Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 09
April 30, 2007
Playing our part in the global symphony of faith
Tanzania
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“Aaaiii, Hinke!” yelled Amina as she bounded out to hug my brother and me during a recent visit to her home. Amina and I had last seen each other 13 years ago, but for much of our childhood we grew up together in Tanzania. Her father, Juma, had worked for my family and had been like a second father to me.
Quickly the entire family gathered and we caught up on 13 years of family news. Several hours later we were all sitting down to a meal of ugali (a paste made of maize meal and water) and mchicha (Tanzanian greens), as well as a few celebratory bottles of pop. We sat on wooden stools in the dirt yard and ate from a communal dish.
“Hinke, my sister, why aren’t you eating?” asked Juma’s son, Athumani, in Swahili, after I had eaten a few handfuls of food.
I grinned at him and answered, “I am eating, but I’m also listening.” It was the same response I had given to the same question when I was a child. I gave him a look of mock annoyance and we both felt a distinct sense of home.
Like that of most transient, world-travelling young adults, my faith has been shaped by numerous voices. It is only when I consciously stop and listen, that I hear each cultural melodic strain that together compose the symphony of my faith.
My experience of revisiting Tanzania makes me realize that the voice of Africa has silently influenced my decision-making, principles and faith. Hardship and daily struggle for the most basic of needs in Africa makes simplicity a reality that cannot be avoided and should not be romanticized.
Anabaptism tells me to live simply and with honesty, but Mennonites today have yet to honestly face the reality of a cultural and global paradigm that is already silently informing future Mennonite generations. The church often pays the price in youths and young adults who leave as the gap between church and their culture leaves them feeling apathetic or frustrated.
Because of Christ, I can see the examples of his life and the stories of the Anabaptists and Africa come together to form a terrible and beautiful symphony of faith. The end goal must be to live out our faith in a way that is meaningful as a community that owes its existence and purpose to God.
At last year’s North American Young Adult Fellowship, I met others who find themselves similarly inundated by a diverse collection of faith melodies. These young adults spoke about how their faith interacts with the church. In essence, they described church as living out our Christian faith every day, leaving no room for a dichotomy between faith and social action, finances and work.
In the summer of 2006, North American young adults took part in a bike tour that visited more than 19 congregations across the northern part of the United States. It sought to transform those many voices into one unified experience of intentional community while initiating and inviting conversation about the church.
Experiences like these empower us to listen intentionally to those individual melodies that inform our faith, to take ownership of them, celebrate them, and, with God’s help, to weave them into an integrated whole.
In today’s world we are not all raised in one geographic location or by a distinct faith community. As Mennonites, we cannot assume that other Mennonites have been shaped in the same cultural or faith environment. My generation—and the generations following me—receive information and values from a rich variety of geographic, philosophical and theological sources, and our culture expects that we listen to each source with respect.
To a large extent, the stories of previous generations still define our current Mennonite Church and faith culture in Canada. But we have new stories and new beautiful melodies that must be written into the greater story of our Anabaptist faith history. With God’s guidance, we can filter through the many voices informing us. Slowly and carefully we form an understanding of Anabaptism and what it means to be Mennonite in our world today. We may not be of the world, but we are definitely in it. I have faith that we—as a young generation of Anabaptists—will, by the grace of God, realize our own communal symphony of faith and give this as a gift to a world that is crying out for us to play our part.
Stewardship stories for the generous life (Part III):
Retirement no barrier to service
Stewardship means putting your finances, time, skill and ability into action. That is Leigh Steckley’s definition. It is not just language he pulls out of a file; it is his guide to living.
Steckley, 57, a retired elementary school teacher from the Waterloo Region of Ontario, acts on each part of his statement.
Stewardship begins with tithing the family income. There is no wavering on regular giving to The Gathering, a recent church plant in Kitchener, Ont., the wider Mennonite Church, the community and beyond. In addition, the Steckleys sponsor three children in India through Mennonite Global Family program and they pay their own expenses—without strict accounting—when doing service projects.
It is the projects that call up the full spectrum of stewardship.
Steckley has put his training, experience, natural ability, time and energy to work in organizing and implementing numerous projects within his own community, in the U.S. and abroad.
A project he organized took him, his wife Lois (also a newly retired teacher), and six others from Shantz, Wilmot and Crosshill Mennonite churches in southwestern Ontario, on a trip to Africa in 2002.
One stop was a refugee camp at Kakuma, about a two-day drive north of Nairobi, Kenya, to help expedite the immigration process for some Sudanese women and their children whose documents were caught in a bureaucratic tangle. These families have since arrived and live in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
The group also raised funds from Ontario churches to buy beans and maize for desert Turkana villagers and to purchase 100 NIV study Bibles for the African Christian Mission Bible Institute that trains Sudanese refugees to go back home as pastors.
In Kenya, the group met the Nairobi Mennonite Knights, a basketball team comprised of Christian and Muslim players from the Eastleigh slums. The team was good enough to make the top senior division in the country, but they had poor uniforms. From his teaching experience, Steckley knew how important a smart uniform is to the spirit of a team. He thought of businesspeople in churches back home who loved sports and, upon his return, he challenged them to make donations. It took him two weeks to raise the $1,100 to equip the team with professional-looking red and white reversible uniforms.
Steckley’s daughter, Jill Steckley Leis, initiated Global Youth Network when she was a student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., and has travelled to many parts of the world. Another daughter, Jenee Gowing, was born in Jos, Nigeria, when her parents were on a Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) assignment; she has travelled in mission assignments to Kenya and Peru. Son Joshua, who has a masters degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, in political studies, has taught English in Taiwan and conducted research assignments in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam; he and his wife are currently serving a three-year assignment with MCC in Haiti as policy analysts.
Is it simply wanderlust that has sent all three children globe-trotting? Or has the lifestyle they observed at home led them to invest time and talent in less privileged parts of the world? Like their dad.
Steckley spent the 2001 March break cleaning up and repairing houses after Hurricane Floyd ripped a swath along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. However, he did not go alone. He used his organizational skills to put together an intergenerational work team of 39 people who travelled by bus. One team member said it was “the best vacation ever.”
In 2004, Steckley visited Desmond Tully, a pastor from Jamshedpur, India, a city about two hours west of Calcutta, and offered refresher courses to teachers from impoverished villages in northern India. He also assisted Tully in his many ministries among the poor.
A year later, Steckley was invited by the California-based Chinese Christian Mission to teach English to university students at the University of Chaing Mai in Thailand. Most of his students were children of AIDS victims.
Steckley does not simply pick a place he would like to visit and create a response to a real or imagined need. Each service venture responds to an invitation and the work done is what the people doing the inviting want done. Listening before doing is most important, he says.
With stewardship as a core value, Leigh Steckley heads into each year with his sleeves rolled up, his organizational and other skills on call, and his calendar and chequebook at the ready. Stewardship continues to shape his life.
Anyone interested in joining him in Haiti in 2008?