Telling My Faith Story - I

Telling My Faith Story - I

Okay. I have written at least three posts on "telling our faith stories" - why, why not etc. It is time for me to begin to work on my own story. I am also sharing it here with you. There are many references in the Psalms and elsewhere to telling of the acts of God, his mighty works etc., in the congregation, to the people and to the nations. It is that path I am following here.

I believe in an earlier post I wrote about why I am a Christian that I alluded to my faith heritage as being a factor in that. That is the positive, the blessing, with which I can look back and say my life and my faith pilgrimage started from. I don't know about the faith of my ancestors prior to the Reformation. However, as an Anabaptist Mennonite, I know that I probably come from a pretty good line of faithful ancestors from then till now. I was blessed to have parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who were mostly staunch members of this faith community in which my roots are. They taught me as much by example as word about it what it means to be a follower of Jesus and to have a relationship with God. There example, their teaching, their prayers - and one can never underestimate that - as well as that of the faith communities to which we belong both guided me as I grew up and kept me from falling into many traps that could have led to more negative outcomes.

If we look at the beginning of my life, my expectant mother (and I) were at her parents’ place, my maternal grandparents, in the Burwalde district in southern Manitoba when she went into labor. There was evidently a snowstorm, it being almost the end of October, which could have had disastrous consequences on the prairies. My mother's family knows from personal experience what happens when neighbors get lost in a snowstorm and freeze to death. However, we made it to the Bethel Hospital in Winkler, 5 miles away.

Then, and I don't know if my mother's physician or she knew this, but I presented for delivery as breech, or feet and rear end first. This in itself can be a dangerous situation, as a baby's head is the biggest part of the body and if the rest is delivered but the head gets stuck, well, you can imagine what could happen. Being a firstborn child added to that risk because who knew how wide my mother's pelvis was going to open. Thirdly, I was being delivered by a family physician in a rural hospital which could also be an issue because they would not have the same training and experience as an obstetrician in larger centers such as Winnipeg, which was over an hour's drive away. Indeed, in those days, it seemed much farther than that. However, rural physicians in those days also became quite accomplished in some of these areas simply through necessity and experience.

So, things worked out and I was delivered all right. Then, some two months later, I guess when I was deemed old enough to travel, mother and I set out on the return trip to join my father many miles to the north in Oxford House, Manitoba. Grandfather, mother and I took the train to the place where we would catch a plane to the community to which we were headed. When the aircraft finally took off from this place, The Pas, it needed to make a stop in Norway House. I almost met a premature end there because the pilot mistakenly at first thought that the people that were waving evergreen branches were welcoming him down to a landing strip on the frozen lake. Actually, they were trying to drive him away, because that was an area where they had just been cutting ice to use for storage and whatever had frozen over after that, would not have supported our aircraft. We landed safely farther away.

The next big event where I would say I remember God's hand being on our family was some six years later. Our youngest brother, not even six months old, was not doing well. We were then living in Grand Rapids, still an isolated community at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River and Lake Winnipeg. We were fortunate enough to get an aircraft to fly mother and Lloyd to St. Anthony's Hospital at the Pas, where they diagnosed that he had what they described as a large cyst on his kidney.

Our whole family then went down to Winnipeg, where Lloyd was operated on to remove this cyst, which resulted in him losing one kidney as well. This was done at St. Boniface Hospital by a Dr. McNamara, I believe, and it was evidently the first time such surgery had been performed in Manitoba on an infant. Lloyd's life was spared again within the year when our family was enjoying some tobogganing on our riverbank on a cold winter day. We were all walking back to the top of the hill after a run when we noticed Lloyd was nowhere to be seen. We looked around and there was his snowsuit-hooded head bobbing in our open waterhole. In those days, we got our water from the river by keeping a hole open in the ice. We grabbed him from that freezing water and rushed him into the house, stripped him and warmed him up and he was all right.

It was around that time, and I am not sure of the exact dates or whether I was six or seven-years-old. Our parents regularly read stories from the Bible or other Christian materials to us at bedtime before they said our night-time prayers with us. I don't know what triggered my behavior on this one particular evening. However, I remember breaking down in tears and crying because of my awareness of my own sinfulness. Our parents comforted me with the words of First John 2:1 and 2: “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." Our parents explained this to me and told me what I could do to set things right between me and God with a prayer to him and I decided to do this. My sister decided she wanted to do the same, and we both were "born again" that evening.

I can say, that since that time, no matter what has come my way in my life, no matter what questions might have come up in my mind, God has kept me from straying from the path that he helped set me on that day, and for that I give him thanks. Of course, I am also thankful to my parents and all those around me who had influenced me by that time and continue to do so for their role in helping keep me in The Way since then.

Telling Our Stories – Why I Haven’t Done So

[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?

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.