Behind Anglican lines

I have a hard time not thinking of myself as a Mennonite. I grew up in a Mennonite community, attended a Mennonite seminary and have worshipped predominantly in Mennonite churches. Yet it’s now been almost five years that my family and I have been camped out in evangelical territory. I teach at an evangelical college, and there is no Mennonite church in our town so we now worship with Anglicans.

Maybe this is the bias of a theology professor, but I feel a sense of gratitude towards communities that value the life of the intellect. I’ve come to admire the rigour of the Anglican theological tradition. Although it might not run as deep in Canada as in other parts of the Anglican Communion, there is generally a current of expectation that Anglican leaders ought to be able theologians. The boundary between the pragmatics of “running the church” and reflecting on it theologically is harder to find here than it sometimes is in Mennonite circles.

A bit harder for me to observe have been the benefits of traditional Anglican worship. Growing up in a Mennonite church I would stand silently, staring off into some empty corner of the meetinghouse when we recited responsive readings from the back of the blue hymnal. These seemed mindless, like the “incantations of robots,” I complained to my parents. I’ve come at last to see the value in traditional liturgy: phrases that aren’t new and prayers based on more than a momentary whim.

When it’s rightly approached, liturgy can teach. It can soak us in Scripture and banish notions of performance from our worship. Good liturgy lets us turn off the pyrotechnics, cover the spotlights and immerse our souls in ancient words, pictures, tastes and smells. Good liturgy helps us learn the grace of thinking and speaking like Christians. The small Anglican church where my family now worships probably reads more Scripture on any given Sunday than the rest of the churches in our town combined.

A second way that my ecclesial displacement has been fruitful is that it has helped me grasp more surely what it can mean to carry Anabaptist convictions beyond Mennonite denominational lines. I’ve begun to see myself as an ecclesial nomad, not a Mennonite as such, since my formal ties to those denominations have atrophied, but as an Anabaptist on a sojourn.

There seems to be a growing number of individuals with deep Anabaptist sympathies, yet who find little ongoing nurture in this form of Christian faithfulness. A logical question, then, is how Mennonites—important stewards of the Anabaptist tradition—might make Anabaptist beliefs and practices more accessible to other Christians.

The opportunity I see is for Mennonites to more clearly appreciate the idea that cultivating an Anabaptist presence in new communities might mean finding ways to nurture and support Anabaptist forms of faith in those of us who do not, for one reason or another, participate in a Mennonite congregation.

Maybe Anabaptist insights can even be part of the revitalization of non-Mennonite churches. This would not add numbers to the Mennonite roll, but could make the treasures of the Anabaptist tradition more widely available across denominational lines. There is precedent I think. The original Anabaptist impulse was not necessarily denominational, although it was missional. Maybe Anabaptism can again be part of a renewal movement in the church catholic.

Anthony Siegrist is assistant professor of Bible and theology at Prairie Bible College, Three Hills, Alta. Along with his work at Prairie, he is completing doctoral studies in systematic theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto (Toronto School of Theology).