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2008-01-08 issue:

Free to be different

Life-changing obedience looks different in different places and situations.

by Karl Landis

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Mennonites who no longer wear prayer coverings or plain suits, who no longer drive black cars and who no longer avoid movies or television tend to be pleased and relieved that they have laid aside these and many other cultural distinctives. But I sometimes wonder if we have been sufficiently thoughtful about the full meaning of our laying these things aside or about the true value of the social practices we have replaced them with.

One evening I enjoyed a drama at our local Mennonite high school that incorporated pop music hits from the 1950s played at full volume and exuberant choreography along with swirls of bright color to suffuse the whole production with fun and excitement. The same school also celebrated at least four section sports titles in public league fall sports. The drama and the sports teams were fun to watch and cheer for, and I enjoyed both the excellence of the students’ skills in these endeavors and the fun of cheering for the winning team.

Yet I realize that this particular school was founded only 60 years ago for the express purpose of providing an educational alternative that intentionally and specifically excluded participation in theater and public school sports activities. I realize the founders of this school would likely be dismayed to know the very activities they forbade their students are now high-profile components of student life there.

I wonder if we have lost something in the changes we have embraced. Do we now think it was not important to be culturally distinctive (one way of being separate from the world) 60 years ago? Or do we think it was important then but not now? Or perhaps we think we are still distinctive but in different ways.

Shared commitment: At its best, the cultural distinctiveness of the 1940s was based on a shared commitment to obey Christ’s teachings and example, even if that meant being outside the cultural mainstream. Mennonites recognized each other as people and as congregations willing to be different from the world in noticeable ways. For centuries, most of those who committed themselves to the Mennonite path expected it to remove them from the cultural mainstream in their time. They understood that the gospel has implications for every area of our lives and that it calls us to be willing to yield anything and everything for the sake of the kingdom of God. They expected to be changed or transformed by their ongoing walk with God and saw yielding to the church as an important part of obeying and following Jesus.

Unfortunately, much of the thinking about how to do this in daily life in the 1940s focused as much on how to dress and how to relate to media and public culture as it did on how to be transformed in character and imagination. The other problem was the expectation that whole conferences and the whole Mennonite denomination would answer the questions about how to dress and how to relate to media and public culture in precisely the same way. As we know, this often degenerated into a faith more focused on conformed behavior than on transformed hearts.

My concern is that when we rightly rejected what often came to be a works-based righteousness, too many of us also discarded the original impulse to follow Christ together in life-transforming or self-sacrificing ways. In our eagerness to re-establish meaningful personal faith, we have often relied on an approach to faith that allows each of us to work out our own answers to lifestyle questions. The problem is that we often need our brothers and sisters to call us on and to inspire us into radical discipleship. Left to our own devices, we are likely to be distracted and seduced by affluence and personal comfort. In our time, the messages that promote affluence and personal comfort pour in like a torrent and are far more colorful, far more enticing and far more carefully crafted than the ones that promote service, sacrifice and virtue. As a result, too often we have valued individualism, affluence and materialism over radical obedience. And we hesitate to challenge our brothers and sisters on these matters because inappropriate challenges in the church left such a bad taste in the souls of the previous generation.

Are we still noticeably different from the world as Christ-followers today? Are we still bound together by the desire or impulse to obey and follow Jesus even if it means being seen as unusual in the broader culture? Or are we only willing to obey him as long as we can be seen as successful in American culture?

Cultural setting: If we define individualism as each individual making his or her own decisions without much concern for what is happening with other individuals or for how these decisions affect other individuals, and we define congregationalism as each congregation making its own decisions without much concern for what is happening in other congregations or for how these decisions affect other congregations, then these terms define us fairly well. They at least define what we are tempted to do and are encouraged to do by the cultural setting in the United States. While I acknowledge that it is important for each individual and each congregation to be thoughtful and purposeful, it is also important for all of us to be yielded in some meaningful way to a larger body of fellow believers.

What is the answer? It may lie in carrying out two seemingly contradictory tasks:

1. Preach and live out a demanding gospel. Call people to radical, even risky obedience to the model and teachings of Jesus. But then:

2. Give each other the freedom to mature into that obedience in different ways and in different expressions. Realize that we all start at a different place and grow at different speeds. Also realize that mature expressions of obedience may not all look the same and that our congregations, conferences and denomination are actually richer for the variety of expressions this produces.

We see this dynamic played out in the early church in Acts 15. After the Jerusalem council, new Gentile believers were released from the complicated and burdensome specifics that defined Jewish religious practice, yet Paul continued to call them to life-changing obedience that was evident in their behavior, their attitudes and their relationships (e.g., Romans 12-14, Ephesians 4-5). Life-changing obedience looked different in different places and in different situations, but the same principle was at work.

We can hold these two tasks in tension by engaging in honest, encouraging conversations with each other that begin with

1. listening to the Scriptures and to the Holy Spirit, asking him to guide us into God’s truth. These conversations can then move on to

2. clarifying the commitments and understandings that shape our identity, that bind us together in faith. These are expressed in our confession of faith, in various statements of core values and in shared practices. These conversations then need to move on even further to

3. lovingly asking each other how our lives express or incarnate our shared commitments and understandings. We should trust each other enough within our congregations, conferences and the denomination to ask each other probing questions about how we live out our shared commitments and understandings and to wrestle with the answers together, quick to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

One reason we do this less often than we should is that it takes time and energy to engage in meaningful conversation and even more time and energy to engage in meaningful relationship. As any parent knows, it is also inconvenient and sometimes painful. Conversations about deeper issues usually pop up at unexpected and inconvenient times. Our lifestyles (especially the way we spend our leisure time) and work styles often limit the time and energy we can invest in meaningful conversations and relationships.

If I follow my own advice, I will review my experiences at my local Mennonite high school in my prayers, approach the teachers or administrators involved to clarify the shared understandings that relate to drama and sports and give them the benefit of the doubt as we talk about how well our drama and sports teams express those commitments and understandings. Sometimes our expressions will be noticeably different from the world, and sometimes they may not, but our motivation for what we are doing will always be distinctive if we are people committed to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Karl Landis is director of leadership development for Lancaster Mennonite Conference and attends New Life Fellowship in Ephrata, Pa.

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