Youth with a Mission asks for help from AMBS professor

AMBS

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"Missionaries just go and see who’s on the other end of the phone," Alan Kreider, retiring Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Ind., professor, said, summing up a 13-year relationship that has resulted in a just-completed DVD project.

Alan Kreider, retired AMBS professor, views a session from the "Resident but Alien" DVD project with Andy Alexis-Baker, AMBS graduate. Alexis-Baker wrote the discussion questions that accompany the DVDs. Photo by Mary E. Klassen.

In 1996 Kreider was a mission worker in England when he received a telephone call from John Peachey, director of a Youth with a Mission center north of London. That phone call started a chain of events that led to the six DVD presentations in which Kreider and YWAM students look at the early Christian church and how it was effective in attracting people to faith.

The initial contact came at the time when YWAM was considering how to mark the 900th anniversary of the first Crusades.

"The YWAM leaders in England told me that my writing on the early church had given them a vision for new ways of responding to mission, especially in the Middle East," Kreider said.

As YWAM organized the Reconciliation Walk, a three-year effort in which volunteers walked from Germany to the Middle East with a message of apology, "They asked me to teach about how the cross moved from being a symbol of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice to being a symbol of Christian aggression against enemies," Kreider said. Over the next several years, he taught about the early church in their discipleship training program several times, including three times in Turkey and once in Jerusalem.

Through these encounters, Kreider says he met people from very different ecclesial and cultural backgrounds—charismatic, Anglican, Pentecostals. "I was bowled over by their freshness and their sacrificial commitment to Jesus Christ. Something in their spirit was akin to the early Anabaptists. It was an immense privilege to be there."

Kreider and Eleanor, his wife, moved to the United States in 2000, but YWAM invited him to return to England to teach in their school of reconciliation each year. As more people heard Kreider and valued his teaching, conversations about recording his presentations began.

Cathy Nobles, who organized the DVD project, said, "Having learned so much from Alan since I met him in 1997, I was eager that we get his teaching on videos to be able to share it with others. His views about the role of the church in early Christian history and the subsequent changes into Christendom affect my own view of missions. Since I work with training young people to work in conflict areas or in the area of justice, I am deeply grateful for the insights that his teaching gives us about how to live out the gospel."

YWAM staff arranged for Kreider to be recorded as he presented his material about the early church to volunteer students in England. The resulting project, Resident but Alien: How the Early Church Grew has six half-hour sessions in which Kreider and the students look at early Christian art and documents. Together they explore the experiences of the early Christians to see what insights they give Christians who want to share the Good News today.

"From the time I first read Alan Kreider's work on the early Church, I was fascinated and inspired," Lynn Green, international chairman of Youth with a Mission, said. "When I invited him to speak he captured his audience immediately and held their attention while presenting the fruits of high quality scholarship. In this series, he both challenges our current thinking and presents new (ancient) approaches to mission."   

"I hope to see these lessons used in small home study groups as well as some of our YWAM schools," Nobles said. "I will also offer it to non-Christian friends as a way to give them understanding of the church and how we have both succeeded and failed in our witness to the world."

Kreider hopes the project can be helpful for Mennonite groups, too. He has used it in his own congregation, Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, and said, "It has been enthusiastically affirmed, but needs to be tested. It is my desire that it will be helpful."

The project involved a wide variety of partners. Mennonite Media helped with securing permissions to use the art and illustrations that are part of the lessons. AMBS provided assistance with design of the materials, and AMBS graduate Andy Alexis-Baker wrote the discussion questions. Kim Tan, a venture capitalist who was influenced by writings of John Howard Yoder, funded the work.

Kreider retired from teaching at the end of the 2008–2009 school year, after five years teaching church history and mission at AMBS. He hopes to devote more time to writing about the content he worked with for the DVD project.

"I want to write a book on the growth of the early church through the good times and the bad times—the bad times being when the church used advantage and compulsion rather than offering the delightfully disorienting ways of Jesus," Kreider said.

Resident But Alien: How the Early Church Grew (Great Commission Distribution Ltd., 2009) is available on two DVDs, with study guide, for $54.99 from www.ywampublishing.com (800 922-2143) and from Mennonite Cooperative Bookstore at AMBS (574 296-6251), bookstore@ambs.edu.