This concludes RBC’s series of articles showcasing a variety of practices encountered among Rosedale Network congregations. We hope these articles have promoted thoughtful discussions and sparked new ideas about the differing ways our churches are faithfully seeking to honor Christ as His Body.
I grew up hearing that Mennonites were “non-liturgical” and “non-creedal.”
So, in high school, I decided to visit a liturgical church.
We were a wee bit scared of the Roman Catholics. They’d killed our ancestors back in Europe. But I plucked up my courage and visited a Catholic church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Cross yourself. Kneel. Sit. Read this. Kneel. Stand. Recite the creed. Everyone automatically knew how to perform the holy ritual. The mass. But I was lost. Then suddenly it was over, and everyone left. Abruptly.
At my Mennonite church, there was also a pattern, even though I hadn’t noticed it: Devotional. Sunday School. Youth up front. Two acapella hymns in four-part harmony. Kneel backward for prayer. Offering. Sermon. Benediction.
Then fellowship. Children ducked under benches and played tag in the basement. And maybe there was a potluck and a baby shower.
Like the Catholics, we were about the vertical—hearing from God in the music, words, and prayers, but there was a very strong horizontal—bearing each other’s joys and sorrows.
Yet it never occurred to my adolescent mind that we had our own “creed” and “liturgy.”
When missionary anthropologist, Don Jacobs, returned to East Africa to visit the Tanzanian Mennonite churches he’d helped to found years earlier, he was surprised to see congregations continuing to follow the form of worship used by the early Mennonite missionaries—devotional, two hymns, sermon. This order of service was taped to the pulpit of every Tanzanian Mennonite church.
The East African Mennonites were surrounded by Anglicans reading the same Anglican Book of Common Prayer used in England. Tanzanian Mennonites used the “liturgy” they had “inherited” from their founders.
Later as East African Mennonite youth were influenced by charismatic renewal, it was common to hear elders critique the youth with statements like, “Mennonites don’t raise their hands in worship.” “Mennonites don’t say ‘Praise the Lord!’” These new “Spirit-filled” behaviors were not part of the old Tanzanian Mennonite “liturgy.”
For the past eight months, we’ve looked at the “this and that” of our Rosedale Network “liturgies.”
Today I attend a Rosedale Network church that doesn’t sing hymns or kneel for prayer. We don’t have Sunday School, take up an offering, or dismiss with a benediction. And when I visit Ethiopia or Tanzania, their colorful choirs dance and sing original music that doesn’t come from a hymn book.
Anglican and Catholic churches continue with their recognizable, time-honored liturgies. They’ve worshipped in nearly identical ways for hundreds of years.
But Mennonites? Have we retained the “basics” of a “creed” while contextualizing our “liturgies” to different settings and eras? And what are the basics?
We’ve said that the basis of our faith is following Jesus daily—as shown to us in the Scriptures and agreed upon by our community. Our communities have coalesced around agreed-upon appropriate ways of acting, speaking, and dressing as we’ve sought to love God and neighbor. We’ve tried to live “more-with-less;” to not swear oaths, carry arms, or sue; to dress modestly and help with “barn raisings” and “church plantings.” The Sermon on the Mount was our “creed.”
We expressed our beliefs with great physicality – not so much in kneeling and hand raising, but through organizations like Mennonite Disaster Service. We “hammered and quilted” our theology.
But does that make it easier for us as Mennonites to just “hammer and quilt”—but forget why we’re doing it? We love the Book of James even though Martin Luther, with his fresh understanding of Reformation grace, didn’t. We know that “faith without works is dead.”
But what are works without faith? Do we non-creedal Mennonites have a shorter step to apostasy?
How many children in our communities daily recite The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and stand respectfully to sing the national anthem, but never recite the Apostles’ Creed, or sing “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow”?
What we believe, confess, and act on shapes us profoundly.
If we’re going to last another 500 years, we need a sound, inlaid faith that involves head, heart, and hands. That three-fold “liturgy” is not easily broken! And that’s what makes a Mennonite Christian on any continent.
* Liturgy: the form according to which public religious worship is conducted.
One Response
Thank you, Jewel, for setting forth your observations about the Mennonites “lack of liturgy” in such a thoughtful way. We recently hosted friends who chose to follow Christ 20 years ago coming out of a Muslim background. They were amazed and pleased by the history and beliefs and worship patterns displayed at Menno Hof in Shipshewana. And even though they could not understand the English language, our translations for them helped them to identify the similarities between our history and patterns and their own as new believers in their home setting. It was a profound realization for them to say that in the simplicity of their choices of word and deed, they too could say, “I am a Mennonite!”