MCC accompanying the Colombian Anabaptist churches in their witness for peace

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog each week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website.

The story of MCC Colombia’s peacebuilding work is in fact the story of Colombian Anabaptists’ peacebuilding work. Although MCC did not open an office and program in Colombia until 2002, its involvement in Colombia began with the founding of Mencoldes (Colombian Mennonite Foundation for Development) in 1976. Mencoldes was born out of the shared conviction of Colombian Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren that just as the gospel mattered for inner spiritual transformation, so must it also speak to the material and social well-being of communities. While MCC and MEDA (Mennonite Economic Development Associates) provided the initial funding to launch Mencoldes, it was directed and staffed by Colombian Anabaptists. As Mencoldes matured, it focused on community development, disaster response and economic development.

In 2017, MCC partner Edupaz organized Bread and Peace marches at the schools where Edupaz facilitates peer mediation programs. Edupaz works to ensure a culture of peace at the schools, and the annual Bread and Peace march is part of that effort. Bread and Peace is observed by most of the Anabaptist churches in Colombia on September 21, the International Day of Peace, to publicly testify in their communities that peace is not just lack of armed conflict, but also the hope that everyone will have enough food and comfort to live a dignified life (hence the bread). Edupaz is a ministry of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Colombia. (Photo courtesy of Edupaz)

At the congregational and denominational levels, Colombian Anabaptists in the 1980s (which now included the Brethren in Christ, who joined in 1984) were talking about their faith in new, shared terms. They discussed “responding to their context,” “relating to political power” and “social ministries” and talked about forming themselves to be “witnesses of peace.” As the churches expanded their ministries in these ways, MCC began to support Justapaz (the Mennonite Church’s peace and human rights institution) and other ministries in Anabaptist publishing and efforts to promote and secure the right of conscientious objection to military conscription. Meanwhile, the conflict in Colombia grew more complicated: new armed groups formed, peace talks dissolved and money from the drug trade complicated the situation. By the late 1990s, human rights violations and assassinations had reached an all-time high. At this point the United States became more directly involved in Colombia through Plan Colombia, a massive military and foreign aid package that was intended to support the Colombian state in counteracting left-wing groups and drug trafficking. Soon after the deal was signed in 2000, however, it became apparent that Plan Colombia was escalating militarization of the conflict and funding significant human rights abuses.

In 2010, Viviana Meza Guerra (right) and Yaqueline Morelno Morales hang a vibrantly colored quilt, the fruit of a quilting group and trauma healing project that MCC worker Teresa Geiser of Elkhart, Ind., began in the small Colombian community of Mampuján in 2007. (MCC photo)

In analyzing the situation, Colombian Anabaptist churches decided they wanted more international accompaniment from global Anabaptist churches, particularly those in Canada and the United States. Collectively, they invited MCC to open an office in Colombia. Although MCC had already been walking with them in their peacebuilding work for years, there was a clearer and more explicit mandate following MCC’s opening of a Colombia program in 2002. The wisdom that can be gleaned from this partnership is deep, but for the purposes of this article, I will identify three key learnings MCC has gained from partnering in peacebuilding alongside Colombian Anabaptist churches these past 18 years. First, peacebuilding is holistic, in the vision of abundant life proclaimed in John 10:10. Secondly, peacebuilding requires accompaniment, lived out as a deep contextual and relational commitment to these communities. Finally, peacebuilding is a long-term project that extends well beyond project cycles and even individual lifetimes.

In 1998, Ricardo Esquivia, then the director of the Mennonite peace organization Justapaz (and now director of another MCC partner organization, Sembrandopaz), claimed that “peace is life in abundance.” This articulation gained widespread adherence within the Anabaptist churches over the next two decades. Rooted in Jesus’ words from John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly”—it came to encapsulate a uniquely Colombian Anabaptist vision of peacemaking. “For many,” wrote Esquivia, “peace is the absence of war. They have not yet embraced the concept of peace as the fruit of justice, as reconciliation, understanding reconciliation as the reconstruction of lives, of trust, love, respect, and mutual care” (Esquivia 11). It has been on this foundation that Colombian Anabaptists have partnered with MCC in many of their ministries. While we do support Anabaptist partners actively working in conflict resolution and mediation, many more have chosen to work with victims, trauma healing, education in marginalized neighborhoods, agricultural development, community organizing, refugee assistance, documentation of human rights abuses and ministries with youth and children. Despite their different manifestations, partners would articulate these ministries as peacebuilding in the vision of Jesus—life in abundance.

When the armed conflict edged its way into the Pacific coastal region of Chocó, the Mennonite Brethren church—present in the region since the late 1940s—became concerned about the impact this could have on the economic life of their community. Not only did the armed conflict inflate prices, but it disrupted transportation routes and introduced illicit activities into the economic system. In response, the churches looked for ways to cultivate lives of abundance, eventually founding FAGROTES, an agricultural development organization that teaches farmers how to cultivate cacao and rice through intensive hands-on training and provides processing options for farmers wishing to sell their products at market. By envisioning peacebuilding as that which leads to life abundant, FAGROTES has stabilized communities by providing farmers with the expertise and access they need to be able to sustain their families and avoid the worst of the economic fallout of the armed conflict.

For many, peace is the absence of war. They have not yet embraced the concept of peace as the fruit of justice, as reconciliation, understanding reconciliation as the reconstruction of lives, of trust, love, respect, and mutual care.

—Ricardo Esquivia

If “life in abundance” is the framework for Colombian Anabaptist peacebuilding, then “accompaniment” is the practice that defines their peacebuilding. Accompaniment is a relational practice, marked by commitment to others as dignified children of God and attention to their spiritual, emotional and physical needs. In some cases, our partners have committed to accompany the same communities for decades, particularly when communities have been victims of the armed conflict. These peacebuilding models seek to rebuild the torn social fabric through trauma healing, community organizing, economic sustainability and leadership development. Other peacebuilding models attend to a transient population, so their accompaniment is necessarily more temporary, but no less relational. One example of the latter model is the response of the Mennonite Brethren in Valle del Cauca to the recent influx of Venezuelans in the cities of Palmira and Cali. With MCC’s support, these churches began to provide humanitarian aid to Venezuelans who were showing up at their churches. Instead of simply handing out food and health kits, however, the Mennonite Brethren visited participants in their homes and prayed over them; they collected medicines to send back to family members still in Venezuela; they rotated snack responsibilities for the biweekly meetings among group members, so they could share different foods with each other; they helped make doctor appointments when people were sick. According to Francisco Mosquero, coordinator of the Mennonite Brethren aid response in Cali and former director of the peace office, Edupaz, some Venezuelan participants commented to the pastors, “You are different than the other aid organizations, because you see us as whole people.”

You are different than the other aid organizations, because you see us as whole people.

—Francisco Mosquero

For Colombian Anabaptists, this kind of peacebuilding is the work of a lifetime. In the words of Ricardo Esquivia, “We must fill ourselves with patience” (Esquivia 11). When Jenny Neme was closing her tenure as director of the Mennonite peacebuilding organization Justapaz, we invited her to share some reflections with our team. She chose to highlight the slow pace of peacebuilding, reflecting on Justapaz’s foundational work in conscientious objection in the 1990s. Some of the earliest gains were a provision for religious freedom written into the 1991 Constitution, but that was yet a long way from freedom to object to military service (Klassen 254). It would be nearly thirty more years and much diligent, faithful work by Justapaz and others until there was a full legal route to conscientious objection in Colombia. Even today, Justapaz has a department dedicated to conscientious objection, because they still dream of an alternative service option for young people. Although we as MCC work in three-year project cycles, we share our partners’ understanding of peacebuilding as a long-term, lifelong work to which we are all called. And indeed, in MCC Colombia’s 18 years, we have been privileged to see how a long-term commitment to the accompaniment model of peacebuilding brings forth life in abundance in all sorts of unexpected ways. 

Elizabeth Miller is MCC representative for Colombia.

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Learn more

Klassen, Bonnie. “Communities of Hope: Colombian Anabaptist Churches Bridging the Abyss of Suffering with Faith.” In From Suffering to Solidarity: The Historical Seeds of Mennonite Interreligious, Interethnic, and International Peacebuilding. Ed. Andrew P Klager, 251-273. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015.

Esquivia, Ricardo, “Sowing Seeds of Peace in Latin America.” Peace Office Newsletter. 23/2 (April-June 1998): 11.

Local church partnerships in humanitarian assistance

[Individual articles from the Fall 2016 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog each week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website.]

One question I am asked by MCC supporters is: “When there is a disaster, how does MCC decide who receives relief and who doesn’t?” This article attempts to answer that question by exploring the opportunities and challenges of working with local church partners when responding to humanitarian crises and disasters. In particular, this short piece explores the challenges in targeting, meeting minimum humanitarian standards and the potential for peacebuilding through humanitarian assistance.

At this year’s World Humanitarian Summit international humanitarian actors committed to channel more resources into partnerships with local humanitarian actors. That commitment reflects MCC’s primary approach for the last few decades: executing humanitarian activities almost entirely through local partners in recognition of their unique access and capacity to respond appropriately to people affected in their communities. MCC partners with a variety of local civil society organizations such as churches, denominational entities, faith-based organizations and community-based
organizations.

In particular, MCC is committed to supporting local Anabaptist churches in responding to disaster. For example, this year MCC is working with the Brethren in Christ Church in responding to drought and acute hunger in Zimbabwe and Honduras and to flooding in Nepal. In Colombia and Ecuador, MCC works with local Mennonite organizations and churches to meet the needs of people displaced by conflict. And in eastern Congo and
India, MCC works with Christian ecumenical organizations where local Anabaptist churches are members.

One of the challenges in working with local churches is how best to target limited resources. Church leaders in communities affected by disaster and conflict often feel they should respond first to those in the family of faith. MCC was born in response to the call to Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. from fellow Mennonites in the Soviet Union to provide urgent food assistance, agricultural equipment and ultimately refugee resettlement assistance in Canada. Likewise, MCC’s current church partners are moved to assist those affected in their faith communities because they have direct relationships to church members and know their specific needs.

At times, this desire stands in tension with humanitarian principles requiring humanitarian actors to be impartial—that is, the principle that assistance should be provided based on need and vulnerability, without discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, race, ability or religious identity or affiliation. So while church partners may have the easiest access to people in their own congregations, they should also seek to support crisis-affected people outside the family of faith. Many of MCC’s church partners boldly respond beyond their immediate church family, faithfully answering the Christian call to love one’s neighbour, provide hospitality to strangers and care for the poor and vulnerable as well as and those perceived as enemies or outsiders.

Local church partners, particularly at the denominational leadership level, also face significant pressure to spread assistance across the denominational structure and a wide geographic area. At times, church leaders, with social and political pressure from the many congregations they serve, find it difficult to focus assistance. MCC is committed to
abiding by humanitarian standards, including Sphere minimum standards for disaster response that describe the essential conditions for ensuring that disaster-affected people can survive and live with dignity. People have the right to enough and appropriate food, shelter, water and medical assistance. Adhering to humanitarian guidelines requires MCC and our local partners to make difficult decisions about prioritizing the quality of assistance to a more limited number of disaster-affected communities instead of spreading resources too thin.

Working with local faith-based partners also gives MCC unique opportunities to engage in peacebuilding and conflict prevention when responding to conflict and disaster. MCC seeks to enhance capacities for peace when responding to disasters by building connections among diverse groups. In working with local church partners, MCC encourages their relationships with other local faith-based actors. In Nigeria, for example,
MCC supports the church in facilitating trauma healing with people from various religious groups, while in Syria local churches (Orthodox and Protestant) work with local Islamic charities to provide emergency assistance to both Muslims and Christians uprooted from their homes. By supporting local churches to build ecumenical partnerships and reach out beyond their walls, MCC accompanies churches in nurturing peace, reducing conflict and meeting urgent needs.

Bruce N. Guenther is MCC disaster response director.

Learn more:

Core Humanitarian Standard. Resources available at http://www.corehumanitarianstandard.org/

The Sphere Project: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response. Resources available at http://www.sphereproject.org/.

Bennett, Christina, with M. Foley and S. Pantuliano. Time to Let Go: Remaking Humanitarian Action for the Modern Era. London: Overseas Development Institute, 2016.

Crooks, Bill and J. Mouradian. Disasters and the Local Church: Guidelines for Church Leaders in Disaster-Prone Areas. Teddington, UK: Tearfund, 2011

Related articles:

Humanitarian assistance and social cohesion in Syria

Peace through education in Kigali

Like other countries in the African Great Lakes region, Rwanda has a dual identity when it comes to conflict. On the one hand, the country has known many forms of conflict and violence. On the other hand, however, Rwandans are deeply invested in the search for solutions to the violent conflicts that have torn apart their country.

Violent post-colonial ethnic conflicts in Rwanda began in 1959, followed by other outbursts in 1965 and 1973. This violence culminated in the 1994 genocide, in which the vast majority of victims were Tutsi. After the 1994 genocide, the new Rwandan government began efforts to rebuild a peaceful society. Government leaders started practical initiatives to strengthen national unity, such as: initiatives for restorative justice (whose practitioners were called Abunzi, or “the restorers”); the repatriation of Rwandan refugees from different countries; the institution of national commissions for peace, unity, reconciliation and the fight against genocide; and peacebuilding lessons in public schools.

Amidst these initiatives promoting peace in Rwanda, the Evangelical Friends Church of Rwanda, with the help of MCC and Change Agents for Peace International (CAPI), established the Friends Peace House (FPH) in 2000. With a strong history of leading peace trainings and uniting people across dividing lines, Friends Peace House, like the country of Rwanda as a whole, now finds itself shifting more towards development projects. Peace and development are not unrelated. The French proverb “pas de pain, pas de paix” (“without bread there is no peace”) illustrates the link between poverty and peace; likewise, without peace there can be no sustainable development.

As part of our peace and development programming, Friends Peace House runs a vocational training center called Mwana Nshuti (“child, my friend”). Commenting on the context of the village where he teaches, one of the Mwana Nshuti instructors remarks that “In my service I have seen that youth lack peace because of joblessness, not war only.” In the past in Rwanda a large amount of violence was committed by unemployed and
uneducated youth in gangs and militias who were easily manipulated to see other ethnic groups as targets for expressing their economic frustration and anger at the discrimination they had endured. Through Mwana Nshuti, Friends Peace House seeks to give value and practical skills to disadvantaged youth, encouraging them to think for themselves so that they are not vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

The Mwana Nshuti program first began as a response by the Evangelical Friends Church to the large number of orphans (many of whose parents had been killed in the 1994 Rwanda genocide) living around a garbage dump in the Kicukiro neighborhood of Kigali. These children were often called mayibobo (a derogatory term for street children) and were marginalized from society. The name Mwana Nshuti is a deliberate act of honoring the youth, telling street children that “you are not mayibobo, you are mwana nshuti—a child who is my friend”.

Today’s Rwanda is being shaped by a new generation: none of today’s youth saw the genocide firsthand, yet they and other Rwandans live with the genocide’s aftereffects. In 2014 the Rwandan government ran another campaign called Ndi Umunyarwanda (“I am Rwandan”) to reinforce the message that we are all citizens and we choose not to discriminate along ethnic lines. In a recent Mwana Nshuti social studies class, teachers asked students to discuss in groups whether they would marry someone from a different ethnic group. Most students answered yes, because love is more important and we don’t value those distinctions, but some acknowledged it could be difficult for their parents’ generation to accept.

Throughout our lives we are educated by many different people, such as our parents, teachers, pastors and friends. In Mwana Nshuti the teachers seek to be good role models who create an atmosphere of inclusion and trust. As part of these efforts, Mwana Nshuti offered the Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) trauma healing training, a program developed by a Rwandan and a Burundian, for its students. This three day training explored the causes and consequences of trauma, loss, grief and mourning, examining what kind of society Rwandans want to see and how they can help create it.

Feedback from an anonymous evaluation survey of students suggests the impact of the initiative. One student shared that “this training helped me discover the grief which was in me.” Another reported that “I appreciated the lessons because they helped me to move from where I was (in grief) and now I am feeling OK.” Still another participant shared that the training “helped rebuild me and also to live peacefully with others wherever I am.” After students complete their practical training at Mwana Nshuti in hairdressing, mechanics or tailoring, FPH tries to place them in co-operatives and train them to work together and do their own projects for development and peace. Mwana Nshuti includes training in entrepreneurship, peaceful conflict resolution and trauma healing and encourages the transfer of this knowledge to the households of origin. The teachers also visit the students at home to get to know them, their situation and their extended families better. On one visit we were looking at an English reader with one student’s five-year-old neighbor who was also visiting. The book contained a picture of one person chasing someone else with a stick. The girl looked up and said, “I saw a movie where people were beating each other with machetes.” We asked her, “Is that good or bad? What do you do when you have a problem?” Her attention had already wriggled away to another picture on the page, but there will be one day when she will learn more of her country’s history and have to grapple with these kinds of questions. The country is moving on and deliberately teaching its youth to be peacemakers on a national and local level. If peace is built by youth, the country can hope for a sustainable peace.

Mwana Nshuti is an MCC Global Family education project. 

Antoine Samvura is the Program Coordinator at Friends Peace House, an organization of the Evangelical Friends Church in Kigali, Rwanda, that works with at-risk youth. Teresa Edge was a participant in MCC’s Serving and Learning Together (SALT) program. For the last two years, she has served as Program Assistant at Friends Peace House.

For more, check out the Summer issue of Intersections on Conflict, Reconciliation and Partnership in Africa’s Great Lakes Region. 

The making of a COMT

A lifetime journey led me to make the moral choice to become a COMT—a “conscientious objector to military taxation.” World War II was raging when my journey began. I grew up in a Canadian city amongst patriotic people of British origin. Young men who were neighbours, relatives and even fellow church members were enlisting to help defeat Hitler. Some of them lost their lives in that endeavor. Even my beloved teacher came to school one morning in the splendid uniform of the Canadian navy.

Meanwhile, my Mennonite parents, teachers and wider church family were shaping my mind in other ways. The war savings certificates promoted at school got no approval at home—my first lesson in conscientious objection to military taxation. War costs money, but the government was not getting any from our family. In my baptismal instruction class I struggled with the doctrine of nonresistance. It sounded heroic for the sixteenth century, but definitely not cool in the 1940s. When my father served as pastor at an alternative service camp for COs, I became more aware that, while most of society was on the track rushing to war, some heroes refused to board that train.

The church schools where I received my secondary and college education strengthened my commitment to Christ and his teachings. When I taught with MCC’s Teachers Abroad Program in Kenya in the 1960s, I learned about the Kikuyu Christians who paid dearly at the hands of the Mau Mau for their unflinching commitment to the same nonviolent Jesus.

Back in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War and anti-nuclear movement drew me and members of my faith community into Ban the Bomb demonstrations and marches. One day we heard Edith Adamson speak about what Quakers in Victoria, BC were doing to protest Canada’s use of their income taxes for military purposes. Adamson made it clear that, if we expect our young people to stay out of the army, we should be just as categorical about keeping our money from funding the army.

Adamson’s organization, eventually known as Conscience Canada, encouraged people to withhold the portion of income tax intended for military purposes, deposit it into a trust fund and lobby the government for a Peace Tax Fund to be used only for peaceful purposes. This was “fiscal” rather than “physical” conscientious objection to war. The idea captivated me and I decided to become a COMT as soon as my income from teaching piano lessons rose to a taxable level.

For at least 15 years I annually followed Conscience Canada’s instructions on how to file my income tax, withholding a specific percentage and sending a letter explaining as persuasively as possible the reason for this action. I received responses from successive Ministers of Finance informing me that my actions were illegal, along with cold letters from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) telling me I owed them money. The CRA probably considered my “debt” too insignificant to try to recover, but after my 65^th birthday, it annually withheld a Goods and Services Tax refund due me until the full amount was erased. I suffered no great harm from all those years of civil disobedience.

Currently, the only legal way to avoid paying taxes for military purposes is to keep one’s income low and/or increase charitable donations up to the limit. But even for the pensioner who receives a refund after filing, the conscience is not perfectly at ease. We can downsize our income, but our monthly old age security allowance depends on investments in corporations which fuel the military. We are inextricably involved, so it seems.

We COMTs need to find new ways of inviting others to make the moral choice of conscientious objection to military taxation. We need to find new ways of appealing to legislators for the legal means of redirecting our taxes for peaceful purposes. We need to find new allies in those who object to lavish military spending.

Mary Groh lives in Toronto. She has been president of Conscience Canada since 2010.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

Mennonite women as conscientious objectors

Shortly after the Second World War began in 1939, women in Ontario organized their local sewing circles into the Nonresistant Relief Sewing Organization. In describing the humanitarian assistance and moral support given to conscientious objectors in camps and war sufferers overseas, secretary Clara Snider said: “We are representing a common cause and stand for the same principles. . . . United we stand, divided we fall.”

American Edna Ramseyer, writing in 1943, reflected a similar desire that women be included in the discourse on nonresistance and conscientious objection. She asked: “Have you ever wished that you could prove your convictions on peace and war as your boyfriend, husband, brother, or son has? . . . Girls and women of the Mennonite church groups! Our Christian responsibility, to our God, the world, the church, our boys . . . is tremendous. The challenge is before us; the projects await us; the question is, do we as girls and women want to serve?”

These Mennonite women were not called up to serve their country militarily, but they nevertheless chose to identify as conscientious objectors and to provide an ‘alternate service’ to their country and to humanity. Indeed, they served voluntarily while Mennonite men were required to provide service to the state in eras when military conscription was enacted. And while men were confronted with the question of what they ‘would not do’ during war, women considered what they ‘would do’ in the midst of conflict. What they did was offer a ‘positive peace’ in the form of material and moral relief and service to those who suffered from the violence of war.

Mennonite women, and others from historic peace churches, expressed their conscientious objection in both world wars of the twentieth century by providing material relief and voluntary labour, both to their own men in work camps for conscientious objectors (COs) at home and to war sufferers overseas. During the Second World War, a church-administered work program for COs in the United States called Civilian Public Service (CPS) drew women into labour as nutritionists, nurses, cooks and other roles within the 151 CPS camps established across the country.

In Canada, the Alternative Service (AS) work program for COs was government-run, and so women were not as involved in the camps. Yet Canadian women declared a pacifist stance by sending care packages and letters to their own sons and husbands in AS camps and by entering paid employment in order to support their families in the absence of male wages.

Mennonite women’s organizations across Canada and the United States prepared clothing, bandages, food and other relief goods to be sent directly overseas and held sales and other events to raise money to support organizations engaged in wartime relief. Relief workers in England suggested that women in Canada and the United States adopt the slogan “Non-Resistant Needles Knitting for the Needy” to underscore the “magnificent opportunity” that their work represented. A 1940 report on Mennonite Central Committee’s relief clothing program for war sufferers in Europe described the relationship between relief and peace thus: “In the face of war’s havoc there is need for a positive testimony of peace, love, and compassion toward the suffering.”

The voluntary ‘positive peacemaking’ of women was literally embodied as numerous young women went overseas themselves, during and after the war, to work in orphanages and refugee centres and to distribute food and clothing. Arlene Sitler of Ontario was one woman who took up this opportunity: she affirmed the material relief provided by Mennonite women, suggesting that through their giving “the bonds of peace and Christian fellowship may become stronger throughout the world.”

Women continued to demonstrate a ‘positive peace’ in the decades after the Second World War, volunteering for overseas relief work or domestic voluntary service in high numbers. Between 1940 and 1970, for example, nearly twice as many Canadian women did service with MCC as Canadian men (Epp-Tiessen, 63). Moreover, during the Vietnam War draft in the U.S., when most of the 89 men in MCC service in Vietnam were there to perform the required alternative service duty, 39 women were there completely voluntarily. Women have also demonstrated a keen commitment to active nonviolence through their participation in Christian Peacemaker Teams.

If notions of Mennonite nonresistance, as expressed by male church leaders, shifted from a passive to an active pacifism in the latter part of the twentieth century, it could be argued that such a shift had already been anticipated in the words and actions of Mennonite women.

Marlene Epp is professor of History and Peace & Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ontario.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

When peace church members enlist

In the historic peace churches, when young people choose military service the impact on family and the faith community can be painful. These contrasting stories challenge peace churches to consider the meaning of community when strong disagreements arise.

Who is my neighbor? (Conrad Stoesz)

In 1939, as the Western world edged ever closer to war, Mennonite leaders in both Canada and the U.S. met to discuss what their response should be. They were guided by a belief in non-resistance, an important thread through many migrations and hardships, as well as a strong commitment to community. It was the community that provided the emotional, financial, spiritual and physical help enabling Mennonites to pioneer in difficult new contexts, overcome hardships and help keep people on the right spiritual path.

In the Second World War Mennonite leaders went to great lengths to advocate for a system of alternative service in Canada and the U.S. as a way of ensuring that drafted young men could uphold the church’s pacifist convictions as conscientious objectors. However, some Mennonite men chose not to enroll in alternative service, but to enlist for active combat. To the church which had suffered, migrated and worked hard for conscientious objection, their actions represented a slap in the face and were contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

In southern Manitoba, Peter Hildebrand was one of these men who did enlist. His parents Peter and Katharina were not proud of their son’s decision, but they cared deeply about him. They quickly learned they would need to carry their burden alone. Their friends and family did not want to talk to them and they felt shunned. When the Hildebrands received a telegram saying that Peter was missing in action, Katharina internalized her grief, sitting in her rocking chair for weeks on end ruminating. No friends or family came to console her. In one month she became hunched and her red hair turned white. The faith community that was supposed to care for the vulnerable failed Katharina, as well as others like her, when they most needed support.

The Hildebrands were overjoyed when they learned their son Peter had been found alive in Europe. But the deep physical and emotional scars were with Peter for the rest of his life. Like many Mennonite war veterans, he never did return to his Mennonite church.

A Mennonite parents’ journey with a marine son (Dot and Dale Hershey)

As we were preparing to leave for church one Sunday morning in February of 2000, our son, a high school senior, asked us, “Would you disown me if I joined the Marines?” He quickly made it clear that he had already signed with the Marines and had every intention of following through with that commitment. We were shocked, but sensed it was a time to put aside differences and give him all the support we could find within ourselves. He saw himself being a peacemaker in the Marines, so the day he left for boot camp we together planted a peace rose to symbolize our differing views of peace.

We attended his boot camp graduation as a way of showing our parental support for him. He was then sent for further training just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Our son would sometimes call in the middle of the night because he was also concerned and fearful. He would ask if we would be able to honor and support his sacrifice if he were sent to Iraq. Would we be able to accept the flag from his coffin if he were killed?

Meanwhile, we were not comfortable discussing our son’s military service with our Mennonite congregation, where teachers and pastors taught peace and nonresistance. Children from the congregation went to Botswana, Nepal and Bolivia to serve others and did not train to kill. Despite this, many people in our congregation provided us with love and support. Some sent notes to our son, letting him know they were praying for him and that he was loved and missed.

Once while on leave our son told us he was going to attend church with us. We hoped he would not come in uniform, but that was exactly what he did. He wore his Marine dress blues and was ready with his holy war arguments. He expected things to go badly. However, much to his surprise, two hours later he was still talking to members of the congregation. He was being received with warmth and compassion, hugs and handshakes, and genuine acceptance as a child of the church. This was an important event for him and an important event for us.

Fourteen years later we have a strong relationship with our son and we can agree to disagree on the role of the military in our society. This past year, for the first time, we were able to call him on Veterans Day and let him know we were thinking about him.

Conrad Stoesz is Archivist for both the Mennonite Heritage Centre and the Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies in Winnipeg. Dot and Dale Hershey live in Manheim, PA and are members at Akron Mennonite Church.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

Conscientious objection: a U.S. veteran’s perspective

Since the U.S. military moved away from a policy of conscription, several generations of Mennonite pacifists have become somewhat apathetic on questions of conscientious objection and military service. The issue of conscience in war—once a key ethical matter central to the Mennonite faith—has lately been labeled as political, a marginal and somewhat irrelevant distraction from the other pressing needs of an active congregational life.

The challenges of war and conscience in war, however, are still very real to many Americans. Many soldiers are struggling and suffering for their new-found beliefs against war and military service. The Mennonite community should not be indifferent to their struggles. Not only does the pacifist church have an opportunity to unmask the ideology of militarism by standing with recent COs, but in helping to secure the rights of supposedly-volunteer soldiers in the present day, Mennonites will be securing those same rights for a time when the draft once again comes knocking to take their children off to the army camp.

The plight of the Iraq War CO

In late 2006, my friend Amy was deployed to Iraq with the U.S. army. She was a sensitive and educated person, but she was also a good soldier and a professional linguist. While in Iraq, Amy experienced the soul-crushing violence of military occupation and war. Like many thousands of fellow soldiers in the supposedly “all volunteer” U.S. military, she began reading in her spare time, and she knew deep down that the occupation she was participating in was wrong. In 2007, Amy wrote an essay on why she was considering herself a conscientious objector to war, and turned it in to her commander in an attempt to be recognized for what she was: a CO.

Because Amy had never once loaded her weapon in the war, and because it was a prop required for passage on the base, she did not immediately turn her rifle in to the commander, who then used this fact to deny Amy her conscientious objector status. In effect, the military told Amy that her deep convictions against war and militarism were just passing feelings. She was then punished for daring to waste the army’s time with her frivolous feelings. The day Amy’s unit returned from the war, she was told that she would be re-deploying in six months for another year-and-a-half in the occupation. Soon Amy showed up at the peace center where I was working, AWOL: a fugitive from the military. Based on my own assessment as a soldier in the war, the vast majority of the soldiers who applied for conscientious objector status between 2004 and 2008 were turned down like Amy.

Pacifist appraisal of modern conscientious objection

So what does it mean for Mennonites that during the middle stages of the occupation of Iraq, hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers were ready to jettison their careers and explore the nuances of conscientious objection? A lesson to religious pacifists who want to monopolize conscientious objection: that someone like Amy should come to a world-altering conclusion about violence and militarism without a traditional religious conversion demonstrates the universality of nonviolent truth. The nonviolent God moves in a theodicy of grace through the experience of brokenness, war and violence to renew the covenant of wholeness. By failing to engage those soldiers who struggle in a conceptual language different from ours with the transcendent truth of God’s nonviolent way, Christian pacifists share in the guilt and sin of the world that forces young people to do violence against their will and better judgment. War is, after all, really a failure of human imagination. Human violence is a demonstration of humanity’s unwillingness to trust the will of God the Creator, to suffer-with and to love enemies.

Comfortable Mennonites, whose children go unthreatened by conscription and war, sometimes talk of peace as if it were some distant eschatological fairy-tale, and not an urgent, vital need. To people like my friend Amy, peace is tangible and present, what some pacifist theologians have called the “moral grain” of the universe. My deep and abiding hope is that Mennonites will embrace veterans and military personnel in the spirit of Christian love and peacemaking, partnering with us to explore the realities of the God of peace. Together, let us worship the Lamb who reigns nonviolently, and let us proclaim God’s peace.

Evan K.M. Knappenberger is an Iraq war veteran and a Philosophy and Theology major at Eastern Mennonite University

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

For a timeline of peace church and broader efforts to obtain provisions for conscientious objector discharges from the U.S. military, see: http://civilianpublicservice.org/storycontinues/hotline/advocacy

Brock, Rita Nakashima and Lettini, Gabriella. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Center on Conscience & War: http://centeronconscience.org

GI Rights Hotline: http://girightshotline.org

Privilege, right and responsibility: peace and Mennonites in the U.S. and Canada

At the core of Mennonite identity in the U.S. and Canada is the practice of peace. It goes by various names, including nonresistance, pacifism and nonviolence. Even within an historic peace church, however, peace has not been a static term. Over their 300-year history in the U.S. and Canada, Mennonites have seen peace, in sequence, as a “privilege,” a “right” and then as a “responsibility.” But the three terms have overlapped, and in some respects all three exist today.

The privilege of military exemption

The story begins in 1683 as Mennonite victims of persecution in Europe sought the privilege of military exemption in Quaker-run Pennsylvania. Deferential to authority, they were “absolute pacifists.” As an English missionary in Lancaster County put it, Mennonites always chose “to leave their Properties and Liberty exposed to the first Invader, than bear arms in their Defence” (McMaster, 229). Local lore recounted the cost of this idea; Mennonites were in some ways the privileged—encroaching on the lands of Native Americans—but as the 1764 murder of the entire John Roads family shows, they came to be known in time as a people who would not defend themselves under any circumstances (Dyck, 200). In 1775, during the American Revolutionary War, Mennonites petitioners declared that because of “the Doctrine of the blessed Jesus Christ” and “finding ourselves very poor [in spirit]” they were “not at Liberty in Conscience to take up arms to conquer our Enemies” (McMaster, 256).

Following the War of Independence, some Mennonites headed to Canada, embracing its 1793 Militia Act offering commutation fees in lieu of military service. The United States adopted a similar policy in 1862 during the Civil War with the first federal American draft. Mennonites, thus, were more worried about youthful volunteers joining the war than being compelled to fight.

In the meantime new waves of Mennonite and Amish immigrants from western Europe in the 1830s and from New Russia in the 1870s bolstered the old idea of group privilege. Both groups encountered modernizing governments who were re-imagining the state as a “nation” and heralding “universal military service” as its handmaiden (Loewen and Nolt, 13). In the New World they found frontier land to buffer them from these changes. Especially in Canada the newcomers found a British system still recognizing group “privileges.” In 1873 a federal Order-in-Council exempted them from military service, an arrangement that remained in effect through the First World War.

The right to alternative service

During the First World War, events in the United States changed the meaning of pacifism. A universal military service act in 1917 granted draftees the “right” to seek personal exemption. But it was only a limited right, lightly enforced by a Secretary of State who declared that “war was the purest mission that a nation ever espoused” (Juhnke, 230). Hazings, threatened hangings and the death of two young Hutterite men, Joseph and Michael Hofer, from mistreatment in a military camp in 1918 revealed the limitation of the supposed right to personal exemption.

World War II enshrined the idea of “rights” for pacifists in both countries. Conscientious objectors now were exempted if they could demonstrate personal religious scruples. COs then joined the Civilian Public Service in the U.S. or performed Alternative Service Work in Canada, mostly as forestry, soil conservation and mental health hospital workers. Even within this system were the seeds of a new view on pacifism. Robert Kreider spoke of being restless as a CO, longing to do work of “real . . . national importance” (Kreider, 19). In both countries some 35 percent of all Mennonite draftees answered the call to arms. Pilot Henry Pankratz of Canada spoke of his service as the “highlight of my life” (Regehr, 36) while Roland Juhnke of the U.S. declared “a sense of duty to my buddies” (Bush, 271). Mennonite COs, on the other hand, faced taunts of being cowardly “yellow bellies” and ethnocentric rural bumpkins (Epp, 110).

The responsibility to peacebuilding

After the war many Mennonites considered more engaged ways of expressing their pacifism. In November 1950, at an MCC-supported conference at Winona Lake, Indiana, Mennonite thinkers overrode the word “nonresistance” for a new imperative, the “responsibility . . . to the total social order of which we are a part” (Driedger and Kraybill, 85). During the 1960s and ‘70s, in the midst of the Cold War, the Vietnam War draft and the Civil Rights Movement, Mennonite thinkers recalled their own “radical” and “revolutionary” Anabaptist heritage (Klaassen).

Reflecting a broadening acceptance of engaged pacifism, MCC opened advocacy offices in both Washington, D.C. (1968) and Ottawa (1975). The first Washington office director, Delton Franz, spoke of the chance to “sensitize the powerful to the impact of their actions on the world’s powerless” (Loewen and Nolt, 316). Later organizations, including Mennonite Conciliation Service and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), pushed for international justice through action (Miller, 16).

Later, even these ideas broadened. In 1997 one CPTer, Patricia Shelly, challenged the binary of “personal” versus “political” peace, demanding it confront all of life, including consumer greed and the attending “need to protect what we have” (Heisey and Schipani, 39). At the same time, some Mennonites began to re-envision the very idea of conscientious objection. During the Vietnam War, MCC had provided a way for U.S. draftees to perform alternative service in many settings, including Vietnam. However, some draftees chose not to register with Selective Service as an act of noncooperation with and as a prophetic witness to the system. In 1969 the Mennonite Church even went on record in support of such acts of civil disobedience, while Canadian Mennonites hosted draft resisters and deserters arriving from the U.S.

More recently, Mennonites in the U.S. have participated in broader efforts to counsel military personnel seeking CO status as a way of linking privilege and responsibility. Similarly, in the 1990s the Ottawa Office of MCC Canada felt the responsibility to advocate on behalf of soldiers who developed a conviction of conscientious objection while in service. Additionally, some Mennonites began to practice “war tax resistance” as a new form of conscientious objection that aims to address the system, while also asserting the rights of the individual.

Conclusion

After 300 years in the U.S. and Canada, many Mennonites still held to the old “two kingdom” theology and a nonresistance of the “quiet in the land.” Still other initiatives highlighted “responsibility.” Attention to conscientious objection continued, particularly in the U.S., but it occurred within a much larger framework of proactive and “responsible” peacemaking. Clearly a fundamental shift had turned an historic peace church from attending to a question of “privilege” to one of “responsibility.”

Royden Loewen is Professor of History and Chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

Country profiles of conscientious objection

The right to claim conscientious objector to war status varies greatly among different country contexts. These profiles from the Republic of Korea, Colombia and Israel illustrate the very real struggles and risks currently faced by young people, reminding us that saying no to war still remains a costly choice.

Republic of Korea (by Jae-Young Lee)

In the Republic of Korea (commonly referred to as South Korea), military service is mandatory for all young men. There are no legal provisions for conscientious objection. According to the United Nations, of 723 COs imprisoned worldwide, 669 (or 92.5 percent) are incarcerated in South Korea.

Sang-Min Lee, a member of Grace and Peace Mennonite Church in Seoul, is the first South Korean Mennonite to refuse military service because of his commitment to Christ. He came to this decision over a period of seven years through study, reflection and the encouragement of people around him. Initially he was actively involved in a non-Christian NGO called World Without War. One of the reasons he came to Grace and Peace Church was because he had learned that the Mennonite church would support his decision to become a CO. Sang-Min was sentenced to 18 months in prison on April 30, 2014 and is currently incarcerated. He could be released after 15 to 16 months’ imprisonment. He will have a criminal record upon his release.

Being a Christian pacifist in South Korea is a very difficult thing, because opposition to military service in South Korea is seen as a betrayal of one’s country and as sympathy with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the DPRK, or North Korea). Conscientious objectors and their families experience ostracism and isolation.

There can also be division within families. For Sang-Min, a major dilemma in identifying as a conscientious objector for peace has been becoming a “peace-breaker” within his family. Sang-Min’s father is a pilot and former major in the country’s air force who does not agree with his son’s views. He believes that the serious political tension between North and South Korea makes conscientious objection inappropriate.

However, in past months the father has visited Sang-Min in prison several times and demonstrated patient listening and respect for his son’s beliefs. Members of Grace and Peace Church have met Sang-Min’s parents, talked with them about “what is a Mennonite,” and explained that some Christians who try to follow Jesus’ teaching on peace and justice will do so to the point of becoming prisoners. The father has slowly accepted Sang Min’s decision.

Even though this journey will not be short, there is hope that this “unexpected incident” called conscientious objection may reveal God’s plan of peace and reconciliation for Sang-Min and his family.

Currently, Grace and Peace Church has no members who are of military age; consequently conscientious objection is not a burning issue. However, Sang-Min’s personal journey has influenced church members to think about what it means to be Christian pacifists in Korea. Sang-Min definitely has challenged all church members to shape their faith identity as Korean Mennonites.

Colombia (Anna Vogt)

Jhonatan David Vargas did not know that what he was doing was called conscientious objection until he had been in the army battalion for three months. Jhonatan, a member of a local Foursquare church, however, was sure that he did not want to learn how to kill or belong to an armed group.

His case exemplifies the challenges that Justapaz, a Colombian Mennonite agency, faces when working with COs in Colombia, where there is no practical way to access the right of conscientious objection. Justapaz played a pivotal role by advocating for inclusion of this right in the Colombian Constitution of 1991. In the nearly 25 years since, Justapaz has been demanding that the right to conscientious objection be regulated.

Each eighteen-year-old man must serve one year in the army unless he receives a deferral. The majority of youth have no idea that it is possible to say no, meaning that education and political advocacy are both important parts of Justapaz’s work. As there are no regulating bodies, laws or norms set in place, each case becomes a unique navigation through the complex Colombian legal system.

As a student, Jhonatan believed that he would be granted a deferral. However, the army told him that his seminary studies were not eligible and he was illegally incorporated into the army. While there, he refused to fire a weapon or swear allegiance to the flag, an important ceremonial part of basic training. When Justapaz learned of the situation they worked to rally international support for a letter writing campaign to pressure national authorities and used their national networks to work on legal strategies, including with the Constitutional Court.

When given routine home leave, Jhonatan refused to return to the army in the hope of being declared a CO and, with the help of Justapaz, his family started a complex legal process. The military, however, declared him absent without leave (AWOL) and, on September 4, 2014 during a routine ID check, Jhonatan was arrested. Justapaz again put its advocacy machine in action.

Justapaz’s work involves not only advocacy, but all of the challenges associated with living in Latin America’s most militarized society. Objecting and accompaniment are risky as they are actions that expose and threaten military control: both individual COs and Justapaz often deal with threats and the very real possibility of retaliation.

Context analysis and self-protection strategies are fundamental parts of Justapaz’s work. Anything can happen: during the writing of this article, Jhonatan was arrested and the Constitutional Court ruled in his favor, ensuring his release. He is now officially recognized as a conscientious objector to war and military service. Each new event requires new strategies. Yet the end goal remains the same: that the rights of every young man to object are respected, that appropriate legislation is implemented and that obligatory military service is abolished.

Israel (Ruth Hiller)

Refusal to do military service in Israel is a complex issue. Many assume that all Israelis are required to serve in the army, and many do. However, a growing number of Israeli citizens choose not to enlist.

It is important to note that military service is required only of Jews and secular Palestinian Arab Druze men. It is not required of Christians or Muslims, who make up 20% of the population. While the government attempts to maintain the myth that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is an army of all the people, there are huge efforts to conscript ultra-Orthodox Jews, or haredim, a sector which has been exempt from military service since Israel’s establishment. The haredim maintain that their contribution to society is through their study of Torah, which they consider greater than military service. They consider compulsory military service a form of religious persecution.

There are also attempts to conscript Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Participation in the Israeli army is regarded by many Palestinians as equivalent to treason, since Israel still occupies Palestine. Nevertheless, some Muslim and Christian Palestinians (including Bedouins) with Israeli citizenship do volunteer for army service. It has yet to be proven that participation in the military by non-Jews provides connections that will further careers or other opportunities such as integration into mainstream Israeli society. Druze villages, where residents do conscript, are subject to overcrowding, poor infrastructure and house demolitions. Presently many Bedouin villages in the Negev are also subject to repeated destruction—the homes of former Bedouin soldiers are not spared.

While conscientious objection is at present a marginal phenomenon in Israeli society, there are signs of its growth. For example, some young Jewish COs, aged 16-20, calling themselves the Shministim (high school seniors) have declared their refusal to serve in an occupying army. In 2014 a group of 140 Shministim signed a public letter and sent it to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, clearly stating their intent to refuse to do military service. They wrote:

We, the undersigned, intend to refuse to serve in the army and the main reason for this refusal is our opposition to the military occupation of Palestinian territories. . . . The problem with the army does not begin or end with the damage it inflicts on Palestinian society. It infiltrates everyday life in Israeli society too: it shapes the educational system, our workforce opportunities, while fostering racism, violence and ethnic, national and gender-based discrimination. We refuse to aid the military system in promoting and perpetuating male dominance. . . . We refuse to forsake our principles as a condition to being accepted in our society. We have thought about our refusal deeply and we stand by our decisions.

Such a declaration means that these teenagers, upon their induction dates, are possible candidates for immediate incarceration that could last for many months. But in addition to the possible threat of going to jail, these young people are also subject to continued harassment by their teachers, peers, communities and the military. Their families may tell them how disappointed they are in the choices they have made, and some leave home due to the high tensions created.

Through acts of civil disobedience and their desire to apply democratic values and to change society, the Shministim are a growing group of young people  who bravely oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine at all costs and believe in a better and more peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians.

Jae-Young Lee is currently Executive Director of the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute and a director of the Korea Peacebuilding Institute. He is also a leader in the Grace and Peace Mennonite Church. Anna Vogt works with MCC Colombia partner Justapaz in Bogota. She is from Dawson, Yukon, Canada. Ruth L. Hiller is a co-founder of New Profile, the movement to demilitarize Israeli society established in 1998 to support and counsel anyone considering not doing army service.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

International law and conscientious objection

Laws providing for conscientious objection to military service vary from country to country. Both the U.S. and Canada have traditions of allowing recognized COs to perform an alternate service in lieu of military service. In many countries, however, individuals who identify as COs may face persecution, prosecution and imprisonment. For this reason, some have sought refugee status in other countries.

Over the decades, however, advocacy at the United Nations (UN) has resulted in growing recognition of conscientious objection as a right under international law. In 1998, for example, the UN Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution urging states to consider granting refugee status to COs who leave their country of origin out of fear of persecution due to their refusal to perform compulsory military service when no appropriate alternatives are available. The decision acknowledged that individuals may develop conscientious objections while performing military service.

In 2013, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution affirming that conscientious objection to military service is recognized in international law as derived from the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. According to this resolution, states are under the obligation to make laws and implement procedures to provide for conscientious objection to military service. They are to make information about conscientious objector status and how to apply for it readily available to conscripts, volunteers and those already in the armed forces. Moreover, they are to allow for selective objection—a situation in which a CO objects to participation in a specific war but not all wars. Also in 2013 the UNHRC released guidelines related to the protection of individuals seeking refugee status in countries other than their own because of fear of persecution. As these developments indicate, the status of conscientious objection within international law and practice continues to evolve.

Esther Epp-Tiessen is public engagement coordinator for MCC Canada’s Ottawa Office.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.