Historical Committee
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Gathering at the Hearth: Stories Mennonites
Tell
A collection of twenty-eight stories from Mennonite History
by John E. Sharp
Herald Press, 2001
Order from Provident Bookstores or call 800-759-4447
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Robert, Mary Elizabeth and
Cloyd Carter are the first known African- Americans in the Mennonite
Church. On April 21, 1897 they became members of Lauver Mennonite
Church, a Lancaster Conference congregation in Pa. James and
Rowena Lark were well known for organizing summer Bible schools,
and as energetic and visionary church planters. James H. Lark
became the first ordained African American Mennonite minister
on October 6, 1946. He served Bethel Mennonite Church in Chicago,
where ordained to the office of bishop, September 26, 1954. One
hundred years after the Carters became Mennonites, Dwight McFadden
was installed as moderator of the Mennonite Church (1997). I was born the second child of an unmarried teenage mother who, by the time she was 27, had conceived seven children by three different men. There was much misery for my mother and her children, and there was much love, compassion, and commitment, as well. My mother, to this very day, continues to teach me much about life. I respect her and love her dearly. I believe that my mother and the births of her children will shatter many myths and images. While my mother did not conceive her children within the mythologically perfect two-parent, 2.5 children, all-American "Dream Team" family, she is as committed as any parent to nurturing and guiding her children along the path of self-dignity and self-worth. One of the key lessons I learned
from my mother can be summed up in the words of the existentialist
writer/philosopher Albert Camus: My four sisters, two brothers, and I grew up with my mother in Harlem and the South Bronx in New York City. From about the ages of eight to 17, I attended Camp Deerpark, which is owned and operated by the New York City Mennonite churches. This and other church-related experiences acquainted me with various peace church agencies. In general, I have been influenced, burdened, helped, and hindered by people who are rooted deeply within the Anabaptist religious tradition. Much of this interaction took place in and around Glad Tidings Mennonite Church in the Bronx, and at Seventh Avenue Mennonite Church in Harlem. Inside the Anabaptist tradition I was affected by the words and the writings of educators Hubert Brown and Zenebe Abebe, Spanish historian Rafael Falcon, theologian Jose Ortiz, Old Testament scholar Wilma Bailey, biologist and bishop Monroe Yoder, New Testament scholar Gertrude Roten, and historian C.J. Dyck. These elders of our faith tradition and others helped me see clearly that the story of the African American experience in North America is also a part of the peace church experience. The Peace Church's Ambivalence Black Africans first "arrived" in the colonies in 1619. They "arrived" from the West Indies at Jamestown, Virginia, on a Dutch ship named Jesus. In 1688, 69 years after the landing of Jesus, the peace church, or some portion of it, first went on record as being opposed to slavery. While it is clear to me that some portions of the peace church have historically become increasingly conscious and concerned about racism, I contend that our beloved Anabaptist community has more often than not quietly acquiesced to the racism of the surrounding culture and, therefore, participated in it. The peace church legacy on racism in the U.S. - from the start - has been an ambivalent one. For example, in this century, a group of congregations now known as Allegheny Mennonite Conference courageously passed a strong resolution against the Ku Klux Klan in 1924 because of the group's discrimination against "Jews, Catholics and [African Americans]." In that same year, however, another district conference encouraged establishing separate congregations for African Americans and cautioned against "close social relations" or intermarriage. It is this latter view, in various manifestations, which guides the core masses in today's peace churches, at least as I interpret its history. I am continually and critically affected by a whole historical legacy of racism and a multitude of influences other than those of the Anabaptist peace churches. Because of these other forces, the peace church must seek to create a much closer approximation of the kingdom of God on earth. For example, we who call ourselves the peace church in the U.S. must continue (and in too many cases begin) to examine the African American historical resistance to the American nightmare and the African American contribution to the so-called "American Dream." The peace church must engage itself in serious dialogue with resistance traditions, just like the ones embodied vicariously in the lives and deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X and Martin King, along with many other men and women, represent a blood sacrifice for the salvation of a nation that still, in great measure, refuses to be redeemed. Our Collusion with Racism Indeed, if we are to find the truth so often buried beneath the untruth, we must create new models of community. We must "cultivate" the kinds of children, men, and women who can live new models of servanthood and love in the name of Christ. I am speaking of the kinds of models that question our peace church's silent assumption about race - as well as class and gender. I am talking about the kind of church community that will foster a "Christ-like" integrity which would challenge us to question and to interrogate our greatest icons and our most revered traditions. It also is my hope that we would emphasize the importance of caring critique and compassionate critique. It will be crucial for the peace church to acknowledge its historical collusion in the sin of racism, and then to do something redemptive and sacrificial and reconciling and prophetic about it. The peace church must confess that, although it has accomplished much that it can be proud of, when it comes to dealing forthrightly with the racism of its church institutions, it has too often hindered where it might have helped and been evasive when it was morally bound to be forthright. In many instances church institutions continue to separate peace church believers on the basis of race, even though the church declares its mission as one which seeks to demonstrate God's love to all. Many people want to believe that we can respond to the human condition of brokenness in the peace church, but entirely divorced from the historical reality of racism as a serious and ongoing human tragedy. I am disheartened to see, in stark detail, how soon and how utterly often we forget - or ignore - our church and nation's history. We forget why Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote "Why We Can't Wait" in 1964. We forget about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hammer in the middle part of this century. We forget why Langston Hughes wrote about "The Ways of White Folks" in 1933. We forget about preachers like Amanda Berry Smith and justice advocates like Sojourner Truth. We forget the struggles of James Lark, the first African American bishop in the Mennonite Church. We forget about the suffering of the early Anabaptist believers in Zurich, Switzerland, South Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. I see people like Hipplysus Eberle and Felix Manx, as well as other women and men in the early Anabaptist tradition, as struggling 'til death for a believers church faith perspective, which, at its very best, stands "neck and neck" with the struggle of those named and unnamed radiantly dark African faces, which swung grotesquely from the trees of the American democratic contradiction. I speak of those very same faces and burning flesh that Billie Holliday sang so eloquently about in her melancholy anthem "Strange Fruit." In general, those representing dominant power within today's Anabaptist peace church too often forget about the loving, suffering, and triumphant Christ of history. As a collective group, today's peace church tends to forget (or pretends to forget) that a move to include the gifts of all peace church members, regardless of their race or ethnicity, is not a struggle which is happening for the first time in our church's history. Our current struggles do not exist in some kind of metaphysical vacuum, detached from the ways we live our lives in our church structures and communities. Beyond Good Intentions To say it more plainly - with nothing but love and a deep sense of sorrow - many European American Anabaptists generally seem not to care about making serious and lasting mutually empowering and vulnerable connections with the diverse cultures, traditions and histories of our current church structure in North America. Furthermore, they do not seem to care, beyond merely good intentions, about having critical masses of "other than white folks" as friends, acquaintances, and colleagues in their daily lives. We, the peace church, must learn to respond to our own devastating legacy of non-inclusiveness with the same vigor of attitude and deliberate spiritual fortitude that we used to face Hurricane Andrew, and the Midwest floods, and the misery of Rwanda. If we as a people can begin (or continue) to enter into situations and communities that are multi-racial and multi-ethnic, we might be better prepared to understand words like these form Professor Charles Lawrence in the Stanford Law Review: "Racism in America is much more complex than either the conscious conspiracy of a power elite or the simple delusion of a few ignorant bigots. It is part of our common historical experience and, therefore, a part of our culture. [Racism continues to arise] from the assumptions we have learned to make about the world, ourselves, and others, as well as from the patterns of our [most] fundamental social activities." Like when we go to church on Sunday morning. Let Us Learn . . . It is tragic that for African Americans, the historical public meaning of Christianity in the U.S. justified, among other atrocities, bringing our foreparents as human cargo from the shores of Mother Africa on ships with strange sounding names, such as Gift of God, Integrity, and John the Baptist. This brand of Christianity cannot be tolerated in the peace church today. As historian Vincent Harding once said, "Let us learn to listen and act upon some of the points of view of women and men who have heard vaguely that we, [the peace church], have a witness concerning peace and reconciliation"; then we might truly represent the poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the meek, the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the one(s) persecuted for righteousness sake. There is a pervasive spiritual impoverishment which grows daily in America. Increasingly we are witnessing the collapse of spiritual communities - the kinds of communities which help people love themselves and others; the kinds of communities which help families and neighborhoods face despair, disease, and life and death with love, dignity, commitment, and decency. If, in the name of Christ, we wish to be a meaningful presence in the face of our increasing national nihilism and xenophobia, we must, with fear and trembling, as historian Vincent Harding tried to tell the peace church in 1967, be willing to "be driven beyond all limits of physical and intellectual and spiritual safety that we know now; then the anointing may come. Then the broken victims will leap for joy at our appearance, and the humiliated will sing a song of praise" (Eighth Mennonite World Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Let us learn to live in community with those we consider to be the so-called "other"; let us learn to make an understanding of diverse histories, cultures, and experiences crucial to our faith perspective and to our very development at human beings. Let us interact with one another as wine, old and mature, and as bread, freshly baked. Then, come Sunday, we might represent a true communion. This plenary lecture was originally
delivered at "A Gathering for Those Seeking to Challenge
Racism in the Anabaptist Community," March 4, 1995. It first
appeared in print in Urban
Connections, an inter-Anabaptist urban newsletter. And then
was published in Festival Quarterly, Winter 1996, pages,
19-21. Reprinted with permission from Gathering at the Hearth: Stories Mennonites Tell edited by John E. Sharp, Herald Press, Copyright 2001. The book is sponsored by the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church. |
Come
Sunday, Will We Be a True Communion?