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2007-07-03 issue:

Former MCC director wanted more risks

by Robert Rhodes

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Robb Davis’ legacy at Mennonite Central Committee—an 18-month period he describes as one of unrealized, even frustrated, potential—may be encapsulated in a single photo. The photo showed Davis conversing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York on Sept. 20. It was taken at a meeting MCC was asked to organize between U.S. religious leaders and Ahmadinejad, who was in New York to address the United Nations. The encounter—amid growing U.S. tensions with Iran over its nuclear development program—was the kind of thing Davis thought MCC should be all about.



But only weeks later, on Oct. 23, Davis abruptly resigned as MCC’s executive director, leaving not only an organization trying to re-envision its future but many unanswered questions about why Davis—an accomplished, charismatic man of service with the high ideals MCC traditionally has espoused—would simply quit and walk away.

“I know it felt out of the blue, and it wasn’t an easy decision,” Davis says. “But I was not feeling that I had the patience or the maturity to really help move MCC into its future. I think my own maturity as a leader had not evolved to that point.”

Before coming to MCC in 2005, Davis had worked for service agencies such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services and the Davis, Calif.-based Freedom from Hunger. He also was a featured speaker at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute hosted by Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., and holds a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in population dynamics from Johns Hopkins University.

His training and his passion for forging grassroots responses to global problems would seem to make him a perfect fit to lead MCC. But Davis said he was not equipped to navigate MCC’s interior culture or to fully understand the relationship the agency has with its constituent churches.

“I’m very high on MCC,” Davis says. “I don’t see another [agency] that is positioned to do what MCC does. What I said to staff when I was there was that if MCC didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it … MCC should be risk-loving and risk-taking. I just wanted MCC to do more.”

Central to MCC, Davis says, is its role as a prophetic voice among Anabaptist churches, which Davis believes have lost some of their theological bearings, especially when it comes to issues such as the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

“The church needs that fundamental call to return to who we are as a people,” Davis says. “MCC can nurture the church [and help it] gain a bigger vision. That to me is where MCC’s greatest challenge lies—speaking prophetically but nurturing the questions of How do we live at this time; how do we live as global Christians in a globalized economy?”

One of Davis’ assignments at MCC was to help the agency redesign its governance and leadership model—a process that continues and was affirmed by MCC’s binational board on June 9.

Davis says he found MCC’s diverse—some would say fragmented—structure of regional offices and headquarters hard to work with.

“It can’t just act like a family but like a large, complex organization,” Davis says. “I know that leadership exists in the church, and I know MCC has within itself that kind of leadership. I hope they’ll put a premium … on finding someone who will do things on the edge but who will be deeply Anabaptist and grounded in Scripture.”

Davis says he hopes MCC’s binational board, in choosing his successor, will signal that “this is the time for risk-taking.

“I don’t think [leaders] are encouraged to take risks. There’s a sense of fear to stick your neck out too far … there’s a shift going on in MCC where boards are taking their roles a lot more seriously and taking more active leadership. We really have to step up and be those leaders.”

Since returning to California, Davis has been doing some consulting work and curriculum development. He works 60 percent at Freedom from Hunger as a senior health adviser, working on programs that link microfinance and health education and health services. He is also doing a series of training and program evaluations with other nongovernmental organizations working in child health and water and sanitation, and working as an adjunct faculty at Eastern University, Philadelphia, teaching this summer in the Campolo School’s graduate program.

He says someday he would welcome another leadership challenge, especially with a group that helps the oppressed and that “has connections to grassroots realities but speaks to the powers.”

Now Davis spends a lot of time alone, thinking and taking long bike rides.

“There have been some really wonderful people who have helped me,” he says.

Robert Rhodes for Meetinghouse

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