Cross Roads Fall Lecture
Valley Brethren Mennonite Heritage Center
Given 10 November 2007 at
Garbers Church of the Brethren
Harrisonburg, Va. by
Nancy R. Heisey

 

They Also Serve: Reflections on the Brethren Mennonite Service Experience

 

            I want to begin with two word pictures. The first is of three small children poring over a book. It's thin, yearbook shaped, and is full of small, black and white photographs. The children look for younger versions of familiar faces; they always stop with special interest at the photograph of a young man standing in the snow with his coat collar turned up, a dairy tester's kit in his hand, shaking hands with a farmer.  It is their father, serving in Civilian Public Service during World War II, doing his rounds of dairy farms in Maine. Though they, or at least the middle daughter, never read the words that accompanied the photographs, they knew the title of the book: "They Also Serve," a record of Brethren in Christ men who served in CPS during World War II.

            The second photograph is of that same middle daughter, now in her 30s, sitting in a spacious living room of a villa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. She's been invited to dinner by a friendly man who is just finishing up a tour with the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, in that West African country. She looks around at his large collection of African masks, and wonders why she is there, coming from her smaller and more humble Mennonite Central Committee home.  When they sit down to talk, she learns that this man, Bob Zigler, is the son of someone she does know about, M. R. Zigler. During her days in the headquarters of MCC before undertaking a service assignment in Burkina Faso, she heard frequent references to the elder Zigler's role, working together with Mennonite Central Committee and Quaker leaders, in developing the CPS program for conscientious objectors during World War II.  Despite all their difference, Bob Zigler clearly saw himself and Nancy Heisey as part of the same story—the story of Brethren and Mennonite serving around the world.  It's a story of vast dimensions—one which has been told over and over, in parts, in many different settings. It's also a particular story, one that has percolated through many congregations and families within the framework of the Historic Peace Churches. It is a story that is alive, and on-going, yet always threatened by forces that do not value compassionate care for the neighbor.

            In this presentation, I want to tell parts of that story again for you, some of which may be repetition for those of you very versed in the service experience of Brethren and Mennonites. But I hope to focus on the world "also" in my title, the "also" of women's participation in service along with men in response to war and militarization of society. And I want to raise a question suggested by the title, which, as you may have picked out, comes from the final lines of John Milton's "Sonnet on His Blindness." As the poet protests the limitations imposed on him as he loses his eyesight, he hears God's response:  "God doth not need/ Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best/ Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state/ Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,/ And post o'er land and ocean without rest;/ They also serve who only stand and wait." That sentiment, to the Brethren in Christ who joined in the Mennonite CPS camps and projects during the Second World War, was the framework for their response to the system of universal military conscription. I want to suggest that, in this time of the growing churches around the world, the model of military service is not adequate for the service involvement that must shape our future within the heritage of the Historic Peace Churches.

            Of course, service as a way of life for Christians did not begin with the twentieth century in the United States and Canada. Nor did it begin with the emerging Anabaptist-related movements of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. As even a perfunctory search of the New Testament will show, compassionate care was at the heart of Jesus' ministry in first-century Palestine. As soon as the budding Jesus movement began to grow, they faced the growing pains of providing for the needs of a body becoming ever more diverse, and were moved to appoint deacons to assure that proper sharing of resources characterized the community. The Apostle Paul devoted nearly ten years of his itinerant mission not only to sharing the good news, but to taking up a collection of money from the Gentile churches he founded to take back as a gift of unity and care for the Jewish churches in Jerusalem. 

            Records of the early churches repeat this theme. Dionysius of Alexandria, bishop of that Egyptian city during the turbulent third century, writes extensively about members of his churches dealing with the threat of persecution and with actual martyrdom. He also speaks with emotion about the Christian response to an outbreak of plague: "The most of our brothers and sisters in their great love and affection for the brotherhood were unsparing of themselves and clung to one another, visiting the sick without a thought as to the danger, carefully ministering to them, tending them in Christ, and so most gladly departed this life along with them….Many also cared for and restored others to health….The conduct of the pagans was the exact opposite. Even those who were in the first stages of the disease they pushed away, and fled from their dearest." (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 7. 9-10). Sociologist Rodney Stark has proposed that the early Christian ethic of service was a primary factor that led to the growth of the churches.  He suggests that care for the sick led to a better survival rate during epidemics, and that survivors would have strong reason to join the new communities because of their care. 

            As the monastic movement developed among Christians in Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages, these holy people articulated for themselves an ethic of hospitality, as can be heard in these words from the Benedictine Rule: "In the salutation of all guests, whether arriving or departing, let all humility be shown. Let the head be bowed or the whole body prostrated on the ground in adoration of Christ, who indeed is received in their persons….In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims the greatest care and solicitude should be shown, because it is especially in them that Christ is received"(Rule of Benedict 53). Stories of sharing abound within this ancient Christian tradition: One writer described Melania the Elder, a fourth-century Roman widow who became an important Christian benefactor: "For thirty-seven years she practiced hospitality; from her own treasury she made donations to churches, monasteries, guests, and prisons….. She persisted in her hospitality to such an extent that she had not even a span of earth for herself…." (Paladius Lausiac History)  It is important to notice that the sharing of resources that marked monastics was practiced in a situation of scarcity—where travelers had no other inn at which to rest, where most people lived at the subsistence level, working for day-to-day survival. Christian service was both a fulfillment of the model of Jesus and a practical necessity made holy by its motivation.

            When Christians in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire joined those raising serious questions about the direction that the medieval church had taken in Europe, they acted out an ethic of service. Most radical was the experience of those who, when they were expelled from Moravia in 1528,  "spread a cloak on the ground on which they pooled their meager resources as a matter of survival"(Becoming Anabaptist, 67).  Confirming the theological underpinning of this economic choice, Hutterite leader Peter Walpot wrote in 1577:  "Community is also taught in the Lord's Prayer. Christ taught us not to ask for our own bread. Not ‘give me my bread,' but ‘give us our bread,'that is, the communal bread. It is a false supplicator who prays, give us our bread, but then treats the bread received as his own!"(Liechty, 146). In the eighteenth century, Mennonites from Switzerland, still fleeing persecution, came to the Netherlands, and Dutch Mennonites, who were much wealthier, aided them in gaining passage to America or in resettling in the Netherlands. "Relief and service efforts were undertaken for refugees, immigrants, and poor members by early Brethren Congregations in Germany, and in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Minutes of (Brethren) Annual Meetings between 1788 and 1875 give instruction for the care of poor Brethren. In 1840 Annual Meeting ruled that the church, not local government, should take care of indigent members." (Brethren Encyclopedia, 1096).  The churches within the Brethren movement became involved in relief to Armenian refugees in 1918 and 1919. Several smaller Mennonite relief committees banded together in 1920 in order to better aid Mennonites suffering the effects of revolution and famine in Russia. This effort evolved into Mennonite Central Committee, an organization that today offers relief and development assistance, as well as service for justice and peace, in 70 countries in 2007. In 1974, M. R. Zigler brought together a group of people who wanted to strengthen the peace witness of the Church of the Brethren, and today the resulting movement, "On Earth Peace," which still is centered at the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor, Maryland, engages in a variety of service and peace activities.

            During major periods of the twentieth century, Mennonite and Brethren service was shaped by the impact of the military draft. While this was not the only form within which service activities were carried out, the force of governments requiring young men to hand over their bodies, a reality known as "military service," or "service to the country," provided a framework within which what we called "alternative service" was carried out. It was in large part this push for conscription that also pushed the service understandings of Mennonites and Brethren beyond mutual aid within our communities into service for the wider world. CPS men not only served in camps, but, as many of you know, in mental hospitals, as smoke jumpers, and, as my father did, as dairy testers. In this context, it is interesting to notice how important it apparently was to many women church members to offer their service, while not required by the government, as a way of joining the witness for peace.

            Women such as these played an important role in shaping my interests and choices, not the least of whom was my mother, Velma Climenhaga Heisey, a nurse who traveled to the post-war Philippines as part of an MCC relief unit set up to serve those who had suffered during that long conflict in Asia. Another was Edith Merkey, a Church of the Brethren teacher whom I knew when I was a school child in New Mexico. On the staff of the Lybrook Church of the Brethren mission, Edith stood out as a lively and engaged woman. I remember her helping to direct the interscholastic athletic field day that brought together Navajo students (as well as a few of us Anglos) from the Church of the Brethren, Brethren in Christ, and two other mission schools for friendly competition. I am sure that there is much more story here to tell, although I have not been able to do so. Two tantalizing references to Edith can easily be found. The first is that she participated in a 50-year PAX reunion in 2001, among a number of Brethren workers who had joined that post-World War II program for reconstruction in Europe, so her service orientation went back far beyond her teaching days at Lybrook. The other is a note from a genealogical researcher on the internet who suggests that more information about a Church of the Brethren congregation in Oklahoma could be gotten from Edith and her sister, part of a "mainstay"  family in that congregation (http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/BRETHREN/1998-07/0901198480). Am I sure that this internet Edith is the same Edith I knew? No, but the hints of connection are strong enough that I want to at least point them out—a woman committed to a life of service, based in a strong church community. Someone should look further into this story. 

            Diaries and letters of Elsie C. Bechtel, a Brethren in Christ woman from Ohio, provide much more information about a similar woman in service. Like Edith, Elsie, who traveled to France just at the end of World War II, was a school teacher. Her assignment was to help close down a children's colony being operated by MCC in the small village of Lavercantière. It's a long story. Quakers and Mennonites had become involved in helping refugees from the Spanish Civil War fleeing into Southern France in the late 1930s. Many of these refugees were children, and the service program that was begun focused on trying to keep the children clothed and fed in a situation of extreme suffering. As the war heightened, and as two MCC workers who were U.S. citizens were interned by the German occupation in France, MCC administrators, and several Spanish refugees who played a key staff role in the effort, began looking for ways to protect the children. Several sites were located in remote rural areas away from the Mediterranean coast, and the children were moved to "colonies" there.

            The colony in Lavercantière, located in a run-down 12^th-century "chateau," was opened in 1943.  Throughout the next five years, up to eighty children at a time lived there, cared for by Spanish and French workers paid by MCC. One of them, Sarah Serrano, now in her 70s, was a nine-year-old Spanish refugee child in 1943. Sarah remembers how terrible it was to be a refugee—always hungry, always afraid. Her father had been killed in Spain in 1936. While she and her older sister Olga lived in a refugee camp on the Mediterranean coast, her mother went to work as a maid for a French family in a nearby town.  Sarah remembers the times her mother was permitted to leave work to come and visit her two daughters. But soon bombing came too close to the camp, and the MCC workers decided to move the children inland. "We arrived in Lavercantière," she said, "with numbers written on a piece of cardboard around our necks. The train ride wasn't reassuring; we had lots of bad memories." Things felt better several months later when the German occupying forces allowed Sara and Olga's mother to join them as a cook in the colony. "She arrived," Sarah remembers, "with only a small suitcase of personal effects." Life in the colony was a much happier period for Sarah. "Our life was filled with games and activities, as well as with school. We had plenty to eat because of supplies provided by Secours Mennonite (Mennonite Aid, the name MCC used in France). Sarah and others who were children at the time especially remember the oatmeal flakes, the candy, and the packages of clothing. But the fact is that MCC support covered the expenses of the children at the colony during the entire time. During the war years, the colony housed not only Spanish refugee children but also French orphans, and a small number of Jewish children who were hidden there.

                                                               Photo: Elsie Bechtel (print dress) with children and neighbors  at the door of the chateau that housed the children's colony.

 

 

 

 

 

When MCC worker Elsie Bechtel arrived in France in the fall of 1945, the war just over, she learned that she was going to Lavercantière to help close down that children's colony. As soon as she arrived, however, she wrote: "The seventy-nine children rushed out to greet (the Spanish administrator of the relief program), kissing him on both cheeks and going into a very frenzy at his return. The house, while needing repairs and equipment, was clean, gloriously clean, and all the children were polite and dressed neatly. I fell in love with the place right away and prayed for some way to keep it from closing by December." Among the children were some who were orphans, some whose parents had not yet been able to locate them, and some, like Sarah, whose mother had no means of support other than her MCC-supported work as cook. Elsie spent the next three years struggling to learn French and debating with MCC administrators about how to best meet their service goals amid the extreme situation of limited transportation, food rationing, and ongoing large numbers of displaced persons. She also came to love the place and the people, despite the frequent chaos within the colony, critique from the local priest, and difficult communication with her supervisors.

Indeed, Elsie's experience represents some of the best of the Brethren and Mennonite service heritage, based as it was in a desire, founded in her faith, to take seriously, to learn from, and to love those among whom she served. Although her diary often comments on her loneliness and confusion, she also remarks with satisfaction, after helping another staff member to saw wood, "What a peasant I've become!" This service commitment, although she seldom articulated extensively, shone through her many observations about daily life in this unusual situation. Shortly after her arrival in France and before she arrived in Lavercantière, she lost her suitcase amidst a pile of bags being transported to the train station by army truck.  "I searched everywhere for it, and felt quite bad. But considering that I came to France ready to give my life, complaining about a suitcase seemed inconsistent." Later, describing a worship service among other MCC relief workers, she notes: "It was a very serious service and made me realize again how fortunate that I am to be in special work." One day when an MCC vehicle arrived at the colony with fresh supplies, Elsie wrote, "Everyone helped unload things. Had special dessert for supper. Was proud of being a Mennonite for the first time in my life. That's true religion."

Sarah Serrano Abadie continues to this day to speak with fondness of Elsie, and while she would not put it that way, of the faith community within which Elsie's work was placed. "We were all like a family at the chateau," she recalls. "Our life was filled with games, activities, and songs. Mees Elsie was at the center of it all; she animated us!" Sarah also recalls that it was Elsie who, when the colony did close in 1948, arranged for Sarah and her mother to stay in the village until Sarah could finish her schooling. And she points with affection to the tiny French New Testament that was a gift to her from "Mees Elsie" and remarks that she also still has her Mennonite quilt at home. 

            Elsie Bechtel, like many other Mennonite and Brethren men and women who participated in formal service programs, has continued in service throughout the rest of her life. In addition to a later MCC assignment in Germany and Greece, she raised a homeless child when she returned to her home in Canton, Ohio, was active as a youth advisor in her congregation, wrote to a prisoner, served as a docent at the Canton Museum of Art, and volunteered as a driver for Meals on Wheels.  It's not surprising that those of us who have had the privilege to interact with women and men whose lives were shaped by alternative service continue to seek for our own avenues of reaching out in compassion in the name of Christ. Yet I believe that we have a great challenge to live out and offer models and stories that will make sense of our service commitment in the twenty-first century. While we shouldn't decide to act in a particular way in order to make an impression, we may reflect about our heritage of service and how it can be continued among younger sisters and brothers.

            In that reflection, I have been privileged to see the deep and confident way that service has always been central to faith among Mennonite and Brethren churches in other parts of the world. Indeed, service is usually just part of life; using the specific term and suggesting that it is one aspect of the life of faith is essentially foreign to many brothers and sisters in other places. I remember Mari Malgwi, a Church of the Brethren pastor and teacher in the far north of Nigeria, whom I met because of his service on behalf of MCC in Nigeria. When MCC was seeking to be registered as a non-governmental organization there, Mari made many long road trips from his home to the city where MCC's offices were located, to join in the discussion and planning. Later, when through their naiveté several MCC workers in his city got in trouble with the authorities, he took a number of important risks to support and defend them, even in the midst of an environment where a strongly Muslim culture prevailed.

            In Indonesia, Paulus Widjaja, a university professor and peace secretary of Mennonite World Conference, has spent years working to promote peaceful relationships between Christians and Muslims. The Center for the Study and Promotion of Peace at Duta Wacana Christian University, where Paulus is on the faculty, has developed programs to help people who are on different sides of a conflict see things from another perspective. For example, theology students at Duta Wacana regularly have the opportunity to live in the Islamic boarding school for some time, and the santris from the Islamic boarding school, in exchange, also live in the dormitory of the faculty of theology (A Culture of Peace, 84). Paulus' active engagement helped make it possible for Mennonites to be involved in relief in Sumatra after the 2004 tsunami, even in areas that had been under the control of Muslim militants. 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Gloria Duarte, First Lady of Paraguay, addresses the MWC executive committee in August 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps one of today's most famous Mennonites is Gloria Duarte, the first lady of Paraguay. A beautiful and personable woman, Gloria loves to talk about her experience of finding Christ after years of searching. When she began to attend a Mennonite Brethren (here I am speaking of the denomination by that name) congregation 10 years ago, with the encouragement of her husband, a Catholic and at that time the Paraguayan Minister of Education, she found the presence of God and the support and love of a spiritual community that were what she was looking for. When Nicanor Duarte Frutos was elected president in 2003, with Gloria's urging, he invited several Paraguayan Mennonites to join his cabinet as part of his effort to wipe out corruption. But for Gloria, all the responsibilities of being first lady did not deter her from pursuing her own calling to service. When I had the privilege of meeting her in August 2007, she had just come from a tour of several of the homes set up through foundation in Paraguay to minister to street children. She explained to me that Paraguay has many street children of all ages, most of whom leave home because of domestic abuse. The goal of the homes is to equip the children to return to their families, as well as to meet the families and assist them in developing parenting skills. One of the homes is for children who are too old, or whose situation is too difficult, for them to ever return to their families. I asked Gloria what would happen when she is no longer first lady (her husband is required by the constitution to leave office in 2008). "It will be more difficult to raise money, but I'm determined to press forward with this service," she replied. 

            Within the past number of years, member churches of Mennonite World Conference have begun to raise new questions about service. What is the relationship between service offered wherever there is need, and the service of the deaconate, that is, the care that sisters and brothers offer each other within the faith community? Older institutional relationships, particularly between mission agencies of Mennonite and Brethren denominations the North America, offered some measure of kinship relationships to sister churches in the global south. However, in recent years those old relationships have dissipated, partly because of a desire to focus on exciting, new programs, and partly because of economic pressures on the North American agencies. Yet at the same time, the economic gaps between wealthy and poor members of the global faith community have grown every wider. Some sisters and brothers remind us, for example, that Mennonite Central Committee was founded to provide for the needs of fellow Mennonites in Russia, but now carries out the largest portion of its service in communities other than those of sister Mennonite and related churches. The shape of service in the global community of faith needs new reflection.

            In 2006, a consultation on service was held in Pasadena, California, sponsored by Mennonite World Conference and MCC, to look at such questions. While next steps are only beginning to be developed, one direction that is emerging is for MWC to develop a deacon commission as one of the parts of MWC's ongoing work. Choosing people from member churches in many parts of the world to serve as Global Anabaptist Deacons is one part of this commission's task. These deacons will be called to be alert to needs within the churches in many places, and to help MWC, interested churches and agencies, find concrete responses. In August, as one example of what this might look like, a koinonia delegation of eight persons went to visit with the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, a member church within MWC. The BIC Church in Zimbabwe had hosted the last global MWC assembly in 2003, in what then seemed like a context of serious economic uncertainty. Since then, however, the economic and political crisis has greatly worsened, with overwhelming shortages of food, water and fuel, power outages, 5000 percent inflation, and record unemployment. Danisa Ndlovu, bishop of the BIC Church and MWC President-elect, invited the group to come and participate in that church's general conference.

            The entire delegation felt the impact of food and water shortages and blackouts during the conference. Organizers expected fewer than 2000 people, but attendance climbed to 3,600, the second highest ever.  They weren't prepared to feed so many. Then the electricity went out. As a result many people did not have a meal the first night or the next morning. But on the second day, people hauled in wood and 25 huge outdoor cooking pots, and the food situation was resolved.  During the conference, Bishop Ndlovu preached, urging the people to keep the Word of God, stand firm in the faith, guard what is precious and not lose spirit. Delegation members were overwhelmed by the suffering but also by the resilience and hospitality of their Zimbabwean hosts. They were able to offer a contribution of $15,000 for the church to use in its efforts of water development in rural areas.

            The koinonia delegation visit to Zimbabwe is only one image of what the future of service may be among Brethren and Mennonite people. Big challenges lie before us all. The needs for compassion and commitment to the community good will only increase, whether in areas of food production and distribution, health care, or education for nonviolence. We will not be able to offer the service that is needed unless we are willing again to find our particularity as people who see all of life as shaped by Jesus' peaceful life, ministry and death. We will need for our entire lives to be reshaped, in the face of forces that do not honor or sustain service to those in need, and in contrast to those who suggest that we can "get our service obligation out of the way." We will need to search the many components of our daily lives, asking ourselves, "What choices and the actions today will make our lives fruitful for others? What stories are we building that, told and retold by our children, will help them and their children also choose lives of nonconformity, simplicity, and service?"

The preceding lecture appears here as presented and was not edited for publication.