Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision: Exploring Ecclesial Identities in North American Mennonite Mission with Pentecostal-Type Churches in Southern Africa

By Joseph C. L. Sawatzky

What does Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing Christian expression worldwide, have to do with Anabaptism, whose Mennonite adherents have sometimes been called "the quiet in the land?" In this groundbreaking study, Joseph C. L. Sawatzky explores a mission history of North American Mennonites working with African Initiated and Pentecostal-type churches in southern Africa, illuminating points of divergence and convergence between Anabaptist and Pentecostal streams.
Placing testimonies of African and North American participants in this history within a broader biblical and theological framework, this study proposes bases for an emerging Anabaptist-Pentecostal vision, with implications for the church, its leadership, and its witness in the world. This lively, interdisciplinary study will interest students of mission, interculturality, and the Christian faith itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666739121

Joseph C. L. Sawatzky

Joseph C. L. Sawatzky is a training and resource specialist for Mission Education for Mennonite Mission Network, and a core adjunct professor at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana.

Book preview

Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision

Exploring Ecclesial Identities in North American Mennonite Mission with Pentecostal-Type Churches in Southern Africa

Joseph C. L. Sawatzky

American Society of Missiology Monograph Series 63

Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision

Exploring Ecclesial Identities in North American Mennonite Mission with Pentecostal-Type Churches in Southern Africa

American Society of Missiology Monograph Series 63

Copyright © 2023 Joseph C. L. Sawatzky. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3910-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-3911-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-3912-1

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Sawatzky, Joseph C. L., author.

Title: Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal vision : exploring ecclesial identities in North American Mennonite mission with Pentecostal-type churches in southern Africa / by Joseph C. L. Sawatzky.

Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2023. | American Society of Missiology Monograph Series 63. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-3910-7 (paperback). | isbn 978-1-6667-3911-4 (hardcover). | isbn 978-1-6667-3912-1 (ebook).

Subjects: LCSH: Mennonite Church—Missions. | Pentecostalism—Mennonites. | Mennonites—Africa, Sub-Saharan. | Pentecostalism—Africa, Sub-Saharan.

Classification: BR1360 S29 2023 (print). | BR1360 (ebook).

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Quotations marked RSV are taken from Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Quotations marked NETS are taken from A New English Translation of the Septuagint, ©2007 by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: Freedom and Humility

Chapter 2: Contextualization and Translation

Chapter 3: Following Jesus, Community, Peace

Chapter 4: To See the Need of the Next Person First

Chapter 5: Connecting to the Spirit of God

Chapter 6: Spirit, Worship, Leadership

Chapter 7: Ethics, Experience, and the Essence of Religion

Chapter 8: Biblical Foundations for an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision

Chapter 9: The Wholeness of God, Church, and Mission

Bibliography

American Society of Missiology Monograph Series

Chair of Series Editorial Committee, James R. Krabill

The ASM Monograph Series a forum for publishing quality dissertations and studies in the field of missiology. Collaborating with Pickwick Publications—a division of Wipf and Stock Publishers of Eugene, Oregon—the American Society of Missiology selects high quality dissertations and other monographic studies that offer research materials in mission studies for scholars, mission and church leaders, and the academic community at large. The ASM seeks scholarly work for publication in the Series that throws light on issues confronting Christian world mission in its cultural, social, historical, biblical, and theological dimensions.

Missiology is an academic field that brings together scholars whose professional training ranges from doctoral-level preparation in areas such as scripture, history and sociology of religions, anthropology, theology, international relations, interreligious interchange, mission history, inculturation, and church law. The American Society of Missiology, which sponsors this series, is an ecumenical body drawing members from Independent and Ecumenical Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and other traditions. Members of the ASM are united by their commitment to reflect on and do scholarly work relating to both mission history and the present-day mission of the church. The ASM Monograph Series aims to publish works of exceptional merit on specialized topics, with particular attention given to work by younger scholars, the dissemination and publication of which is difficult under the economic pressures of standard publishing models.

Persons seeking information about the ASM or the guidelines for having their dissertations considered for publication in the ASM Monograph Series should consult the Society’s website—www.asmweb.org.

Members of the ASM Monograph Committee who approved this book are:

Alison Fitchett Climenhaga, Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

Paul V. Kollman, Associate Professor of Theology and Executive Director Center for Social Concerns (CSC), University of Notre Dame

Previously Published in the ASM Monograph Series

W. Jay Moon, African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs Contextualizing Christianity in Ghana

E. Paul Balisky, Wolaitta Evangelists: A Study of Religious Innovation in Southern Ethiopia,

1937

–

1975

Auli Vähäkangas, Christian Couples Coping with Childlessness: Narratives from Machame, Kilimanjaro

For Anna

Preface

In the words of David Ngong, a Cameroonian scholar of religion, the tendency to make distinctions between African and Western imaginations is rooted in discourses that have colonialism as their background and entered Christian theological discourse through the work of pioneering African theologians.

¹

As someone who participated in the enterprise of western missions to Africa, and despite my particular Mennonite missionary tradition’s historical effort to transform its colonial praxis,

²

the conceptual frameworks I employ throughout the following study are not immune from the philosophical dualisms of which Ngong speaks. For example, my use of the spatial metaphors of vertical and horizontal to define the religious identities of African church leaders and North American Mennonite missionaries, respectively, falls short of accounting fully for African worldviews variously described as unified

³

and holistic,

⁴

i.e., in which the realm of the spirit—that which in bifurcations typical of Enlightenment thought belongs to a remote God up there—enfolds and infuses the realm of flesh—the world of humankind down here. More than half a century ago, J. V. Taylor described this primal vision of the world as all are one, all are here, all are now;

⁵

later, Kwame Bediako, while treating Taylor’s construction, likened the revelation of God in Christ in the idiom of the primal imagination to the rending of the veil, so that the nature of the whole universe as instinct with the divine presence may be made manifest.

⁶

In these words one hears echoes of Moses to Israel beyond the Jordan or, taking up those words in relation to Christ, Paul to the church in Rome, in which the word and life of God is neither up in heaven nor across the sea but very near.

⁷

Beyond its limitation in communicating the oft-acknowledged holism of African (and other non-western) worldviews, vertical as a thematic description often carries connotations of an individualistic spirituality, since modernity has defined human identity by the Cartesian dictum, "I think, therefore I am" [emphasis mine].

⁸

In this light, my application of horizontal to summarize the social-ethical language of the missionaries’ definitions of Mennonite identity may obscure the fact that their structural opposite—this study’s set of African ecclesial descriptions—emanates from a context in which human identity is defined corporately, as in the Nguni proverb, umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons. Therefore, to retreat to the western terminology, African religious identity, despite my vertical attribution, is no less horizontal. Finally, on this point, neither do I wish to imply that love of neighbor—what I refer to with regard to Anabaptist-Mennonite identity as a horizontal conception of Christianity—does not mediate the love of God, though I argue in this study that dominant expressions of Anabaptist-Mennonite identity have isolated ethics from experience, worship, and proclamation.

⁹

Moreover, in the vein of Anabaptist-Mennonite identity, I view my critique of Anabaptist Vision theologizing as building on the thesis of Stephen F. Dintaman, whose 1992 essay The Spiritual Poverty of the Anabaptist Vision and subsequent follow-up articles sounded the theme that neo-Anabaptism deepened and expanded the concept of discipleship, but gave only passing, non-passionate attention to the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit in the inner transformation of the person.

¹⁰

While Dintaman thought that the Anabaptist Vision had run its course,

¹¹

I contend that the popular reemergence of its themes in Palmer Becker’s What Is an Anabaptist Christian?,

¹²

with Mennonite institutional backing,

¹³

indicate that Anabaptist-Mennonite identity in the North American milieu yet awaits that for which Dintaman called, namely the recovery of Pentecostal community as a retrieval of the primal generative power mediated through the primary stories and symbols of the Christian narrative—the power that is in water, blood, and Spirit, not merely in ideals and moral values.

¹⁴

Here then, at virtually the same moment that Dintaman, a western theologian of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, called for a retrieval of the primal generative power of the biblical story, Bediako, an African theologian, proffered the primal imagination—that worldview perhaps most visibly represented among African Initiated and Pentecostal churches—as the opportunity for a new theological idiom for the Christian, not merely non-western, world.

¹⁵

So too, I have endeavored within these pages, while imagining western Christians of the Anabaptist-Mennonite mold as my primary interlocutors, to bring something of my knowledge of African Pentecostal-type Christianity—however limited the research and incomplete the insights—to bear upon the recovery of Pentecost, that moment when the Spirit and the Word converged to create a people of peace from every tribe and language and people and nation devoted to the praise of God’s glory.

¹⁶

In keeping with the spirit of the study that follows and the simple (hopefully not simplistic) biblicism historically characteristic of those traditions named Anabaptist and Pentecostal, I conclude this preface with a summation of the foregoing themes in the narrative imagery of scripture. For it is there, in the story of Jacob’s flight from the murderous rage of his brother, Esau, that the migrant, having left his father and mother,

¹⁷

came upon a certain place and there laid his head on a stone for the night.

¹⁸

Thereafter he dreamed of a ladder extending from earth to heaven on which the angels of God were ascending and descending and heard the Lord’s promise to his ancestor Abraham applied to him: and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring.

¹⁹

Thus, we might say that the ladder, no less those ascending and descending on it, constitutes—quite literally in this depiction—a vertical connection through which God speaks a blessing of horizontal effect, calling forth a communion across cultures, i.e., between the descendants of the wandering Aramean and all the families of the earth.

²⁰

Nevertheless, the peculiar revelation to Jacob is neither that God is above nor across but around, indeed that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go—even back to this land which is no more a certain but an awesome place: the house of God and the gate of heaven.

²¹

As in Bediako’s analogy of the primal imagination as the rending of the veil, a breaking through of the eternal and omnipresent divine, so Jacob awakens to the reality that the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!

²²

So too, if the metaphor of the vertical to describe the primal-pentecostal perspective of African Christians of this study can open western eyes to a not-merely-human point of view,

²³

then perhaps the church can experience now on earth what it is in heaven—the one new humanity in Christ in which God dwells by his Spirit.

²⁴

1

. Ngong, African Pentecostal Pneumatology,

85

–

86

.

2

. On this, see chapter

1

below. Cf. Shenk, Changing Frontiers,

59

–

68

.

3

. So Kwame Bediako, summarizing Harold Turner’s analysis of primal religions, wrote that man lives in a sacramental universe where there is no sharp dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual, so that, "even where there is a clear ethical dualism with respect to good and evil, nevertheless, ‘one set of powers, principles and patterns runs through all things on earth and in the heavens and welds them into a unified cosmic system’" [emphasis mine]. In Jesus and the Gospel,

88

. Similarly, see Ngong, African Pentecostal Pneumatology,

79

.

4

. See, e.g., Kalilombe, Spirituality in the African Perspective,

115

.

5

. Taylor, Primal Vision,

72

.

6

. Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel,

93

.

7

. Deut

30

:

11

–

14

; Rom

10

:

5

–

9

.

8

. See Kalilombe, Spirituality in the African Perspective,

122

. Cf. McClendon, Ethics,

89

.

9

. See chapter

6

below, specifically my critique of Bender, Anabaptist Vision.

10

. Dintaman, Spiritual Poverty,

205

. Cf. Dintaman, Reading the Reactions,

2

–

10

; Dintaman, Pastoral Significance,

307

–

22

.

11

. See Dintaman, Pastoral Significance,

322

.

12

. Becker, What Is an Anabaptist Christian?

13

. Mennonite Mission Network falls back on The Anabaptist Vision via Becker’s formulation in answer to the question, Who are we and where did we come from? In Krabill, Walking Together,

4

–

5

.

14

. Dintaman, Pastoral Significance,

321

.

15

. Dintaman, Pastoral Significance,

321

. The Pastoral Significance was published in

1995

, the same copyright date of The Primal Imagination as a chapter in Bediako, Christianity in Africa,

91

–

108

.

16

. Rev

5

:

9

,

7

:

9

; Eph

1

:

14

. By moment I mean to imply that the intercultural communication/communion/community of Pentecost extended far beyond the day of (Acts

2

:

1

), i.e., as a trajectory toward a fuller expression of the many-in-one people of God unfolding through the narrative of Acts (to the ends of the earth [Acts

1

:

8

]) and beyond. One also thinks of Walls, The Ephesian Moment, in Cross-Cultural Process,

72

–

81

.

17

. See Gen

27

:

41

—

28

:

9

.

18

. Gen

28

:

11

.

19

. Gen

28

:

12

–

14

.

20

. See Deut

26

:

5

; Gen

28

:

14

;

12

:

3

;

22

:

18

.

21

. Gen

28

:

15

,

11

,

17

.

22

. Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel,

93

; Gen

28

:

16

.

23

. Note the Pauline echoes here, from

2

Cor

5

:

16

NRSV: From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. On the other hand, because it might be argued that Christ empowers his brothers and sisters to be fully, not less than, human, the literal rendering of the Greek, according to the flesh (human point of view), may clarify the contrast to Christ as the true human being precisely in that he lives according to the Spirit. Cf. Rom

8

.

24

. Matt

6

:

10

; Eph

2

:

15

,

21

–

22

.

Acknowledgments

This study grew out of an unpublished paper that I presented as part of a small conference, sponsored by the Anabaptist Network in South Africa, on the theme of Anabaptist theologies in South Africa, in October of 2013. At that time, I was less than six months away from the close of an eight-year sojourn in South Africa, during which I and my wife, Anna, had carried responsibilities for a long-standing ministry of North American Mennonite mission agencies in South Africa—working as teachers and coordinators for a biblical education program for leaders of African Initiated Churches, Zionists and Pentecostals, in and around Mthatha. During these years we also related in various ways to Pentecostal and charismatic, as well as explicitly Anabaptist-related, leaders and churches throughout southern Africa, often through our North American Mennonite mission colleagues formally assigned to assist these churches in their ministries. So it was that I—one able to trace his ancestral roots in Anabaptist-Mennonite communities of faith from eighteenth-century Europe to North America—came to reside, in deeply formative years in which we began our working careers and established our family, in a broadly Pentecostal context in Africa. From this personal background comes the desire, represented in this study, to merge, or at least draw into closer proximity, Anabaptist and Pentecostal identities. It is also against this backdrop that I would like to make the following acknowledgments.

Tony Balcomb, my academic adviser on this project, encouraged me to investigate the themes of the original paper in a thesis-length treatment, sharpened the thesis with his comments, and worked tirelessly to see it upgraded from master’s to PhD. John Thiesen located missionary files for me at the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, and allowed me to make digital copies of relevant materials. Mennonite Mission Network, still my employer, has provided opportunities for me to forge and streamline some of the content presented here through and with my work of speaking and casting a vision for mission among Mennonite congregations in North America. My colleagues on the Church Relations team have particularly encouraged me during this process. John Roth, director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism at Goshen (Indiana) College, invited me to present my research at two academic conferences in 2017, a process that gave some sustenance and shape to my project. In that same year, Malinda Berry of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana, afforded me an opportunity to crystallize some of my thinking by inviting me to lead one of four cohort groups of attendees at a conference on the theme of the Holy Spirit in movements and institutions.

My experience with and interest in these themes, and hence this project, is indebted to Mennonite workers who preceded me and Anna in mission, whose relational integrity paved the way for our own reception among African Initiated Churches and many others. I wish to thank our Mennonite colleagues in mission, some of whom have lent their voices to this study, and with whom we share a familial bond; among these, Andrew Suderman warrants special mention, for without his faith in my ability to say something of worth I would not have embarked on this project. Members of Bethany Bible School, old and new, named me Luxolo and called me teacher before I had as yet said a word, and thus called into being in me something that was not (1 Cor 1:28). I wish to thank the African church leaders who lent their voices to this study; among these, Reuben Mgodeli deserves special acknowledgment, not only because he served as my interpreter for four interviews in isiXhosa, but because he answered the call to lead Bethany Bible School, even to this day. Family members prayed for me throughout this process, and perhaps desisted from asking about my progress in consideration of my insecurities. Isaac, Moses, Levi, and Jesse, who wonder what I am doing, tolerated the distant look in my eyes when I was lost in thought. Anna strengthens me daily with her love (1 Cor 13:7).

Though each of the above have made this project possible, I alone am responsible for the presentation and interpretation that follows, with all its foibles and inadequacies.

Abbreviations

AICs African Initiated Churches

AIMM Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission

AW Anabaptist Witness

BCBC Believers’ Church Bible Commentary

CGR The Conrad Grebel Review

COM Commission on Overseas Mission(s)

ECB Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible

GC General Conference Mennonite Church

GH Gospel Herald

IBMR International Bulletin of Missionary Research

IMS Institute of Mennonite Studies

IRM International Review of Missions

ISGA Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism

JASR Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

JTSA Journal of Theology for Southern Africa

MBM Mennonite Board of Missions

MBMC Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities

MC Mennonite Church

MF Mission Focus: Annual Review

ML Mennonite Life

MLA Mennonite Library and Archives

MQR Mennonite Quarterly Review

MWC Mennonite World Conference

OBMR Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research

PCPJ Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice

RAIC The Review of AICs

SARN Southern Africa Regional Newsletter

TM The Mennonite

WBC Word Biblical Commentary

Introduction

The Vertical and the Horizontal: Defining Ecclesial Identity in the North American Mennonite Mission with African Independents, Pentecostals, and Charismatics in Southern Africa

In February 2010, in the pages of its quarterly feature magazine, Mennonite Mission Network published the reflections of four of its North American workers, two married couples, in South Africa.

¹

All four had worked or were working with so-called African Independent Churches (AICs)

²

and Pentecostal or charismatic Christians on the continent. That fact plus the feature’s title, Great Exchange Rate: Mennonites Give and Receive in South Africa, bespoke a particular history and praxis of North American Christian mission in Africa—a field which forms the basis for the findings of this study. Amid an eight-year span of missionary service as a Bible teacher among AICs and Pentecostals in South Africa, the author himself had stated that

[North American Mennonites] can learn from Christians in South Africa about what our Anabaptist forebears called gelassenheit, or yielding oneself to the will of God. In daily life, this takes the form of waiting expectantly for God to give them their good things in the face of overwhelming insecurity, violence and disease. In worship, placing oneself into the hands of God means a willingness to go where the preached word might lead.

Concerning that life and worship according to the spirit, Mennonites are positioned to aid South Africans in their work of testing the spirits (

1

John

4

:

1

). Our historic commitment of following after Christ means that, for us, the spirit of God is never without content, form or order; the Holy Spirit comes in the name of a particular life, Jesus, whose love and justice are the way for all Christians.

³

Both these comments and their given frame constitute a salient prelude to the study that follows. First, and in terms of the frame, the author had responded to the mission agency’s request to articulate for its constituency what Mennonites might both give and receive in South Africa. Couched within the conceptualization of mission as a great exchange, the language of giving and receiving, with North American Mennonites as both the subjects and objects of mission, mimicked a missiology which had guided the work of certain Mennonite mission agencies in Africa for more than two generations. Consequently, the author’s commencing comments concerning what we can learn from Christians in South Africa were words worthy of Ed and Irene Weaver, North American Mennonite missionaries who served three tours of duty between west and southern Africa from 1959 to 1977, and who propounded the first vocation of missionary teacher as that of learner.

⁴

Chapter 1 of this study narrates the development of the learner-teacher emphasis as the interior component of the then-emerging North American Mennonite mission of interchurch cooperation rather than denominational affiliation with various types of independent and spiritual churches on the African continent. As a companion, chapter 2 explicates the theoretical framework for this history and this study as a missiology of contextualization and translation, with special reference to the work of Wilbert Shenk, Lamin Sanneh, and Andrew Walls.

Second, and beyond the rhetorical framework of learning and teaching or receiving and giving, the author’s comments portray a certain evaluation of religious and ecclesial identities, both his own North American Anabaptist-Mennonite point of reference and those of the independent (mainly Zionist), Pentecostal, and charismatic churches he had encountered in southern Africa. As to the former, the author—much akin to his missionary colleagues and predecessors whose reflections on Anabaptist-Mennonite and African ecclesial identities feature respectively in chapters 2 and 5 of this study—posited what might be viewed as a primarily horizontal conception of the Christian religion in Mennonite perspective, as a Christianity which lays particular stress upon the ethical obligations of disciples—followers of Jesus—toward their neighbors, friend and foe alike. This social-ethical definition of Christianity in Mennonite perspective breaks through in the interplay that the author’s words create with African independent and Pentecostal ecclesial identities around the second and third persons of the triune God. Hence, Mennonites are positioned to aid South Africans in their work of ‘testing the spirits’ because of the former’s historic commitment of ‘following after Christ.’ Yet therein lies an implicit contrast with AICs and Pentecostals, for it is Mennonites who can give the aid of the knowledge that the spirit of God is never without content, form or order but comes in the name of a particular life, Jesus, whose love and justice are the way for all Christians. These words reflect a perceived tendency within AICs and Pentecostals to attribute to the Holy Spirit the manifestation of phenomena—power without discernible content, form, or order—apart from evidence of the fruit of love and justice characteristic of the life of Jesus, a point which some African respondents of this study include in their assessment of ecclesial identities in chapters 4 and 5.

Just as truly as critique, however, the author expressed appreciation for the religious orientation of his South African acquaintances. Indeed, in their posture of dependence on God in the midst of adverse circumstances—waiting expectantly for God—members of AICs and Pentecostal churches exemplified the spirit of Anabaptism—"gelassenheit, or yielding oneself to the will of God—better than its historical Mennonite heirs. Not limited to the spheres of home and workplace, such yieldedness appeared also in the ritual context of worship, in which African Christians expressed a freedom to go where the preached word might lead." Indeed, the author’s observations here foreshadow the findings of chapters 3 and 6, in which both African and North American voices testify to the passion, joy, and freedom of worship definitive of Zionist, Pentecostal, and charismatic contexts. Moreover, the observed centrality of worship in these African ecclesial traditions points to what might be described as a primarily vertical conception of religion, the purpose of which is to foster the human connection to the Spirit of God.

Thus emanating from a tradition self-conscious of Christian mission as exchange—a cross-cultural process

⁵

through which both those sent and those who receive them are transformed—this study aims to distill from the statements and testimonies of historical actors some theological signposts for a multiethnic, global church. Drawing upon interviews,

⁶

archival sources, and other unpublished documents which detail the perspectives of North American and African participants in the Mennonite mission of interchurch cooperation rather than denominational affiliation with AICs, Pentecostal and charismatic churches in southern Africa since the mid-1970s, this study uncovers and explicates two broad strands of religious-ecclesial identity: (1) Anabaptist-Mennonite identity and witness as reflective of a primarily horizontal conceptualization of Christianity, as a religion that privileges social ethics; (2) African independent, Pentecostal, and charismatic identities as indicative of a primarily vertical conceptualization of Christianity, as a religion that prioritizes worship and the human experience of God.

The data of this study point principally in two directions. First, the horizontal themes of Mennonite identity largely fit within the parameters of Harold S. Bender’s Anabaptist Vision, a mid-twentieth century articulation that continues to circumscribe Anabaptist identity in the imagination of many North American Mennonites.

⁷

The vertical allusions of African ecclesial definitions cast the horizontal emphases of Mennonite identity in sharper relief, exposing the degree to which The Anabaptist Vision muffles the vertical dimension of Christian faithfulness, a subject which chapter 7 of this study will probe. Second, the strength of these respective emphases indicates that any common theological vision for both Anabaptist-Mennonite and Pentecostal-type Christians—an orthodoxy of sorts—will focus the horizontal and the vertical, ethics and experience, orthopraxy and orthopathy, as an indivisible essence of a robust Christianity. Moreover, with its field as the encounter between white North American and black African ecclesial identities, this study may offer insights toward the construction of intercultural theologies