Brethren ethnicity, Brethren confession, and naming abused privilege

by Parker Thompson

So I got a message that there was an interesting conversation going on in the interwebs among some intellectually engaged individuals about the Church of the Brethren, culture, and confession. After reading several lengthy, engaging posts and many interesting comments, I have felt called to articulate these thoughts.

In my engagement with the conversation, I would like to introduce myself as an infiltrating outsider to the Church of the Brethren. This status, after four years of heavy, delightful engagement with the denomination at the local congregation level, at Bethany Theological Seminary, and at the national level, generally seems to be slipping away as I have become more and more acculturated and welcomed into the “community.” But if my experience and conversations are any indicator of future experience, I will probably always have a sense of being an outsider.

The first piece of the conversation, and most central, that I would like to engage is the topic of cultural Brethrenism that both Josh and Carl have been so eloquently parsing. While the dialectic between culture and theology is a favorite interest of mine, I think more specifically that the issue creeping below this entire conversation is that of Brethren ethnicity. It is the key challenge and gift of the denomination. Are you born Brethren? If you are, you are of a higher class in this crew. Deny that statement all you like in the sense of what should be, or what confessed ideal is desired, but I have experienced and witnessed this deeply embedded privilege manifest in more than one situation. It is the experienced reality in comparison to the stated/desired ideal.

It would be a sloppy reductionist approach to bifurcate the ethnic Brethrenism from the confessional Brethrenism. So instead, I embrace the muddling. The blessing of ethnic Brethrenism is that is does provide, what speculatively appears to be a strong acculturation draw for many born into ethnic Brethrenism to comprehend and take on the discipleship and confessions (what ever variation that might be).

The curse of this reality is, I think, what Josh is prodding in his questioning of the difference between “only culturally Brethren” and a “practicing Brethren” (my synthetic phrases, for the moment). A danger of the privilege of cradle Brethren is to lift the Brethren ethnic heritage and confuse it or conflate it with the religious faith confession/seekings initiated by the eight and carried on, explored, practiced, and expanded by three centuries of believers. I think the Pietist influences that launched this adventure are an important heritage to bring into conversation with conflating ethnicity with confession. The whole Pietist movement was about doing examined theology and choosing to believe in that examined theology, and then continuing to work through that ever-evolving faith with mind, body and soul (and in community depending on the root community). This challenging task is done in varying degrees by different seekers and believers, but it is the challenge set forth by our Pietistic forbearers and is a common thread in the antipedobaptism that we share with our Anabaptist brethren.

It all arises out of a double bind that all faith traditions arrive at (at least ones that believe in sex, procreational sex at least). One of the easiest ways, at times, to maintain or even grow your group’s numbers is to make a bunch of babies. The baby boom becomes an evangelical captive market. At the very least the status quo of staying in the tradition of origin has, depending on cultural context, a relatively high success rate at adding to numbers. On the flip side, this approach can be too easy for Christian formation, leaving large groups of a population with a limited set of embedded theology because it looks right and does not require a lot of work. But this lazy evangelism can, not always, but can make for lazy Christians, and in these circles lazy Brethren. Unfortunately, these lazy Brethren wander around with a sense of entitlement that they have been in since birth and therefore have a “special” sense of ownership.

I think that is all I have at the moment. It seems the style around here to leave something unsaid for later, since this is more of a conversation than a more formal publication. I hope that this is received as a well-spirited offering to conversation. I have written these care and tenderness in my heart for this big messy community of the Church of the Brethren, but know that quick writings can have sharp edges. Some of this playfulness is definitely springing from my minds summer stir-craziness that is beginning (despite being very busy in the midst of a summer ministry placement). May these words find a touch of God’s grace as others wrestle with them.

Anabaptist Fierce

...is what I'm trying to learn how to be at seminary right now.

In preparing for this friday's Voices of a People's History of Christianity joint worship service at Bethany and ESR (Earlham School of Religion), our professor Dawn Ottoni Wilhem gave some of us in her worship course feedback on our readings. We were preparing a service in which we would perform (in the best sense of the word) readings from Christoph Blumhardt, Meister Eckhart, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mary Ann Tolbert, who were/are all notoriously controversial prophets of their times.

The worship service, planned by my husband Parker, was inspired by our admiration for the late Howard Zinn's project, Voices of a People's History of the United States, in which Zinn gathers together some of the great actors of our time to enact and embody the words of many great prophets from US History.

Dawn was exhorting one of us to drop the normally cheery disposition it is culturally acceptable to operate in and switch to a more serious and provocative tone.

"Don't be Anabaptist nice," she said. "Be Anabaptist fierce."

That's it! I thought. What a perfect term for what I've been trying to embody this semester! Maybe Dawn didn't invent the term and maybe lots of cradle Brethren and Mennonites will tell me they've heard it from birth--which seems to happen to me pretty often as a convert--but I'm still impressed.

It seems to me that while the shift from Anabaptist nice to Anabaptist fierce may appear small, it takes a lot of work and makes a lot of difference.

For me, this semester it has meant working hard to be more and more honest about who I am and what I am thinking and feeling, which might sort of sound innocuous--but try doing it! I will tell you it is no easy task to unlearn 25 years worth of habits of closeting my thoughts and feelings and of only letting squeeze out a thin, filtered version of myself, in favor of becoming a more honest and open me.

More than once this semester telling the truth about my feelings or thoughts especially when it comes to sexuality, sexism and our bodies, has alarmed and offended my classmates, some of whom have even approached me in private to try to shame me into shutting up.

But thanks to the support of great friends and mentors in this community and the great witness of our Anabaptist-Pietist heritage, I am not shutting up. I am trying to pick up where my adopted ancestors and mentors left off and trying to learn the fierceness required to stand strong on who I am and what I know.

How can we live and experience fully God's presence in this world if we don't develop the fierceness it takes to be authentic? And I don't mean being offensive for the sake of being offensive, but genuinely authentic.

I've been quoting Bob Hunter a lot lately, and I hope he doesn't mind if I do it again, but he planted a very helpful and related seed in me at Bethany's Presidential Forum. In our small (and I do mean small) group discussion on racism at the forum, we were discussing why many Evangelical Christian associations would have lots more people of color than our very pale, liberal-leaning forum did. Bob cited a weak (or rather antithetical) version of non-violent theory he often hears from seminarians as symptomatic of the problem. Concerning Jesus' Sermon on the Mount commandment to "love your enemies" these seminarians want to claim that we have no enemies, which as Bob cited is not really nonviolent theory at all.

Only someone at the top of the food chain, with all kinds of privilege, could claim that we have no enemies. People of color (and other oppressed peoples), who in this country are faced with messages every day that often demarcate them as the enemy to "American" culture, know the point of that old labor song "which side are you on?"

And a kind of "peace church people" who want to pretend those demarcations are not there and that no matter what someone believes they are not working in opposition to us, will always seem frighteningly and dangerously out of touch with reality.

To be clear, to stand up for and on your convictions does not mean you have to be unchanging, uncaring and infallibly correct. It means you have to have the fierceness to say what you mean and mean what you say.

It doesn't mean we can't be in community if we disagree--in fact it means we've got to learn to love each other across enemy lines!

But community is not real if we're all pretending to be Anabaptist nice when we really disagree with each other vehemently. That's not community. That's a lie. Now there's a careful balance to loving each other while speaking truth, but we'll never get good at it if we don't first try on some Anabaptist fierce.

I know it was those peace church people who tried this fierceness on that drew me to fall in love with Stone Church and the Church of the Brethren to begin with.

So, when I stood up to perform a reading from Mary Ann Tolbert in Friday's chapel service, in which I would talk about sex, sexuality, and then call, with Mary, for the church, "all of us straight and gay, to come out of the closet about our bodies," I was a little nervous because I knew that there were quite a few in the community (and probably some in that room) whose bodies scare them and who just plainly disagree.

But, I wasn't nearly as nervous as I would have been at the beginning of the semester, when I was still trying to hide behind a mask of nicety. I could take solace in the knowledge that for us to be truly the community of believers God calls us to be, we need to be honest about where we are and what we believe.

And that disagreement is not something to sweep under the rug, but rather a great opportunity for growth, if we can find the courage to be Anabaptist fierce.

-Katie Shaw Thompson