Telling Our Faith Stories – II. How?

Many of us Mennonite Christians shrink back when someone comes around with how-to advice or how-to lessons relating to our faith and church. We feel that is a bit put on, somewhat ‘fake,’ if you will. If what you say and do does not grow from your experience, it is not real. We would like to believe that what God wants us to do, the Holy Spirit will help us do.

This applies then also to what we say to others about our faith, to sharing our ‘faith stories,’ as I called them. In the first part of this blog, I listed 3 possible reasons why many of us in Mennonite Church congregations do not do this. We had no reason to question what we were doing because, until the last generation or two, what we did worked. Our churches continued to grow. Of course, it was mainly by what some call ‘biological growth’ that our churches grew and multiplied. Our children picked up the faith from us and passed it on to theirs. It also helped that most of us lived in fairly tightly knit communities where our faith and ‘church’ was part of the order of things.

However, all of that is changing.

We no longer are limited to life in our Mennonite enclaves. We have become urbanized. With the mobility in our society related to jobs and education, our families no longer live together. Our culture has become much more diverse in every way. There are many influences that tear at our tidy belief systems and structures and are indeed causing the breakup of our bodies.

As I wrote in the previous entry, those of us who still retain the faith of our ancestors believe that we are to be instrumental in keeping the church going and growing. We need to share the good news of Jesus, the gospel. I suggested we were failing in this because we had lost the skill of how to share our faith in a way that would bring others ‘into the fold.’ How do we reverse that?

I think this is something we need to work at together. We can begin by sharing our own faith stories with one another in our small groups and congregations, over coffee and dinner. Hopefully, this will give us confidence in speaking out and we can move on to sharing these stories with family members, friends, neighbours, fellow students and co-workers who are not believers. In our congregational circumstances this also means we can share these stories, the gospel of how God has worked in our lives, with those around the table at the Community Meal and in our LIFE Groups. Some of the latter refers to sharing our stories with one another but I believe our LIFE Groups can also be places to invite newcomers to, and share our stories with them.