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
