[Disclaimer: Looking back, I realize
I said much of this in my September posting, but here I think I am being a bit more
personal as I work on this]:
Christians are generally of two
kinds: First, those who have grown up in the faith and carried on with it as
their own without any major deviations from the path in which they were reared.
The second group are those who come to Christianity from other places or from a
place to which they have sorely strayed. I suppose the same could be dais for
other religions.
I would have to say I come from the
first group. One of the differences that sometimes seems to show up is in
respect to carrying out one of the evident tasks of being a Christian. This is
obedience to Christ’s command to bear witness to him and his gospel.
Sometimes individuals in my camp,
myself included, are not sure what kind of witness we can bear. Perhaps that is
because we think too much of what faith has done for us, about our experience. If
we have not come from some ‘other’ place, we are sometimes guilty of thinking
we don’t have much of a salvation story to tell. As I began to allude to
though, bearing witness is not all about us and our experience. It is the story
of the gospel, of who Jesus Christ is.
Here we run up into a problem in
our society. Western individuals generally do not want to hear about your
religion. They don’t want to be spoken to about matters of faith. It is an
individual matter in our society. However, you are freer to talk about your
experience. No one can really deny that. The catch for some of us believers
then is that when we don’t think we have a very dramatic story to tell, we are
not sure how we can ‘witness.’
Quite some time ago now, the
fallacy of this thinking was gently pointed out to me. A wiser more mature believer pointed out that
maybe people such as I had an even more important story to tell. We have a story of how we have walked in
righteousness our whole life. Righteousness simply means in right relationship
with God. This story includes how God has perhaps kept us from yielding to
serious temptations of one kind or another, whether it be to fall into bad
behaviour or drift into some other brand of faith that is not Orthodox Christianity.
It can also include the many individuals and events that have been a part of
our continuing walk of faith, helping us stay on the ‘straight and narrow.’
Here I run into another problem. As
good as I believe my faith community to be, we have lacked a certain emphasis
on this kind of witnessing, which is essentially verbal. Thus, even though I
was told what kind of story I might have a long time ago, I have never really taken
a good look at my life to see what that story is. We don’t emphasize practicing
such things as a rule in our congregations. I am referring to what in the past
was referred to as the Kirchengemeinde Mennoniten, which really simply means
the Mennonite Church Assembly. That might sound a bit presumptuous but until in
the mid 1800s it was really the main body of the Mennonite faith in Europe. After
immigrating to North America and transitioning into English it became the the
former General Conference of Mennonites (GC), then Mennonite Church Canada
(MC-C), currently devolving into Regional denominational divisions in Canada.
Many smaller groups broke off
from this body over the years, most notably the Mennonite Brethren (MB), as
they came to call themselves, in 1860, still in Russia (now the Ukraine). Most
of these schisms, like this one, occurred because it was believed the main
church was no longer faithful enough. They did not emphasize salvation,
witnessing and being born again in the way those of Baptist and Alliance
persuasion who encountered the Mennonites believed necessary. The old church
was not mission-minded enough.
Perhaps this whole area has been
more of a struggle for me because my father came from MB background. His
upbringing and even post-secondary schooling fostered the understanding of
Christianity I referred to in the last paragraph. Naturally, since he was my
pastor, Sunday school teacher and summer Bible Camp director for many of the
first 16 years of my life, I absorbed much of that. It seems to me that many of
my peers who grew up totally within the GC/MC-C sphere do not have this issue
to the same degree I do.
So, what is your story in this regard?
Where do you fit in?
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