A Cloud of Witnesses: Celebrating Indonesian Mennonites

By John D. Roth

Goshen, IN  46526
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513809403

John D. Roth

John D. Roth is Professor of History at Goshen College, where he also serves as editor of The Mennonite Quarterly Review and director of the Mennonite Historical Library. He is the author of numerous books and articles on subjects related to the Radical Reformation and contemporary Anabaptist and Mennonite theology, including Teaching that Transforms: Why Anabaptist-Mennonite Education Matters (2011). A Review of John K. Roth's Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching About the Genocide by Bill Younglove, Holocaust Specialist    Ethicist John Roth has done it--again. His latest volume--to be added to the fifty-plus volumes written by him over a half century--represents a kind of "bringing it all together," the "it" residing in the title and subtitle--The Holocaust as genocide, extraordinaire. In almost classical fashion, Roth establishes in a Prologue exactly what the essence of an ethical pursuit should be--and in an Epilogue some 250+ pages later, outlines, via thirteen bulleted points, key Holocaust insights gleaned. Sandwiched in between is a compendium from decades of testimonies by surviving witnesses, conversations, conferences, scholarly research, and writings by, literally, hundreds of well-known--and perhaps not so well-known figures. One format aspect, which this reader really appreciated is that genuine footnotes (at the foot of most pages!) make for easy connections. Likewise, bibliographic and post-bibliographic electronic notes allow for easy, extended, referencing. En route, Roth's customary straightforward prose, strengthened by apt analogies or even figures of speech, help the reader understand the very winding--and often seemingly duplicitous--path that ethical explorations take. As the Table of Contents notes, the eleven chapters are populated with names familiar to every scholar of Holocaust history and literature. At the same time, Roth includes friends and teachers whom he met during his years of academic pursuit, noting their contributions, also, to the whole spectrum of Holocaust Studies. Particularly important to this writer is Roth's inclusion of teachers--thus the "learning" in the subtitle. No one who has attempted to impart the importance of the events (principally) between 1933-1945 in Europe to young people has ever forgotten the challenges that students have given, rightfully so, to anyone standing in the front of the classrooms. Herein is the essence of John Roth's pursuit in Sources of Holocaust Insight. If you are quite new to the field, but are a determined teacher, you will find that Roth's personal odyssey will provide you with a wealth of resources to help you respond to the dilemmas posed in Wiesel's half dozen questions. For the more seasoned teacher, Roth will provide context for that which you may already have broached, if not explored thoroughly. For those steeped in Holocaust scholarship, Roth's references to Albert Camus, and Sartre parenthetically, may cause said reader to (re)visit, existentially, what Kafka called the language of the absurd. Dramatist Samuel Beckett, himself active in the French Resistance during World War II, questioned the absurdity of that world in his play, Waiting for Godot. When pronounced correctly, God-ot suggests that humanity's wait will long test its faith in its capacity for compassion, as well as survival. Roth is a consummate faith tester.

Book preview

1

The Emergence of a Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Church

On August 10, 1952, Tan King Ien, leader of the Chinese Mennonite churches in Java, Indonesia, greeted an audience of twelve hundred people who had gathered for worship just outside Basel, Switzerland, as part of the fifth global assembly of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC). The fact that I can stand before you this morning, he said through a translator,

is evidence that this conference is made up of people from different races, with different languages and customs. Nevertheless, it feels to me as if we are one family. It is the strong and loving hand of the Lord that has brought us here and binds us together. Only through that love can we feel as one—one in baptism, one in faith, and one in the Savior.¹

Tan King Ien’s words to the assembly—supplemented the following day by a greeting from Soehadiweko Djojodihardjo, chair of the Javanese Mennonite synod—marked the first occasion in which anyone from Asia had participated in a gathering of the Mennonite World Conference. Indeed, according to historian Alfred Neufeld, It was probably the first time that representatives of the Mennonite churches in the global North were asked to listen to the pilgrimage of a new member in a public gathering speaking in a completely foreign language.²

Although MWC regarded itself as a global body, in reality the 214 delegates who attended the gathering in 1952 represented only six countries—all from Europe and North America.³ Shortly after the Indonesian leaders spoke, Harold S. Bender, MWC chair, summarized the composition of the global Anabaptist-Mennonite fellowship.⁴ According to his estimates, the Anabaptist-Mennonite family comprised 300,000 baptized members, with 200,000 living in North America and another 70,000 in western Europe and the Soviet Union. This left approximately 30,000 baptized members—or 10 percent—in the mission fields of the East Indies, India, China, Tanzania, Congo, Argentina, and Puerto Rico.⁵

Twenty-five years later, when the tenth global assembly of MWC convened in Wichita, Kansas, the composition of the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church had changed dramatically. In 1978, participants in the gathering were welcomed by MWC’s president, Million Belete, a dynamic leader of the Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia.⁶ Over the next five days, worship services featured sermons or extended testimonies from Venancio Gonzales (Paraguay), Mayambi Diakande (Zaire), Albert Widjaja (Indonesia), Festo Kivengere (Uganda), and Takashi Yamada (Japan). Respondents to various presentations included Charles Christano (Indonesia), Kedi Delchume (Ethiopia), Felonito Sacapaño (Philippines), Alvaro Fernandez (Uruguay), Michio Ohno (Japan), Dick Ekerete (Nigeria), Luis Correa (Colombia), and Kilabi Bululu (Zaire [Democratic Republic of Congo]). The assembly featured choirs from Taiwan, India, and Kenya, and concluded with the election of Charles Christano (Indonesia) as MWC’s president, and the appointment of vice presidents from Africa, Asia, and Central and South America to serve alongside those from Europe and North America.

Clearly, something significant had shifted in the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church between 1952 and 1978. By 1978, the Anabaptist family had doubled in size to include 610,000 baptized members—with 315,000 in North America and 95,000 in Europe and the Soviet Union. More telling was the fact that churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America now accounted for an estimated 200,000 members, or one-third of the total.

In the years since then, the shift in the church’s center of gravity from North to South—a transformation that scholars such as David Barrett, Philip Jenkins, and Lamin Sanneh have insightfully documented for the larger Christian church as well—has continued at a remarkable pace.⁷ In 2018, Mennonite World Conference identified slightly more than 2.1 million baptized Anabaptist-Mennonites in the world, of whom approximately 1.5 million were members of MWC churches.⁸ Among MWC member groups, only 19 percent lived in Europe or North America, with 49 percent from Africa, 25 percent from Asia, and 7 percent from Latin America. Put differently, today 81 percent of MWC members reside in what is often called the global South. According to the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism, 93 percent of all baptisms in the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church since 2001 have occurred outside Europe or North America.⁹ Today, the largest national church body among MWC members is the Meserete Kristos Church of Ethiopia, with nearly 400,000 baptized members, followed by churches in India and the Democratic Republic of Congo. To frame it in still another way, in 2018 the combined membership of Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada, along with the Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ churches in North America—groups that have long considered themselves to be crucial carriers of Anabaptist identity—accounts for a mere 8 percent of the total number of Anabaptist-Mennonites in the world today.

A globalized tradition

The driving forces behind this profound transformation are complex. Each group, of course, has its own story and context. But three distinct themes offer a small window into the dynamics behind the globalization of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition in the past seventy years.

1. Migration

One source of globalization has been the diaspora of German-speaking Mennonites, many of them fleeing their homelands as refugees of government oppression or the ravages of war. Thus, for example, in the early 1920s when provincial governments in Canada began to insist that Russian Mennonite immigrants teach their schoolchildren in English, several thousand Old Colony, or Reinländer, Mennonites immigrated to Mexico. They were followed several years later by another immigration of Sommerfelder, Bergthaler, and Chortizer Mennonites from Canada to the Green Hell of the Paraguayan Chaco. Thousands more fled the Bolshevik Revolution in South Russia in the late 1920s, the iron-fisted policies of Stalin in the 1930s, and the destruction of World War II in the 1940s, arriving as refugees to Paraguay and Brazil, or later to Belize, Uruguay, and Bolivia.

Today some 250,000 of these Mennonites are scattered across Mexico, Central America, and South America. The most conservative among them have established thriving colonies in isolated settings where they continue to speak a Low German dialect and maintain the religious traditions and folkways of their ancestors. The more progressive of these immigrants have settled in major cities, entered the professions, become fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and frequently exert an economic—and sometimes political—influence far out of proportion to their numbers.

2. Missions

A second impulse behind the globalization of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has been the missionary movement. Here Mennonites have followed the general trajectory of the larger history of Protestant missions, albeit with a typical time lag. The first organized Mennonite missions emerged in the Netherlands in the 1850s, soon followed by initiatives among Mennonites in South Russia. But the beginnings were very slow. Mennonites in North America had established only seven missions before 1900. Between 1900 and 1944 another eighteen mission outreaches emerged. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that a new generation—shaped by their experiences in Civilian Public Service or European relief work—became much more interested in the larger world. Mennonites in the United States and Canada established more than fifty new missions in the 1950s alone and another seventy-five since then—mostly in Africa, South America, and Asia.¹⁰

Parallel to these missions, thousands of Mennonite young people from North America served as relief and service volunteers with Mennonite Central Committee, the Teachers Abroad Program, PAX, or a dozen other international programs.¹¹ These volunteers were people with practical skills, often more inclined to offer a cup of cold water in Christ’s name than to hold evangelistic services; but they made a profound impact on the regions where they served. Together, these international mission, service, and relief initiatives not only brought the good news of the gospel to many previously unreached regions of the world, but also embodied a distinctive expression of the Christian faith that linked conversion to a strong sense of community, a desire to follow Jesus in daily life, and a commitment to reconciliation and peacemaking, even at great personal cost. And they brought their experiences home with them.

As a result, the reality of the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church has become much more visible to local congregations in North America. Today, virtually every Mennonite congregation in the United States and Canada has some connection to the global church through a former missionary or MCC service worker, a short-term service project, a sister-church relationship, or perhaps more indirectly through the More-with-Less Cookbook or artisan crafts from local Ten Thousand Villages stores that have become an important decorating motif in their congregants’ homes.

3. Contextualization

The real engine behind the dramatic growth in the Anabaptist-Mennonite worldwide fellowship, however, has come about through the creative efforts of leaders and laypeople in countries around the world, as recipients of the gospel retranslated the good news into their local context and made it genuinely their own.

Here, the story of the Mennonite church in Ethiopia is especially instructive. Mennonite missionaries first arrived in Ethiopia in 1945, long after other Protestant missions had already been established there. In typical fashion, they initially focused on education and healthcare, establishing elementary schools, an institute for the deaf, and several clinics and hospitals. An important shift in the character of the church began to unfold in the late 1950s, when a charismatic revival movement led to the foundation of the Meserete Kristos (Christ Is the Foundation) Church, or MKC.¹²

Political events led to another crucial transformation. When Marxist revolutionaries came to power in Ethiopia in 1974, they quickly imposed restrictions on all forms of evangelical Christianity—harassing or arresting church leaders, sometimes beating them or holding them in custody for long periods of time. Still, MKC members continued to meet. In 1982 the government officially closed the church and, for the next four years, held six of its key leaders in prison. Remarkably, however, the MKC did not die. With their leaders imprisoned and their churches shuttered, the MKC developed a new model of church life, which was strikingly Anabaptist in nature. Small cell groups, many of them led by women, met secretly in homes for prayer and Bible study. These groups quickly reorganized whenever they grew to ten or twelve participants. Leaders developed a Bible study curriculum, printed on secret presses, and required new converts to undergo an extended period of instruction and Bible study before their baptism. Above all, the underground church was sustained by prayer—regular sessions of intense intercession to God that often lasted for hours, and sometimes the entire night. Even though their gatherings were illegal, those who participated in the movement later recollected that no one was afraid.¹³

The consequences were astounding. Before the period of persecution, the MKC numbered around 5,000 members. In 1991, when persecution came to an end, it had grown to a fellowship of well over 50,000 baptized members. And the growth has continued at an exponential rate ever since. Today, as noted earlier, there are nearly 400,000 baptized believers in the Meserete Kristos Church, making it the largest national Mennonite body in the world.

The central themes of the Ethiopian story have been repeated in Anabaptist-Mennonite groups in many other countries as well. As local believers have emerged in positions of leadership—and as the church has faced persecution—it has been transformed: steady growth in the churches in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the face of prolonged civil war; renewal in Zimbabwe despite a dictatorial regime and unimaginable economic hardships; and, as we shall see, a church transformed in Indonesia, often in the face of ethnic and religious persecution.

From the perspective of a five-hundred-year history, the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition is clearly in the midst of a profound renewal and transformation.

Whose story?

In general, Anabaptist-Mennonites in Europe and North America—those who have traditionally understood themselves to be the standard-bearers of the tradition—have been slow to recognize this tectonic shift in the church’s center of gravity and the flourishing of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition in seemingly strange and unfamiliar settings. Faith, of course, always takes root in a cultural context. Although the God we worship is beyond time and space, our faith finds expression in beliefs, doctrines, rituals, and forms of worship that reflect particular cultures. In principle, this is a good thing. After all, the biblical doctrine of the incarnation—the Word made flesh—affirms that Christ’s presence in the world will always be made visible and be experienced in tangible, embodied ways.

Throughout the history of God’s people, however, the enduring temptation is to regard those particular cultural expressions of faith as timeless or essential. This has been especially true for groups in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition who claim a cultural heritage extending back for several generations, in which they imagine their Christian identity to be closely linked to the heroic origins of the Anabaptist movement in the sixteenth century. In this telling of the story, the Anabaptist movement endured, despite severe persecution, and continued in an uninterrupted succession as the direct descendants of the Anabaptists—now known mostly as Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites—migrated westward to North America and eastward to Poland and to South Russia.

This sense of a shared history, sealed by persecution, reinforced an identity among many North American Mennonites as a people set apart. The communities they formed tended to be deeply shaped by family networks, ethnic folkways, familiar worship practices, and a strong sense of historical and cultural continuity. Wherever they settled—in the steppelands of South Russia; the rich farmland of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Illinois; the wheatfields of Kansas; or the prairie frontier of Manitoba—Mennonites came to define themselves at least as much by their distinctive culture as by their religious convictions.

In doing so, they came perilously close to turning their particular culture into an idol—worshiping forms of their own creation rather than the living God who always exceeds human categories and definitions. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, contemporary Mennonites, particularly in North America, have sometimes made the preservation of familiar traditions and rituals an end in itself, rather than the means by which the living presence of God is expressed in the world. Some Mennonites in North America today, for example, find it nearly impossible to imagine Mennonite identity apart from their genealogical pedigree, historical experiences, distinctive foodways, or specific forms of worship. Indeed, some go so far as to claim that they are Mennonite, but not Christian.¹⁴ Such claims would sound absolutely absurd, of course, to sixteenth-century Anabaptists who forfeited their lives defending the conviction that following Christ was a conscious decision, not a cultural birthright.

Cultural forms of identity are further complicated by the fact that even