Called by the Spirit

Speakers at San José 2007 laud and challenge Mennonites.

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At the adult worship times at San José 2007, July 2-6, Mennonites heard themselves lauded for their peacemaking and care for one another. They heard challenges not to hide their spiritual treasure but to share it with others.

Confession: Mennonite Church USA executive director Jim Schrag (right) offers a prayer of confession for sins against Native Americans. Steve Cheramie Risingsun is at left. Photo by Lowell Brown.

Two of the six speakers were from Pentecostal background and brought that sensibility to their talks. Further conversation with Paul Alexander, speaker for the joint worship with youth on July 4, brought a call from other Mennonites to depend more on the Holy Spirit instead of needing to be in control. (See "additional notes" below on right).

Each worship opened with spirited singing, led by musicians from Los Angeles Faith Chapel, Reba Place Church in Evanston, Ill., and Lorraine Avenue Mennonite Church in Wichita, Kan., followed by calls to worship from Ephesians, which served as the basis for each talk.

Monday evening, July 2: Juan Martinez, assistant dean for the Hispanic Church Studies Department at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., presented the opening night’s talk, “Called into God’s Glory,” in Spanish and English, moving effortlessly between the two.

“Living the call is messy,” he said. While we sing beautifully, we struggle with living out God’s call to live in God’s kingdom. The Bible reflects this messiness, this incompleteness. While Paul worked to bring Jews and Gentiles together, they never fully did. Like the church today, “it was always a work in progress,” Martinez said.

In Ephesians 2:1-10, Paul writes about God’s grace, which “has an impact.” We all encounter walls, Martinez said, and most of these are social constructions in our minds. We need to deconstruct them.

That job is difficult in part because we live in fear—of losing power and of having power used against us. We build our own walls, he said, and like to say that “the other” is the problem. But the reality of grace invites us to forgive the other, to build community.

The heart of “living the call,” Martinez said, is to demonstrate to the world that in Jesus Christ there is a chance of reconciliation. Hospitality is wonderful but not enough.

Singer-songwriter Ken Medema followed with a created-on-the-spot song based on the message. He led worshippers with the chorus: “These are the days of deconstruction. / These are the days to lift the walls. / These are the days of great disruption. / These are the days to live the call.”

Tuesday morning, July 3: Following the singing, people watched a video about a resolution before the U.S. Senate to apologize to Native Americans for the atrocities done to them by the U.S. government. Then Steve Cheramie Risingsun, a Native Mennonite pastor, spoke on behalf of Native children who were abused in many ways by whites in boarding schools, many of them run by churches. He told of the healing effect of hearing the words “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?”

Jim Schrag, executive director of Mennonite Church USA, then offered a prayer of confession. He mentioned that Native people continue to suffer from injustices by the U.S. government.

Speaking on “Called to Reconciliation,” Mary Thiessen Nation, who teaches at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va., told of growing up in a Mennonite Brethren family in Canada, then moving to inner-city Los Angeles in the early 1970s to work for a Christian organization.

Later, when she went to Fuller Seminary and reconnected with her Mennonite roots at Pasadena Mennonite Church, she had to grieve the many “unmentionable” things she witnessed, including the murder of her friend.

She described the process of healing as three “circles”: (1) our own experiences, (2) the biblical story, (3) transformation. Ephesians 2:11-22 includes phrases that reflect these circles.

We are to “remember” who we once were. “Christ is our peace” names what Christ has done. We must not reduce or domesticate Christ, she said. “We [tend to] become groupies and focus on one aspect of Christ”—the Sermon on the Mount, his death, the victorious, risen Lord.

We are not only to be thankful for being reconciled but to be aware of the unreconciled. “Evil and suffering can only be healed if we’re walking with Jesus,” she said, “if we’re holding onto his nail-scarred hands.” We await “the promised end to this grand story of reconciliation.”

Wednesday morning, July 4: On July 4, while “others have picnics, parades and fireworks,” said worship leader Rod Stafford, “here are we Mennonites having two worship services. How odd.” Jesus’ way is counterintuitive, he said.

Peace was the theme of the day, and a parade of children carrying flags from more than 100 nations offered an alternative focus to this Independence Day.

In her talk, “Called to Claim God’s Power,” Jennifer Davis Sensenig, a member of the pastoral staff at Pasadena Mennonite Church, soon dispelled the notion that peace is merely a nice thought. She focused on Ephesians 6:10-18, where Paul calls his readers to “be strong in the Lord” and “put on the whole armor of God.”

While Mennonites may try to tame the language of this passage, she said, that doesn’t fit the text, which uses terms for Roman combat gear to describe Christians’ battle against the rulers and “cosmic powers of this present darkness.”

God’s battle plan in the New Testament, she said, “is nothing less than the conversion of these powers.” Jesus overcame domination and violence by conversion.

Sensenig looked to the story of Joséph in Genesis for how to live in an empire. His story is “like a bell tone in Mennonite Church USA’s ears,” she said. Mennonites came to this land from persecution in Europe and have flourished. We have much to offer this nation, she said, just as Joséph used his gifts to aid Egypt and many other nations.

Like Joséph, we are living in a superpower nation, she said. “It is possible to live the call in Egypt.” But to do so we need the armor of God.

Sensenig expressed her gratitude for the freedoms we have in the United States and called for contributing the church’s wisdom to bring change. “This nation needs Mennonite Church USA to live the call,” she said. “Soldiering is a sacrificial vocation. We are called to give our lives for others.”

In order to follow this call, she said, we’ll have to “set aside our fears and our impulses toward self-preservation and take up the whole armor of God.” She asked people to stand who are willing to put on the armor of truth, righteousness and faith.

Wednesday evening, July 4: The combined adult and youth worship included an offering for Mennonites in Congo and a talk by Paul Alexander, a fourth-generation Pentecostal who now teaches theology at Azuza (Calif.) Pacific University, on “Citizens of God’s Kingdom.”

He grew up in Kansas in a devout Assemblies of God family. His father told him, “Seek Jesus.” As a teenager he loved guns, told racist jokes and listened to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

At age 24, he lost his faith in God. Later he discovered that early Pentecostals were pacifists. Then he took a class from Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. “I read Yoder and first-generation Pentecostals, and they sounded like they were saying the same thing.”
By age 27 he had regained his belief in Christ and searched out resources about Anabaptism and Mennonites. “Your existence helped me realize I could follow Jesus in the 21st century,” he said.

His pacifist views became unpopular among his fellow church members, especially after 9/11. “If you start questioning nationalism and war, that’s going to cause trouble,” he said.
Alexander described his talk as saying two things: “Thank you” to Mennonites for simply existing. And, “Please live the life you’ve been called to.” He urged the youth to embrace their church and share their faith with others. “You walk straight, now talk about it.”

Thursday morning, July 5: Shane Hipps, pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, Ariz., said he stumbled into the Mennonite fold. In his talk, “Called to Transformation—Living in Love,” based on Ephesians 5:8-14, he told how he and Andrea, his wife, had moved to Pasadena and visited Pasadena Mennonite Church.

One day Andrea had a bad bike accident. Without being asked, church members organized meals for two months, cleaned their home and took Andrea to a job interview.

“They were the hands and feet of God,” Hipps said. When he tells this story to Mennonites, they aren’t surprised, he said. But when Andrea told her Christian co-workers, “their jaws dropped. … Who were these people?”

Mennonites have learned to follow Paul’s advice in Ephesians to “be imitators of God,” he said.

He then drew on the geology of Arizona, where, below its desert crust is porous rock that holds oceans of water out of practical reach. Mennonites’ active faith is like those aquifers, Hipps said, something that went underground, preserved by protected layers above.
The things that make us unique exclude others, he said. It’s hard for people to access our spiritual water. We need to “go as geysers in the desert ready to quench a thirsty generation,” he said.

Friday evening, July 6: Chuwang Pam, pastor of Los Angeles Faith Chapel, was born in Nigeria and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Later he returned to Nigeria, became a Christian and worked as a Pentecostal evangelist. In 1996, he began Faith Chapel, which works with homeless people.

In his talk, “Called to One Hope as One Body,” based on Ephesians 4:1-16, Pam said he is glad the church has grown but is sad it has grown apart. “The only way to peace is through love for one another.” When the church is together, there is no homelessness, no hunger or need.

He named three things that must happen before the church comes together: a rude awakening, a spiritual awakening and the crashing down of denominational walls. “We’re spending too much time fighting,” he said.

The closing worship culminated with Communion, using breads from around the world.

Related Resources

Discussion Guides:

• Discussion Guide I - July 29
• Discussion Guide II - Aug. 5

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Additional Notes

‘Pay attention to the Holy Spirit’

In a seminar titled “Mennonites and Pentecostals: Power and Peace,” a panel of Paul Alexander, who spoke at the combined youth and adult worship (see above), Carol Rose, co-director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, and Gilberto Flores, director of missional church advancement for Mennonite Church USA, discussed what Mennonites can learn from Pentecostals. Though cautious to give any advice, Alexander said Pentecostals can offer “a theology and practice of the Holy Spirit to empower us to follow Jesus.”

Rose said she became a Mennonite through the Mennonite church in Guatemala, which already practiced a combination of peacemaking and depending on the Holy Spirit. “God wants us to be in the flow of God’s power,” she said. Power does not equal control.

Flores asked, “How do we accept the need for the Holy Spirit [in order] to be a missional church?” Mennonite Church USA is a small denomination but a wealthy one, he said, and afraid to take risks.
Its leaders—mostly German or Swiss Mennonites—hate to lose control. How can we overcome fear? “We need to pay attention to the Holy Spirit.”—Gordon Houser