in helping MWC communities reflect on such questions:
- “A Holistic Understanding of Fellowship, Worship, Service, and Witness from an Anabaptist Perspective” by Alfred Neufeld Friesen of Paraguay;
- “The ‘Anabaptist Tradition’ – Reclaiming its Gifts, Heeding its Weaknesses” by Hanspeter Jecker of Switzerland; and
- “Koinonia – The Gift We Hold Together” by Tom Yoder Neufeld of Canada.
All three papers were approved as a teaching resource by the MWC General Council in May 2012.
The word koinonia has rightly become a central term and concept for Mennonite World Conference. In addresses, publications and programmatic efforts, leaders have been nudging the global Anabaptist community to a deeper relationship with each other. Even when we don’t use the word koinonia itself, much of the terminology we use depends on it: meeting needs, mutual encouragement, gift giving and receiving, fellowship, interdependence, solidarity, consensus, communion, community, unity, being “together”…