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2009-03-03 issue:

Race, culture, media focus of EMS week

Eastern Mennonite Seminary’s leadership school tied to Obama inauguration.

by Laura Lehman Amstutz of Eastern Mennonite Seminary

Print Article

When the planners for this year’s School for Leadership Training at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Va., Jan. 19-22, chose the theme and speakers for this year’s conference they had no idea how appropriate they would be.


Regina Shands Stoltzfus speaks on race relations in the church on the eve of the U.S. presidential inauguration to open the School for Leadership Training at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.Photo by Jim Bishop.

Some 220 pastors and lay leaders attending the conference heard messages on cultural change, engaging the media and race relations just as many thousands traveled to Washington to witness the inauguration of the country’s first African-American president and millions more watched the event on digital media.

Regina Shands Stoltzfus, professor at Goshen (Ind.) College, and Shane Hipps, pastor at Trinity Mennonite Church in Phoenix, Ariz., were keynote speakers on the conference theme, “Christians Engaging Cultural Change.”

On the eve of the inauguration Jan. 19, Stoltzfus encouraged the audience to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to “dangerous unselfishness—the notion that we are called into acts of serving one another that at best may not serve us and at worst may indeed cost us.”

“Where we have been is part of who we are,” she said. “Let us remember those times but not let the memory stunt our growth or bring us back into that place.”

Hipps began his session by helping participants understand theorist Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.”

“We tend to assume that the way media [are] used is what gives [them] value,” said Hipps, “when in fact it is the medium itself that has the power to shape the mind.”

By chronicling the changes in culture and faith that resulted from the production of the printing press, Hipps showed how the medium itself, printed words, ushered in an age of linear and rational thinking.

“Before the printing press a linear, sequential understanding of Jesus did not exist,” said Hipps. He pointed out that the advent of the photograph and reproduction of the photograph changed the world again.

“Images reduce the ability of abstract thought,” said Hipps. However, he said,“we increase our ability to live in the right side of our brains with emotion and intuition.”

“The culture is changing,” Hipps said. “The goal is not to be imitative of the culture but to have empathy for your audience.”

Hipps also discussed three ways that Jesus engaged culture—sometimes he moved toward culture, sometimes he moved away from culture and sometimes he moved against culture.

“Mennonites,” Hipps continued, “are very good at away and against, and the world needs you to do that, but you also need to move toward.”

Stoltzfus ended the week by talking about racial and class divisions in society.

“We need to name the places we are different anytime there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us,’ ” she said. “We need to recognize the ways our churches have been complicit in harm in the past and today and the way our sacred texts have been violated and used for violence,” she said.

“We’ve been working at race and class issues for a long time,” Stoltzfus said, “and we keep doing it better.”

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