In order to bring about this unity based on reconciliation, power imbalances in the church must be named. In Mennonite Church USA we recognize that this means questioning our institutional structures and the ways in which they favor white, Euro-centric styles of leadership over the leadership styles of other groups of people. As a denomination we have committed ourselves to being anti-racist and we recognize that it will take much time and effort to overcome the oppression that is embedded in our structures.

Within the global church, I believe that there are things that we, as white Mennonites around the world, must repent of . We must ask for forgiveness and we must change, before there can be authentic unity in the church. We must seek to be reconciled to those whom we have wronged.

On Saturday morning of Mennonite World Conference Chris Marshall spoke of unity as an essential mark of the church. In his bible study he called us to be reconciled to each other within the church, as an Anabaptist-Mennonite body, before we seek to witness to the world around us. As I listened to him I wrote this in my journal: “This is a different spin on unity than we’ve had so far related to the church… up until this point the assumption, by and large, has been that we are united in the church and our call is to be agents of reconciliation outside of the church.”

In retrospect I’ve also reflected on the message from Bishop Nzuzi Mukawa from DR Congo. According to Mukawa, the church works toward reconciliation when it preaches and lives the gospel of justice. During his message on Wednesday evening he challenged the church to be honest about the inequality in access to resources. In addition to critiquing the global trading system which benefits the rich and naming the consequences of global warming in poor countries, he declared that rich countries should pay damages to poor countries, rather than requiring them to repay international debt. He exhorted us to work in solidarity with the poor and to recognize the pain that much of the body of Christ is experiencing. If we are one body, he said, we must feel the pain in our body.

At the pre-Assembly gathering of Latin American and African Women Theologians I was also challenged to think about unity in terms of justice and equality. These women theologians boldly denounced doctrines that perpetuated the exclusion of women from positions of equal leadership with men. Working toward unity, they acknowledged, would not be easily received based on the systemic sexism that is present within the church. At the same time, they committed themselves to this work, believing that unity could be realized as women and men work together to name systemic injustice and be liberated, in different ways, by the power of the risen Christ.

With these understandings of forgiveness, reconciliation, and unity in mind, I was eager to experience the symbolic act of peace, between the German Mennonites and the Indigenous Mennonites of Paraguay. As Helmut Isaak forgave the man who had killed his brother, an event amply reported in the Mennonite press, I waited for Isaak’s acknowledgment of the ways in the which German Mennonites immigrants had devastated the livelihood of the indigenous inhabitants of the Chaco with their arrival. According to Wilmar Stahl, a 62 year old German Mennonite anthropologist who I had the privilege of meeting while visiting the Paraguayan Chaco, the Chaco natives have experienced much trauma. He described them as “persecuted by two armies; dazzled by a powerful war machine; decimated by epidemics; disinherited of their natural habitats; reduced in number by transmigrations; forced and lured, at the same time, into a new way of life, with the false assumption: that it would be best, to make themselves depend on the ’superior white man.’”

So I waited for Jonoine, chief of the Ayoreo people to, in turn, be given opportunity to extend forgiveness to the German Mennonites for these injustices. But to my disappointment, Jonoine was not invited to speak. Without a mutual acknowledgment of wrongs, I was dismayed. Was this symbolic act of peace truly an example of unity—a unity grounded in justice? Would I have felt differently if Isaak had handed over the microphone to Jonoine asking, “Will you forgive us?”

- Joanna Shenk

This piece will also be published in the Octber 26, 2009 issue of the Mennonite Weekly Review

“To authentically respond to immigration,” according to the recent MCC US Immigration Listening Report, “whites must start by seeing immigrants as ‘us’ instead of ‘them.’ White communities and churches who until now have taken little action on behalf of immigrants, must start viewing newcomers as esteemed members of God’s family – just as deserving of justice and love as church friends and immediate family members.”

How do those of us then, who fall into this category, work toward a change in perspective? Could it be that we Mennonites of European descent have forgotten our own history? Perhaps in comparing current themes – government guidelines for immigration, stereotypes faced by recent immigrants, and the role of economic instability in causing people to leave their homes – to our own immigrant histories, the categories of “us” and “them” may become much less distinct. Although the family stories of long-time immigrants are not identical to what is happening today, our history connects us in striking ways with the stories of recent immigrants.

Therefore, as we engage the narratives of our past, first we move to Switzerland in the seventeenth century where government officials did their best to suppress the Swiss Mennonites through heavy fines, land seizure, the threat of capital punishment, and deportations. John Roth notes in Letters of the Amish Division, how a few decades later some Mennonites “defied the mandates and threats of the Swiss government and secretly returned to Switzerland to rejoin their families or to claim their possessions.”

As the nineteenth century drew to a close Mennonites living in Russia were immigrating to the United States. Although, welcomed eagerly as industrious and honest farmers in rural Kansas, the Russian Mennonites were also stereotyped in different ways by their neighbors. In 1880, Scribner’s Monthly published an article on Kansas farming and included a section on the Mennonites in which they asserted that “for next, perhaps, to its unquestioning faith in baptism, the Mennonite heart hugs the watermelon above all things.”

In 1882 the Atchison Champion of Kansas noted of Mennonites that “the people were like their houses, useful but ugly.” Two decades later Atchison published another article, concluding that, “They must learn the lesson of citizenship in a free country, which will not tolerate the bartering of their choice at the ballot box, or abject obedience to petty local magnates; their religion must be softened; in a word they must learn to be Americans.”

Our last encounter takes us to the early twentieth century, to the Mennonites still living in Russia. After the Revolution of 1917, disease and famine plagued the Mennonites and by the early 1920’s it was clear that they would not recover the economic well-being they had known in more secure times. In Lost Fatherland, John Toews states, “Emigration was an elemental survival tactic which, though ultimately aimed at achieving freedom of thought and religion, had as its primary object the conservation of life.” He goes on to note, “most of the emigrants were fleeing from a land they felt had no future for them. The farms which had sustained them as a distinct minority for over a century were gone.”

For Mennonites of European descent, these are powerful stories of our immigrant history. We see our families facing the choice of entering a country illegally, the unfairness of stereotypes, and loss of economic stability. Through these glimpses into our history, may we be better informed of our own identity and increasingly empathetic in our response to those whose immigrant stories are more recent.