Peacebuilding as presence: MCC assignments in “enemy” contexts

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog twice per week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website. This article consist of five reflections which will be posted separately.

Beginning with the decision by some MCC workers from the United States to remain in Vietnam after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country on March 29, 1973, one form MCC’s peace witness has taken has been a witness of presence within so-called “enemy” contexts. Such peace witness included placing graduate students behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War tasked with connecting to and supporting churches in the Eastern bloc, assigning aid workers to live and work in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion of the country in 2002, placing more graduate students at an Islamic studies center in Qom, Iran, seconding staff to work with health ministries in Afghanistan and sending agronomists to make extended program support visits to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Below are reflections from MCC workers who were involved in such peacebuilding-as-presence initiatives on the joys and challenges they faced.—The editors.

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Iraq

We often think of two U.S.-led wars in Iraq. One began in January 1991 in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, ending just over a month later. The second Iraq war began in March 2003 and ended in December 2011. But it is more accurate to say that it was just one long war. The no-fly zones established over northern and southern Iraq from 1991 to 2003 included multiple air strikes and dozens of cruise missiles bombing Iraqi targets, coupled with a debilitating sanctions campaign and a long legacy of depleted uranium.

I arrived in the middle of this long war. From January 2004 to June 2006, I was the MCC Iraq program manager. My job had two components. First, I was to teach English at Babel College, a Chaldean Catholic college and seminary in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Second, I was tasked with cultivating relationships with potential MCC partners, whether churches, Islamic organizations or emerging local NGOs. In doing so, I was merely continuing the work that had begun in 1998 with Wanda Kraybill, the first MCCer in Iraq. From 1998 to 2003, Wanda, and later Carmen Pauls and then Edward Miller, were in Iraq as a gesture of solidarity, especially with the churches there. Placing these MCC workers in Iraq was a way of saying: “Not all Westerners share the U.S. government’s position and not all Christians in the U.S. think their citizenship is more important than their baptism.” MCCers worked alongside the Middle East Council of Churches, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and the Australian branch of CARE to mitigate the effects of the U.S. sanctions and to call attention to the slow violence of depleted uranium munitions, but they did so with limited resources. Importantly, this was a time when there was virtually no Western presence in Iraq. The MCC difference was, first and foremost, simply being there as friend instead of enemy, despite our U.S. citizenship. We took a stand against the sanctions campaign, both as advocates at home in Washington, D.C., and through aid projects on the ground in Iraq.

Placing MCC workers in Iraq was a way of saying, “not all Westerners share the U.S. government’s position and not all Christians in the U.S. think their citizenship is more important that their baptism.”

But after the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, all that changed. Specifically, two things shifted dramatically and both made MCC’s position harder to maintain. First, instead of a few western NGOs with limited resources, Iraq was flooded with western NGOs with billions to spend. Instead of being a lone NGO in defiance of the international community’s aggression, MCC was now just one small cog in a giant aid industry. That industry, as I came to see it after I arrived in January 2004, had three distinct factions. The first were what we might call the “occupying NGOs,” indebted to USAID and the U.S. State Department and (some eagerly, some reluctantly) a key part of the U.S. war effort. The second was what I affectionately called the humanitarian fundamentalists. These were primarily European NGOs committed to the principled tradition of humanitarian neutrality that is best represented by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF). The third were the left-wing activist NGOs who were willing to abandon the neutrality of the second group in pursuit of their anti-war agenda. 

MCC was an odd fit with these three groups. While philosophically, practically and socially most distant from the U.S. NGOs, we couldn’t get away from the fact that most of the MCCers involved were U.S. citizens. We became closest to the humanitarians and the activist NGOs, but for that to happen they had to overcome their wariness of both our citizenship and of our faith commitments. 

The second change was that aid workers were now vulnerable in a way they had not been before 2004. In April of that year, the Iraqi insurgency began taking hostages. A Wikipedia page, “Foreign Hostages in Iraq,” lists over 200 hostages, the vast majority between 2004-2006. At least eight of those were close colleagues of MCC and of those eight, three were killed. It would be convenient if the ones kidnapped were the ones with the closest ties to the U.S. and the invading military coalition. But that wasn’t the case. It was the ICRC compound in Baghdad that was attacked in 2003. In the eyes of the insurgency, we were all enemies. In other words, it became harder to imagine that MCC, or any non-coalition aid agency, was either neutral or on the side of Iraqis. The whole notion of ‘sides’ had gotten scrambled. 

Sister Elham Degaly and Sarah (age 12) in the courtyard of St Anne’s Orphanage. St Anne’s Orphanage was an MCCsupported Global Family project from 2009-2016. Sarah’s last name is not used for security reasons. Iraqi families have been torn apart by poverty and war. Some families have been unable to care for their children. Some children have watched their parents die. The Daughters of Mary of the Chaldean Christian Church provide a loving home for children (mostly girls) with traumatic childhoods. In partnership with the Daughters of Mary, MCC buys textbooks, tutoring resources and other supplies. (MCC photo/Kaitlin Heatwole)

Evacuated to Jordan, the humanitarian fundamentalist and activist NGOs had a standard explanation. “Humanitarian space,” the space in which aid agencies could carry out their mission to the most vulnerable, was only possible when aid agencies maintained their distance from the U.S. coalition power and when the U.S. coalition power respected that distance. Since so many NGOs had effectively become extensions of the occupation, whether willingly or because of USAID arm-twisting, that space no longer existed. In other words, the ICRC hadn’t been bombed because it was an enemy, but because the occupying NGOs had so muddied humanitarian space that it was no longer possible to tell the difference between the humanitarian fundamentalists and the occupation. In the space of just a year, MCC went from being the sole inhabitant of humanitarian space, to one of many organizations claiming humanitarian space, to witnessing the end of that space.

Meanwhile, the suffering of our Iraqi friends and colleagues increased exponentially. Caught between the coalition forces and the growing Iraqi insurgency, tens of thousands of Iraqis died and millions were displaced and remain displaced to this day. Those who remained had their lives disrupted and upended in all the countless ways that war wrecks societies—struggles to obtain food, healthcare, education and employment and lives of constant fear. From my apartment in Jordan in 2005, communicating with Iraqi friends and colleagues by phone and email and learning daily about the deteriorating conditions, we weighed commitments to solidarity with Iraqis alongside the risks. The former won out and MCC agreed to let me return to Baghdad, to an apartment above the flat where members of Christian Peacemaker Teams lived. CPT had never left. But just a week before my return flight, four of those CPTers were kidnapped. One, the only U.S. citizen, Tom Fox, was killed. Fifteen years later, MCC Iraq still does not maintain a presence in Baghdad.

Peter Dula is professor of religion and culture at Eastern Mennonite University. He worked with MCC in Iraq from 2004-2006.

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Paticipants at an interfaith workshop in Abeche, Chad, hosted by Ethics, Peace and Justice (EPJ) in 2016, discuss challenges to interfaith collaboration in their communities. MCC partnered with EPJ for over 20 years in peacebuilding initiatives, bringing Muslim, Protestant and Catholic leaders together to foster cooperation and community resilience. (MCC photo/Mark Tymm)

Peacebuilding as presence: MCC assignments in “enemy” contexts

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog twice per week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website. This article consist of five reflections which will be posted separately.

Beginning with the decision by some MCC workers from the United States to remain in Vietnam after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country on March 29, 1973, one form MCC’s peace witness has taken has been a witness of presence within so-called “enemy” contexts. Such peace witness included placing graduate students behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War tasked with connecting to and supporting churches in the Eastern bloc, assigning aid workers to live and work in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion of the country in 2002, placing more graduate students at an Islamic studies center in Qom, Iran, seconding staff to work with health ministries in Afghanistan and sending agronomists to make extended program support visits to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Below are reflections from MCC workers who were involved in such peacebuilding-as-presence initiatives on the joys and challenges they faced.—The editors.

DPRK (North Korea)

MCC’s provision of humanitarian assistance during the 1994 famine in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) initiated a quarter century relationship and over US$22 million in aid, assistance that has supported disaster responses, agricultural education and pediatric hospitals. While MCC has received wide recognition for this humanitarian work, we might also ask: Have these efforts furthered the “peace” element in MCC’s commitment to “relief, development, and peace in the name of Christ?” This question is critical in the context of MCC’s wider mission, as a lack of peace in the region has shaped life on the Korean peninsula for 70 years.

My work with MCC has introduced me to many North Koreans who are caring rather than threatening.

Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula thrived for 1,300 years, united under a distinctive culture and language. In the 70 years since, however, ten million Koreans have lived permanently separated from their families. A formal peace agreement to end the war was never signed, leaving the peninsula split by a heavily militarized border and a bilaterally-enforced ban on cross-border travel and communication. Despite near complete isolation from one another, the longing for eventual reunification runs deep on both sides of the divide.

With this broader geopolitical context in mind, I propose to consider how MCC’s 25 years of humanitarian work in North Korea has provided a platform for a reconciliatory “peace witness” in three critical ways: people-to-people contact between North Korea, the U.S. and Canada, advocacy with the U.S. government and education work in South Korea.

First, as in any deep national division, political peace is critical. The absence of a peace treaty is an enormous barrier to a new future in Korea. Yet lasting peace also requires the overlooked work that scholar Cecelia Clegg calls “societal reconciliation” (Clegg 84). Speaking from her research into healing in Northern Ireland, Clegg argues that “there is no substitute for . . . a sustained level of new contact, the act of deliberately seeking out a meeting or encounter with the [threatening] ‘other’” (90). Sustained contact is precisely where MCC’s North Korea work has mattered in relation to what Clegg calls “the will to find out the truth about the ‘other’ [as] an essential dynamic in any reconciling process” (89).

Amid a hostile climate that has often condemned positive engagement toward North Korea, MCC’s presence has been catalytic as one of only a handful of agencies with work on both sides of the border.

Mutual isolation has created profound misunderstanding between people in North Korea and the U.S. In North Korea, dominant “enemy narratives” of the U.S. include the U.S. military’s indiscriminate bombing during the war and the complicity of U.S. missionaries in violence. But MCC’s relief work has provided a different face of both U.S. citizens and Christians. Over many years of face-to-face monitoring visits, MCC delegations have shared the story of where MCC’s canned meat comes from—not a factory, but from the hands of tens of thousands of volunteers and churches across Canada and the United States.

These encounters also defy the narratives held by many Canadian and U.S. Anabaptist constituencies accustomed only to threatening images of North Koreans. My work with MCC has introduced me to many North Koreans who are caring rather than threatening. I think, for example, of a dedicated tuberculosis sanitorium director who, while compassionately caring for his patients, eventually contracted and succumbed to the disease himself, as well as government officials who witnessed the impact of a U.S. couple’s work with cerebral palsy and approved the construction of provincial pediatric rehabilitation centers.

A second critical dimension of MCC’s peace witness in North Korea is political advocacy. Even today, 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea. Economic and social collaboration on the peninsula is subject to the mercy of the United States. In 2017, the U.S. State Department banned travel by U.S. citizens to North Korea and the United Nations (under U.S. leadership) instituted sanctions severely limiting imports to North Korea. This threatened the sole avenues for aid to vulnerable North Korean people and endangered future diplomacy. Alongside other faith-based agencies, MCC engaged in direct advocacy to the U.S. government, pushing for humanitarian exemptions and to make signing a peace treaty a top priority in the ongoing U.S.-DPRK negotiations.

During a 1998 visit to Pyongyang, DPRK, MCC staff member Kevin King learns about medicinal plants from Mrs. Kim at the city’s Botanical Gardens. (Photo courtesy of Kevin King)

The third dimension of MCC’s peace witness on the Korean peninsula is its peace education in South Korea. Amid a hostile climate that has often condemned positive engagement toward North Korea, MCC’s presence has been catalytic as one of only a handful of agencies with work on both sides of the border. One South Korean pastor said his encounters with a Canadian agriculturalist who worked with MCC in DPRK “changed my concept about North Korea from missiles and ever-marching people of nationalistic madness to the same common people like us in South Korea.” Another young South Korean I know had grown up distant from the trauma of the Korean divide. Her indifference was challenged in college when she joined an InterVarsity Korea visit to the China-North Korea border. A boat ride to view the North offered her a sight many South Koreans never see: two North Koreans up close, two soldiers sitting on a beach. “One of them looked exactly like my brother,” she said. “Only then did I understand that we are one people.” This transformative experience led her to MCC’s IVEP program, an experience which shifted her career toward peacemaking. If, as described here, MCC humanitarian work in North Korea has become a platform for peace witness, we might ask: witness to what? Perhaps to what scholar Marc Gopin describes as a distinctly Anabaptist approach to peacebuilding where true transformation requires building new relationships over many years across divides. Such peace work bears witness to “the inherent moral value of building relationships” across divides and with adversaries where the “moment of relation becomes a moment of religious fulfillment, of imitatio dei, in [the case of Anabaptists] emulating Jesus. The person in relation becomes an end in herself” (Gopin, 242, 246). With U.S.-DPRK relations tense and fraught, such long-term relationship-building is more critical than ever.

Chris Rice is director of the MCC United Nations Office. Editorial assistance was provided by Abby Hershberger, communications and advocacy assistant at MCC’s UN Office in New York City.

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Learn more

Gopin, Marc. “The Religious Component of Mennonite Peacebuilding.” In From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions to International Peacebuilding. Ed. John Paul Lederach and Cynthia Sampson, 233-255. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rice, Chris. “Contested South Korean Identities of Reunification and Christian Paradigms of Reconciliation.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 42/2 (2018): 133-142.

Reconcilers. Blog for Chris Rice. https://reconcilers.wordpress.com/.

Peacebuilding as presence: MCC assignments in “enemy” contexts

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog twice per week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website. This article consist of five reflections which will be posted separately.

Beginning with the decision by some MCC workers from the United States to remain in Vietnam after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country on March 29, 1973, one form MCC’s peace witness has taken has been a witness of presence within so-called “enemy” contexts. Such peace witness included placing graduate students behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War tasked with connecting to and supporting churches in the Eastern bloc, assigning aid workers to live and work in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion of the country in 2002, placing more graduate students at an Islamic studies center in Qom, Iran, seconding staff to work with health ministries in Afghanistan and sending agronomists to make extended program support visits to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Below are reflections from MCC workers who were involved in such peacebuilding-as-presence initiatives on the joys and challenges they faced.—The editors.

Iran

As our plane landed in Iran about 20 years ago, my thoughts swirled with hope and fear. What will “blessed are the peacemakers” look like as our family’s daily work in a religiously and politically foreign land? My spouse, Maren, and I had just finished studying Persian, Shi’ite Islam and Women in Islam the previous months at the University of Virginia. We both had seminary degrees. Fear of the unknown swirled around our hope for maintaining and strengthening an MCC peacebuilding bridge of trust in Iran. Many MCCers had visited Iran before to lay a deep foundation of relationships with Iranian partners through earthquake relief efforts and short-term medical work. We were called to be the first MCC staff to take up residence in the country.

Our presence in Iran as the only Christians living in the religious capital of Qom was marked by hospitality: giving and receiving tea, fruit and words of honor and welcome

Entering Iran meant not only arrival into a religiously and politically different world. It also unfolded within a legacy of no diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S. and strained Canadian-Iranian relationships. Both Maren and I were bicultural, something that helped us see two worlds. When we landed in Tehran, Maren had to put on a chador (“tent” in Persian) and I had to replace my gold wedding ring with a silver one.

Our presence in Iran as the only Christians living in the religious capital of Qom was marked by hospitality: giving and receiving tea, fruit and words of honor and welcome. How do we find and create shared meaning in the presence of our supposed enemies? Respect became a learned behavior in relationships.

Near the end of one meeting, a student said that he needed to leave early for the “Down with America” rally.” The word for “Down With” or “Death To” sounds a lot like the word for “chickens” in Persian, so I responded, “Do you mean ‘Chickens for America?’ Thank you very much.” He replied with a smile, “It is our seminary’s day of the month and the rally bus is coming soon—don’t take it personally!’

As we sought to build relationships, we focused on listening and answering questions as asked. We met many who wondered, “Why did you come here?” Over time, as trust was built in some relationships, legacy traumas and deep political and religious differences came on the table beside the tea. More time to listen, more words flowed. Some conversations went on for hours. After nine previous years in Egypt and Syria, I had come to enjoy this kind of conversation.

How do we find and create shared meaning in the presence of our supposed enemies? Respect became a learned behavior in relationships.

We usually had Friday lunch with other families. Each Tuesday I joined a group studying religions at the graduate level. I taught them some dimensions of Christian history and theology. At the end of each session, I noted one act of faith that changed the world. In one session I shared about Habitat for Humanity. The course coordinator researched Habitat online and came back the next session saying: “We need a Muslim Habitat for Humanity.” Maren spent time with various women at the Women’s University. We both studied Persian in the morning.

What do Mennonites, who seek in their daily lives to live out the politics of Jesus, do when encountering Iranian Shi’ites for whom the Rule of the Jurists (religious leaders) means the merging of national politics and religious practice? Many persons practiced their English with us and my knowing some Arabic helped a lot in conducting in-depth discussions about these differences.

Other MCC couples followed us to take up residence in Iran, while scores of Mennonites from Canada and the U.S. visited Iran as part of MCC-organized delegations. MCC also worked with Mennonite colleges, universities and seminaries in the U.S. in hosting Iranian delegations and in organizing academic conferences in Iran and Canada. Many other forms of encounter emerged, with Iranian delegations going to Canada and Iranian scholars-in-residence appointed for short terms at Mennonite universities in the U.S. and Canada. These delegations and exchanges continued—until the political winds changed here and there.

Evelyn Shellenberger (right) converses with a faculty member (name not provided) after a general meeting of MCC visitors with the faculty of the University of Shiraz in Shiraz, Iran. Photo was taken during an MCC peace delegation to Iran, December 28, 2007, to January 13, 2008. Shellenberger and husband Wallace Shellenberger lived in Qom, Iran, 2001 to 2004 as part of an MCC-sponsored student exchange program. (MCC photo/Doug Hostetter)

As I look back 20 years later, I hold more fear than hope. There are many ways to destroy the potential for peace and I am watching it happen stage by stage with increasing fervor on both sides. The Shi’ite legacy trauma of persecution has led to increased militancy in various countries. The U.S. assertiveness in the Middle East has shifted to Iran more intensely through sanctions and threats. There were and are forces very willing to sabotage peace on both sides, those very willing to push open the gates of hell and those working to close and seal them in acts of peacebuilding. We have yet to see the outcome.

Roy Hange worked with MCC for over a decade in Egypt, Syria and Iran. Together with his spouse, Maren, he pastors Charlottesville Mennonite Church in Virginia.

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Learn more

Kauffman, Richard A. An American in Persia: A Pilgrimage to Iran. Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2010.

Pierce, Laurie Blanton. What is Iran? A Primer on Culture, Politics, and Religion. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2009.

Peacebuilding as presence: MCC assignments in “enemy” contexts

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog twice per week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website. This article consist of five reflections which will be posted separately.

Beginning with the decision by some MCC workers from the United States to remain in Vietnam after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country on March 29, 1973, one form MCC’s peace witness has taken has been a witness of presence within so-called “enemy” contexts. Such peace witness included placing graduate students behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War tasked with connecting to and supporting churches in the Eastern bloc, assigning aid workers to live and work in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion of the country in 2002, placing more graduate students at an Islamic studies center in Qom, Iran, seconding staff to work with health ministries in Afghanistan and sending agronomists to make extended program support visits to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Below are reflections from MCC workers who were involved in such peacebuilding-as-presence initiatives on the joys and challenges they faced.—The editors.

Behind the Iron Curtain

In 1977, during our second year of marriage and study at Fuller Theological Seminary, we were invited to serve in what was portrayed as an innovative, daring, bridge-building peace witness in what was then Yugoslavia. To go behind the so-called “Iron Curtain” was the stuff of myth and spy fiction. We were among the first of what later became a sizeable group called the East Europe fraternity—a group of students who offered a Mennonite presence in at least eight Eastern European countries from 1977 to 1990. Ours was a peacebuilding venture largely comprised of on-the-ground presence and relationship building.

For Mennonite church leaders in the United States and Canada to assess that our people were vulnerable to fear and manipulation was both far-sighted and sober.

For people in Canada, the U.S. and western Europe, the specter of communism around the globe created widespread and often irrational fear. For Christians, including Mennonites, the fear was complicated by how political and economic threats of communism versus capitalism matched so closely with understandings of religious freedom and the persecution of the church under atheist regimes. For Mennonite church leaders in the United States and Canada to assess that our people were vulnerable to fear and manipulation was both far-sighted and sober. The way they chose to meet that danger was to send volunteers across the borders of the Iron Curtain to study at universities and spend time with real people on the ground—listening, offering friendship, assisting as invited and sharing the gospel of peace by being present and available for collaborative work when possible. We agreed to be among those volunteers, arriving in Yugoslavia in the fall of 1977.

This was truly an educational venture and we had student visas to prove it, but the education was meant to flow both ways. In the East, our message was meant to be that not all Christians see your land and your people as hated enemies. In the West, the educational thrust was to help our people see that real folks live with real challenges in socialist societies, but it is not the end of the world as we know it. A remarkable religious vitality is sustained in faith communities even though constrained by systemic and ideological challenges.

A couple and their daughter from the Orenburg Evangelical Christian Baptist congregation, Orenburg, Soviet Union (Russia) are looking at a scrapbook sent as a gift from Groffdale (Pennsylvania) Mennonite Church in this 1988 photo. An MCC delegation visited the Soviet Union from February 21 to March 4, 1988 at the invitation of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians/Baptists (AUCECB). (MCC photo/John A Lapp)

Our assignment, though sponsored by MCC and Mennonite mission agencies, was not formally missionary or relief and development work in the classic sense. An embodied presence on the ground was deemed the most strategic way to work at relational peacebuilding. Sharing the everyday life of ordinary Christian believers in a communist setting seemed to be our best hope of subverting the fears and overcoming the ignorance of our own people back home. And indeed, as we would return home for brief visits, circulating in our sponsoring communities, people had real questions and showed genuine interest. We were not planting Mennonite churches or starting programs or institutions. We were instructed to come alongside existing communities of Jesus-followers, who became our best instructors. Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Methodists, Catholics and Orthodox, as well as Muslims and Marxists, were all helpful in showing us their complex realities.

Our assignment included freedom to pursue any contacts which could help us toward our goal. We traveled extensively in several regions, engaged with churches and helped with educational efforts in several schools. In addition to relating to primarily Catholic Croatian and Orthodox Serbian contexts, we spent two years in Muslim neighborhoods of Sarajevo. We were welcomed by active Protestant leaders who quickly embraced and included us in their educational efforts. And since we were not setting up our own programs, we could selectively bolster anything that was constructive, collaborative and designed to serve purposes larger than self-interest.

There were plenty of challenges as well. While we had directors from MCC and Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities (EMBMC, now EMM) to provide guidance from the distance, and the “fraternity” of our Mennonite peers in other East European settings, we didn’t have formal local partners. We observed freelance operatives from other Western parachurch and mission agencies whose work was not subject to review by any local group and became problematic. We worked hard to maintain relationships that could incorporate local accountability. There was also our own isolation as the only Mennonites in-country, including the need to negotiate what was best for our children in education, community and church life. Meanwhile, although the political ideology was explicitly egalitarian, the general culture was very patriarchal.

That MCC had a presence on the ground was crucial to mobilizing tons of material aid, peacemaking responses and refugee care in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia in the wake of Yugoslavia’s dissolution.

It seems clear, looking back more than 40 years later, that the parallel assignments across Eastern Europe accomplished significant components of the goals we set out to achieve. The practical ecumenism of cooperating with people of other faiths was strategically fruitful during the subsequent war years in the Balkans. That MCC had a presence on the ground was crucial to mobilizing tons of material aid, peacemaking responses and refugee care in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia in the wake of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Evangelical faith communities came to see Mennonites as allies. They showed openness to Anabaptist theology and many made tangible commitments to peacebuilding in their local communities. And the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the triumph of the hopes we came to share with many people in the region.

Gerald and Sara Wenger Shenk worked with MCC Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia) from 1977-83 and 1986-89 (jointly with Eastern Mennonite Board of Mission and Charities, now EMM). Sara went on to serve as president of Anabaptist Biblical Seminary and Gerald as professor of church and society at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

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Learn more

Jantzen, Mark. The Wrong Side of the Wall: An American in East Berlin during the Peaceful Revolution. Nappanee, IN: Evangel Press, 1993.

A steady witness for peace: MCC in Washington, D.C.

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

In Washington, D.C., in November 1969, a small group of Mennonites stood in the early morning chill to participate in the March on Washington, one of many peace marches held during the Vietnam War. (MCC photo/Burton Buller)

As the year 2002 wore on, U.S. military action against Iraq seemed imminent. J. Daryl Byler, then-director of MCC’s Washington Office, worked with staff of Mennonite Church USA to mobilize church members against the impending war. They set a goal of gathering 5,000 signatures on a letter to President George W. Bush. In two weeks, more than 13,000 Mennonites representing nearly 250 congregations throughout the country, had signed the letter. [Eventually over 17,000 people signed.] Printed out, the signatures were 300 pages long—a six-inch stack of paper that Jim Schrag, Mennonite Church USA’s executive director, held up at a press conference in September 2002 to demonstrate the church’s opposition to the war. Ultimately, these advocacy efforts opposing U.S. military action were unsuccessful and the U.S. military invaded Iraq in March 2003. But it was a key moment in a steady witness for peace over the past five decades by the MCC U.S. Washington Office (originally named the Peace Section-Washington Office).

The time has come when we can no longer maintain faith with the homeless, the hungry, the orphaned and the wounded to whom we minister unless we speak out as clearly as we can against the savage war in which our country is engaged.

— MCC letter to President
Lyndon Johnson, 1966

Even before the office opened in 1968, U.S. Mennonites had been communicating with government officials about conscientious objection concerns, including a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. Between 1940 and 1967, Mennonite leaders testified 13 times before congressional committees about conscientious objection. Concerns about the rights of conscientious objectors continue today, with the Washington Office helping to convene a gathering of Anabaptist church representatives in June 2019 to respond to recommendations from the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service.

MCC’s work around the globe has also helped Mennonites understand that their advocacy to the government needs to extend beyond the protection of their own rights as conscientious objectors to calling for an end to war and militarism. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, MCC staff heard a clear plea to advocate for an end to U.S. military involvement in the war. MCC leadership conveyed this message in a 1966 letter to President Lyndon Johnson. “The time has come,” they wrote, “when we can no longer maintain faith with the homeless, the hungry, the orphaned and the wounded to whom we minister unless we speak out as clearly as we can against the savage war in which our country is engaged.” MCC opened its Washington, D.C., office for public policy advocacy in 1968. In its early years, MCC vigorously advocated for an end to the Vietnam War. Following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, this advocacy shifted to urging the U.S. to normalize economic and diplomatic relations with Vietnam and Laos.

Delton Franz, right, and Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Ore) discuss issues they worked on together during their time in Washington at the 25th-anniversary celebration of the MCC Washington Office in 1993. (MCC photo/David Schrock-Shenk)

The Washington Office has also spoken out against U.S. militarism more broadly throughout its history, including the increasingly steep levels of funding for the Pentagon. In 1975, the office’s director, Delton Franz, lamented the Secretary of Defense’s use of Scripture to introduce a military budget that topped $100 billion for the first time. “If the Defense Secretary’s understanding of Scripture is found wanting,” Franz wrote, “perhaps equally serious is the ignorance of all too many of us in the Christian community on the realities of the militarization of our economic and political system. Do we understand the immensity of the military juggernaut that we are being asked to buy into?”

Drawing on the experience of MCC’s partner organizations in situations of conflict around the world, the Washington Office has consistently opposed U.S. arms sales and foreign military assistance. So, for example, in the 1980s, the office arranged meetings between MCC workers in El Salvador and congressional delegations who visited the country, helping members of Congress understand the impact of U.S. involvement in the civil war.

In 2000, Colombian Mennonites issued a plea to U.S. church members, urging them to oppose “Plan Colombia,” the U.S. anti-drug initiative that sent billions of dollars to the Colombian military. “Just as lighter fluid among flames produces more fire,” they wrote, “more arms produce more war.” The Washington Office worked persistently—and successfully, in some cases—to change the voting record of members of Congress on the issue. The voices of MCC’s constituents were critical in bringing about this change.

Karen Ventura was a consultant in the new office for Mennonite Hispanic Immigration Service in Washington, D.C., in 1978. The MCC Washington Office began doing advocacy on immigration in the late 1970s. (MCC photo/Lynn Roth)

An August 2013 action alert from the Washington Office generated more than 5,000 emails to policymakers, urging them to oppose U.S. airstrikes against Syria. Washington Office staff heard from congressional aides that congressional office phones were ringing off their hooks, with the vast majority of callers opposing military action. In the end, this grassroots pressure helped move the U.S. to support a diplomatic resolution to the immediate crisis. More recent work by the office to address U.S. militarism includes calling for a formal end to the Korean War and opposing arms sales to the Nigerian government in its fight against Boko Haram. The office also opposes efforts to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border, calling instead for more humane responses to migrants arriving at that border.

The MCC U.S. Washington Office is certainly not the only organization in Washington, D.C., that advocates for peace and against militarism. But since its founding over fifty years ago, a vision of peace rooted in God’s justice and care for the marginalized has guided the Washington Office’s work. This work has mobilized Anabaptists to engage in public policy advocacy as part of their Christian witness, and has been undergirded by testimonies and calls from churches and peace leaders around the world about the destructive impact of war and militarism and the need for transformative, peaceful approaches to conflict. Over the past five decades, public policy advocacy through MCC’s Washington Office has been an essential element of what it means to work for peace in the name of Christ. May this witness continue as MCC begins its second century.

Rachelle Lyndaker Schlabach is director of MCC’s Washington Office.

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Learn more

Miller, Keith Graber. Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves: American Mennonites Engage Washington. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee, 1996.

Washington Memo. Available at https://washingtonmemo.org/newsletter/. Published three times a year by the MCC Washington Office.

MCC Canada peace programming: a ministry for or to the churches?

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

Peace programming has been an essential element of MCC’s ministry in Canada since the organization was formed in 1963. But an ongoing tension present from the very beginning was whether this ministry was intended as an outward witness or an inward strengthening—whether it was a ministry for and on behalf of the Anabaptist churches in Canada or a ministry to those same churches.

When MCC Canada (MCCC) was formed in the closing days of 1963, one of its mandates was to further the peace mission of the Mennonite, Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ churches who founded the organization. MCC was to act as a united voice for Canadian Anabaptists in matters of national concern, such as “peace witness, alternative service, immigration and other matters” (Epp-Tiessen, 78). The 1965 MCC Canada constitution confirmed “peace witness” as a core area of its responsibility.

This emphasis on peace witness indicates that MCC Canada’s founders envisioned a vibrant outreach program, inviting people beyond the Mennonite community to embrace a vision for nonviolent peacemaking, even while they saw a need for peace education in the MCC member churches. One of the first peace witness projects the new organization undertook was to host a peace booth at Toronto’s annual Canadian National Exhibition. The volunteers who staffed the booth shared literature and engaged passersby in conversations about peacemaking alternatives to war.

As the office addressed government on issues of defence policy, the arms trade and Canadian military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, MCCC heard charges from some constituents that it should not engage in such ‘political’ activity.

Within a short time, it became clear that some of MCC Canada’s constituent churches were not supportive of the organization’s peace witness efforts. A key issue which surfaced this tension was MCC Canada’s support for young men from the United States fleeing to Canada—either to evade the draft or to desert the military—because they refused to be part of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. MCC Canada allocated a small amount of money to meet the immediate needs of some of these thousands of draft “dodgers” and resisters and encouraged Canadian Mennonite churches to offer to support to these young men. Constituency reaction was swift and strong. Letters to MCC, additional letters sent to the editors of Anabaptist periodicals and conference resolutions condemned MCC Canada’s stance. People opposed support for the war resisters because they suspected the young men of being drug-using hippies and not “true” conscientious objectors since many lacked a well-articulated faith-based conviction. MCC Canada made the case that Mennonites’ own historic stance of conscientious objection and resistance to war should lead them to support the resisters, but many constituents did not see it that way. Dan Zehr, director of the MCC Canada Peace and Social Concerns Program, asked why constituents were generous and open in helping people overseas, but were only prepared to help the “right kind of people” at home (Epp-Tiessen, 115).

Therefore, almost from the beginning, MCC Canada staff and volunteers realized they could not assume an Anabaptist constituency that would whole-heartedly embrace peace witness work. In order to do the “external” work of peace witness, they would need to do the “internal” work of strengthening constituents’ commitment to peace. Over the years, MCC Canada invested significant resources in doing just that. MCC Canada’s peace program staff devoted significant time speaking in churches, organizing special events and producing Christian education curricula and other resources with the goal of fortifying member churches in their commitment to biblical peace theology. One of the longest standing projects was a Peace Sunday Packet, developed initially by MCC Ontario in 1987 that then quickly became a national project. The packet was a special worship, reflection and action resource produced for church use in conjunction with Remembrance Day in November.

To remember is to work for peace.

—MCC Remembrance
Day button.

The notion of an MCC Canada ministry to Anabaptist churches was not unique to MCC Canada’s peace program. Programs that worked with Indigenous people, persons with disabilities, victims of domestic violence and other marginalized individuals—many of these programs birthed by the MCC Canada peace program—also found it important to minister to the churches. MCC Canada staff preached and made presentations in churches, created resources for churches and engaged churches in efforts to help Anabaptists in Canada understand and embrace work that was often quite removed from their own lived reality (Epp-Tiessen, 135-36).

Despite these efforts at ministering to the churches, MCC Canada peace witness initiatives continued to rouse the concerns of individuals, congregations and conferences that purportedly held to a peace church tradition. In the early 1980s, for example, the Mennonite Brethren Conference raised concerns about MCC Canada’s work in Indigenous communities and its advocacy on military spending and nuclear disarmament. A task force was established to explore these concerns and respond to them. About the same time, a well-positioned observer noted an “anti-MCC feeling” among conservative Mennonites in southern Manitoba because of its work in “the peace section and native concerns.”

Through the 1980s and 1990s, much of constituency critique was aimed at the peace witness work of the MCC Canada Ottawa Office. As the office addressed government on issues of defence policy, the arms trade and Canadian military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, MCC Canada heard charges from some constituents that it should not engage in such “political” activity. According to J.M. Klassen, long-time executive director of MCCC, the charge of being “political” frequently surfaced when critics disagreed with MCC’s point of view (J.M. Klassen, Jacob’s Journey).

By no means all parts of MCC Canada’s Canadian Anabaptist constituency opposed public peace witness. In 2001, for example, in response to the September 11 attacks in the United States, MCC Canada organized a special cross-country hymn sing for peace as a way of calling Canada to resist joining the U.S. in military engagement against Afghanistan. In Ottawa, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Abbotsford, MCC constituents gathered to pray and to sing publicly for an international order of peace. In 2003, over a thousand people in many countries joined a weekly “women’s fast for peace” as a way of registering their opposition to war on Iraq. Additionally, over 2,000 constituents across Canada signed a joint letter from MCC Canada and denominational leaders to the prime minister with the same intent.

Laura Dyck, from Sterling Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ontario, wears the MCC peace button at a 2015 walk for reconciliation between settler and Indigenous Canadians based on justice and honoring of treaties. (MCC photo/Alison Ralph)

Nevertheless, by the first part of this century it was becoming more and more difficult to engage Canadian Anabaptists on the issues that formed MCC Canada’s traditional peace mandate: war and armed conflict, conscientious objection to military service, military spending and the arms trade, a peace tax fund and so on. Constituents more happily embraced such growing emphases in MCC on peace as mediation, dialogue, conflict resolution, cross-cultural relationship-building and non-partisan humanitarian assistance. They were less eager to embrace peace witness initiatives that somehow put them at odds with the broader society or government.

In 1989 MCC Ontario produced a simple red button with the message “To remember is to work for peace.” It encouraged people to wear the button around Remembrance Day as an alternative to the poppy worn to commemorate war veterans and as a gentle call to seek non-violent alternatives to war. The button was well received, and over the years thousands were sold and distributed across the country. But as the years passed, the message of the button lost its power. Indeed, a growing group of constituents identified it as “preachy,” “naive” and “offensive to veterans.” A lengthy conversation on Facebook in 2015 surfaced many of these opinions, prompting an in-depth survey within MCC Canada and the provincial MCCs as to whether it was time to lay the button and its slogan to rest.

Around the same time, MCC Canada also quietly ended staffing for a national peace program. The rationale was that the organization hoped to channel further staff time into the work of the Ottawa Office. This was supposedly a temporary measure, but the move became permanent with no discussion. Many of the provincial offices of MCC discontinued their peace programs soon after. To be sure, MCC Canada continued to support peacebuilding initiatives, primarily in its international program, but it had more or less abandoned the task of ministering to the churches, of resourcing Anabaptist congregations in their basic commitments to Anabaptist-Mennonite peace theology.

Why this major shift? Many possible reasons surface. For one thing, MCC Canada peace staff had not been very successful in reaching out to some of the more evangelical or conservative congregations and denominational conferences. With some exceptions, MCC Canada peace staff mostly found themselves preaching to the choir and were ineffective in stemming the gradual erosion of peace theology and practice among Canadian Anabaptists. Some may have asked: why continue an outreach that did not produce the intended results?

Secondly, it had been decades since military conscription had tested the convictions of Mennonites, Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ in Canada about non-participation in war. Consequently, it was increasingly difficult to engage church audiences in exploring the beliefs and practices that might one day be required to authenticate a stance of conscientious objection. Instead—or as a result—MCC Canada peace staff increasingly found themselves focusing on pressing justice issues where there was interest, issues such as care for creation, economic justice and justice in contexts such as South Africa, Colombia and Palestine and Israel. Finally, MCC Canada’s relationship with constituent churches was changing. As time passed, MCC Canada could no longer count on the automatic support of Anabaptist denominations and congregations in Canada. By 2020, some Anabaptist conferences had withdrawn their official membership in MCC Canada. Within this rapidly changing and challenging environment, MCC Canada positioned itself increasingly as a ministry of and for the church rather than as a ministry to the church. MCC Canada thus continued to work for peace by supporting churches and community-based organizations around the world in their efforts for peace, but its peace ministry no longer included sustained work to foster and shore up Anabaptist peace convictions about war, armed conflict and conscientious objection among churches in Canada.

Esther Epp-Tiessen is an historian and author and served as peace program coordinator for MCC Canada from 2000 to 2010.

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Learn more

Epp, Frank H. and Marlene G. Epp. The Progressions of Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section. Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1984.

Epp-Tiessen, Esther. Mennonite Central Committee in Canada: A History. Winnipeg: CMU Press, 2013.

Klassen, Jacob M. Jacob’s Journey: From Zagradowka to Zion. Self-published. 2001.

MCC peace work in the United States: building an archive

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

MCC’s peace work has always been multidirectional, including both an inward direction that aims to nurture the peace witness of Anabaptist churches in the United States and Canada and an outward direction that undertakes peace and justice work in the world around us, reaching beyond the boundaries of the church. Tracing the histories of this multidirectional peace witness is not a simple task. Where does one begin? Whose individual and communal stories are part of that broader story? Whose voices are we (de)centering in telling the story of Anabaptist peace witness in the United States?

Perhaps one begins with the formation of the MCC Peace Section in 1942 during World War II. For decades, the Peace Section served as an agency for counseling about conscription and the draft and as a center for study, research, writing and education regarding the Mennonite peace position. The Peace Section “was often on the cutting edge, dealing with controversial issues—draft resistance, nonregistration, war tax resistance, and women’s concerns to name a few.” It served as a “prophetic vehicle” that “could monitor, facilitate, and encourage more activist forms of peacemaking which otherwise would have been stifled by more conservative denominational forces” (Driedger and Kraybill, 142).

In this 1959 photo, J. Harold Sherk (left) and John Martin of The National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (NISBCO) descend the steps at the Selective Service System headquarters in Washington DC. Sherk, of Kitchener, Ontario, was a Mennonite Brethren in Christ pastor and educator. During and after World War II, he also served in inter-Mennonite peace work, and served with MCC in India doing relief work. October 1949 brought him and his wife Mila to Akron, Pennsylvania, where he served until 1958 as Executive Secretary of MCC Peace Section. In 1958, responsibility as director of the National Service Bureau for Religious Objectors (NSBRO) took the couple to Hyattsville, Maryland, until retirement in 1969. (MCC photo)

Over the ensuing decades, the MCC Peace Section served as the umbrella for a wide variety of MCC initiatives and departments that sought to address questions of justice and peacebuilding. For example, MCC’s Washington Office was established in 1968 under the aegis of the Peace Section. This new office in the U.S. capital provided an important means of public engagement, political advocacy and communication between Anabaptist leaders and government representatives.

From the 1960s into the 1980s, the Peace Section initiated several distinct ministries, such as Mennonite Conciliation Services, Women’s Concerns (later Women’s Advocacy), Peace Education/Draft Counseling and Global Education. With the establishment of MCC Canada in 1963 and the creation of a binational MCC, MCC U.S. and MCC Canada divided responsibilities for addressing different types of country-specific peace and justice issues. In 1990, the MCC U.S. Peace Section was renamed Peace and Justice Ministries and began overseeing the Office on Crime and Justice. In 1993, MCC U.S. Peace and Justice Ministries added a Racism Awareness Program (later the Anti-Racism Program), while its Mennonite Conciliation Services program focused one of its staff positions on urban peacemaking. In 1999, the Immigration Education program was added, and in 2005 Mennonite Conciliation Services and the Office on Crime and Justice merged to form the Office on Justice and Peacebuilding. In 2012, MCC U.S. Peace and Justice Ministries was rebranded MCC U.S. National Program, with focus areas in Immigration Education, Anti-Oppression, Peace Education and Restorative Justice. Today, MCC U.S. National Program addresses Immigration Education, Peace Education, Criminal Justice Education and Anti-Racism and Anti-Sexism Education.

MCC’s nascent recognition that peace witness required addressing racism took a new dimension when in 1960 Vincent and Rosemarie Harding started a Mennonite Voluntary Service unit in Atlanta, a couple of blocks away from the home of Martin and Coretta Scott King, under the umbrella of the MCC Peace Section.

In addition to these programs and activities of the MCC Peace Section and its successors, a significant impact has been the social networks that have emerged around the work. MCC’s peace work not only “symbolized the activist edge of Mennonite peacemaking but also provided a network for hundreds of Mennonites who found support and solidarity” (Driedger and Kraybill, 144). In the remainder of this article, I will look at two examples of MCC’s peace witness that represent important shifts not only in the justice and peacebuilding work of MCC, but also in some fundamental assumptions about what that work is to begin with, a peace witness that embraces public engagement and political advocacy aimed at challenging systemic racism and imperialism.

Attention to systemic oppression and injustice, such as racism, has been a significant part of MCC’s peace work in the U.S. MCC U.S.’s Damascus Road Anti-Racism Process from the nineties and the aughts (that works independently today under the name Roots of Justice) stands as a more recent example of such peace work. But MCC anti-racism efforts can be traced back earlier, as white Mennonite participants in Civilian Public Service camps in the 1940s in places like Gulfport, Mississippi, were confronted by the stark realities of racism in the Jim Crow South. MCC’s nascent recognition that peace witness required addressing racism took on a new dimension when in 1960 Vincent and Rosemarie Harding started a Mennonite Voluntary Service unit in Atlanta a couple of blocks away from the home of Martin and Coretta Scott King under the umbrella of the MCC Peace Section. Vincent Harding was an African-American pastor, scholar and activist who played a significant role in the civil rights movement and in the Mennonite Church in the 1950s and 1960s, calling on Mennonites to bring their values “to bear on the urgent reality of racial oppression” and “align themselves with African-American struggles as an expression of ‘the way of the disciple’” (Shearer, 222-3). As the civil rights movement grew in visibility, and thanks to the prophetic calls of leaders like the Hardings, Mennonites in the United States increasingly paid more attention to racial oppression in their own communities, with the Mennonite press even beginning to include appeals for legislative action to address the blight of racism.

Who is being (de)centered in the peacebuilding stories we tell? Whose labor made any of these peacebuilding efforts possible?

Vincent Harding’s work and early partnership with Delton Franz—a white Mennonite pastor and the first director of the MCC Washington Office—arguably shaped the path that led to the first office MCC opened for the purpose of political advocacy. Harding called Mennonites “to transform the principles of nonconformity and nonresistance into active service to the world, especially in the cause of racial justice” (Shearer, 247). Even as the Hardings became understandably frustrated by the slow response of MCC and of white Mennonites to confront the evil of racism more vigorously, their witness helped to catalyze a significant shift in MCC’s peace witness and provided a challenge that reverberates today.

Other voices have also helped to catalyze the transformation of MCC and broader Mennonite peace witness—including the voice of an unnamed Palestinian woman. This Palestinian woman confronted Hedy Sawadsky, a white Canadian relief worker with MCC in the Middle East in the late 1960s, with the biting observation that “what you’re doing here is fine, but it is only Band-Aid work. Why don’t you go home and work for peace and get at the root causes of evil and war?” (Driedger and Kraybill, 137). We do not know the name of this Palestinian woman in Sawadsky’s story, but her impact was meaningful and significant. When Sawadsky moved to the U.S. in 1970, she became involved in war tax resistance and other forms of nonviolent direct action, joining Mennonite activists in protests at the Pentagon and the nuclear weapons plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado.

In the voices of the Hardings and this unnamed Palestinian woman, we hear calls for MCC to embrace a “thicker” concept of peace that includes public engagement and political advocacy—working for change “upstream”(where problems originate) and not just responding “downstream” (where systems of oppression damage vulnerable communities). Voices like the Hardings and this unnamed Palestinian woman have also pressed MCC to recognize how U.S. imperialism abroad and racism at home are interconnected (see Satvedi 2011 for reflections on the interconnection of legacies of colonialism). These voices have pressed white peace workers from the U.S. over the years to confess and repent our own histories of violence and injustice on this continent and to recognize that our work at anti-imperialism abroad must be complemented by our anti-racism and anti-oppression work at home.

In building an archive of MCC peacebuilding work, we must ask critical questions like: Who is being (de)centered in the peacebuilding stories we tell? Whose labor made any of these peacebuilding efforts possible? If, with bell hooks, we understand our global historical context as shaped by imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2004), we will recognize that Mennonite peace work must be multidirectional and attentive to intersections, and we will strive to create an archive of voices from the MCC and broader Mennonite past that centers the witness of the Hardings and the unnamed Palestinian woman who confronted Hedy Sawadsky.  

Timothy Seidel is assistant professor of peacebuilding and development and director of the Center for Interfaith Engagement at Eastern Mennonite University.

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Learn more

Amstutz, Jim Stutzman. Ed. “Fifty Years of Peacemaking.” Peace Office Newsletter. 22/5 (September-October 1992).

Docherty, Jayne and Mikhala Lantz-Simmons. A Genealogy of Ideas: What Is Old Is New Again. Harrisonburg, VA: Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 2016. Online at https://emu.edu/cjp/docs/A_Genealogy_of_Ideas_-Journal_1-May_13_2016.pdf.

Driedger, Leo and Donald B. Kraybill. Mennonite Peacemaking: From Quietism to Activism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1994.

hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 204.

Harding, Vincent. Hope and History: Why We Must Continue to Tell the Story of the Movement. Revised edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010.

Lapp, John A. “The Peace Mission of the Mennonite Central Committee.” Mennonite Quarterly Review. 44/3 (July 1970): 281-297.

Sampson, Cynthia and John Paul Lederach (eds.). 2000. From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions to International Peacebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University.

Satvedi, Valentina. Ed. “Anabaptism and Postcolonialism.” Peace Office Newsletter. 41/3 (July-September 2011).

Seidel, Timothy. “The Things That Make for Peace: Our Treatment of Immigrants in the United States Has Links with the Palestine-Israel Conflict.” The Mennonite 12/23 (December 15, 2009).

Shearer, Tobin Miller. “Moving beyond Charisma in Civil Rights Scholarship: Vincent Harding’s Sojourn with the Mennonites, 1958-1966.” Mennonite Quarterly Review. 82/2 (April 2008): 213-248.

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.

Reflections from Civilian Public Service (1941-1946)

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.

Women’s Summer Service Unit from Civilian Public Service (CPS) Camp No. 85. at Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases in Howard, Rhode Island. The Unit was one of 26 CPS mental health units operated by MCC, opened in 1943 and closed in 1946. (MCC photo)

As the specter of war loomed in the late 1930s, Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren and Quakers (who identified themselves as the “Historic Peace Churches”) collaborated to advocate to U.S. government officials that provisions be made for conscientious objection to war. MCC officials represented diverse Mennonite, Brethren in Christ and Amish groups in these discussions with government and military officials. Together, the Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers were successful in securing an agreement to establish the Civilian Public Service (CPS) program, which would operate camps where young men would be stationed to carry out work of “national importance” in lieu of military service. These alternative service CPS camps would then fall under the authority of different civilian government agencies, while being operated by MCC and other church bodies.

We exited CPS persuaded that a life of voluntary Christ-followership demands constant service to other people.

—Marvin hein

MCC opened its first CPS camp on May 22, 1941 in Grottoes, Virginia. It would continue to operate CPS camps through March 1946. MCC’s first 25 camps all fell under the jurisdiction of the Soil Conservation Service, the Forest Service and the National Park Service. Over CPS’s nearly five years of operation, MCC collaborated with twelve U.S. government departments, including the Public Health Service, the Department of Agriculture and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration. Of the 151 CPS camps or units that operated during World War II, MCC operated 60 of them on either a solo or joint basis. Records indicate that around 38% of the conscientious objectors who passed through the CPS camps were from different Mennonite churches (with 4,665 young Mennonite men out of a total CPS group of approximately 12,000). CPS men fought forest fires, worked at soil conservation, served as orderlies in mental hospitals and much more. MCC’s first CPS mental health unit opened in August 1942 in Staunton, Virginia. Mennonite experiences in CPS mental health units spurred post-war action for more humane mental health facilities, leading to the founding of Mennonite mental health centers such as Oaklawn in Goshen, Indiana, and Prairie View in Newton, Kansas.

CPS broadened ecumenical horizons for participants, bringing young men from diverse Anabaptist groups together—and with Christians from other traditions. MCC organized educational programs for Mennonite participants, publishing a series of booklets for those programs that covered Mennonite history and theologies of service and non-resistance. MCC sought to foster a spirit of CPS men being “willing second milers” rather than “conscripted Christians,” even as some CPS men chafed at rough living conditions, low pay and compulsory labor (and as some CPS men criticized the program for too-close affiliation with the government and the war effort). CPS service had different meanings for different participants: for some it was a religiously acceptable way of fulfilling a patriotic duty, while for others it represented a positive, proactive witness for the gospel of peace (and for some it was both).

In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, I left public school teaching because I knew that once our country declared war, I could not supervise war bond sales.

—Mary wiser

Just as the war effort mobilized many women into the work force, so, too, did women become part of the CPS effort. Wives and girlfriends often moved to be based near and work at or close by the camps where their husbands and boyfriends were stationed. Some women served in the camps as nurses. Women’s sewing societies prepared “camp kits” to send to CPS that included bedding, towels, toiletries, stationery and stamps. Over the course of CPS’s operations, around 2,000 pacifist women lived in or near the 151 camps, with CPS even operating women’s units at eight state-run mental institutions.

The excerpted reflections below from CPS newsletters and reports show young Anabaptist men and women reflecting on the meaning of Christian service and peace witness, on broadened ecumenical horizons gained through service and on the meaning of cooperation with the state in a time of war.

CPS as Christian service

CPS work has meaning to the men who perform it as an expression of loyalty and love to their country, and of their desire to make a contribution to its welfare. It has still larger meaning as constructive service and ministry to human needs, and as a demonstration of a way of life in peace and love in contrast to the destructiveness of war and violence.
—from Mennonite Civilian Public Service Statement of Policy, approved by MCC Executive Committee, September 16, 1943.

We want to do more than take a stand against war… We believed in the spirit of nonresistance, but also in the power of love to overcome evil.

—Elmer ediger, 1945

CPS is a constructive witness to the way of love as taught by Christ. The fact that the government has not opened the way immediately to use CPS men in areas of more direct need such as relief and reconstruction has not been too disturbing even though many at home and in the camps as well as administrative officials sincerely desire such service and feel it should be made possible. Because the church desires relief service does not mean they will refuse to cooperate with the government in areas that they can use CPS men and which are constructive in nature. . . . [S]o long as CPS gives expression to this deep religious faith there will be support of CPS by the church. Should it become something else, or should the government disallow a religious expression, church support would no longer be forthcoming.” MCC hopes “that through the CPS experience men will deepen and grow in their faith in and love of God,” “that CPS will do works that are a witness to the faith,” “that the men in camp will be more than drafted men,” and that “the men will rise above the fact that they have been conscripted and look upon their status as an opportunity to hear testimony to a deep faith in God and God’s purpose for man.
“The Mennonite Hope in CPS,” Mennonite Central Committee CPS Newsletter 1/13 (March 19, 1943).

It has been stated that men in CPS are only going the first mile and that often grudgingly. That is far too true; but we can go the second mile. If we were not in CPS where could we better represent the principle of going the second mile? If we cannot go the second mile in CPS, then we are admitting that Christianity is not practical in every occasion.
—Abraham Graber (Amish CPS camper), Mennonite CPS Bulletin 3/24 (June 22, 1945).

To say that the men in CPS are going the second mile and overcoming evil with good is to look at the picture through rose-colored glasses.
—Anonymous CPS man, quoted in “Keeping the Vision Clear,” Mennonite CPS Bulletin 4/9 (November 8, 1945).

Glenn Smith, Forest Service Squad
Leader, adjusts the parachute of
Harry Mishler at Civilian Public
Service (CPS) Unit No. 103 in
Huson, Missoula County, Montana.
Camp No. 103 was a Forest Service
base camp operated by MCC in
cooperation with the Brethren and
Friends service committees. It
opened in May 1943 and closed
in April 1946. Men in the unit were
highly trained, parachuting into
rugged country to put out forest
fires; in down times they performed
fire prevention work. (MCC photo)

Writing in the 1945 MCC Workbook, Albert Gaeddert observed “A weariness with the program.” “With too many campers there is a lack of active participation. Interests seem to center about personal convenience.” “We have discovered certain of our limitations. Selfishness is still very much a part of us. We are not free from greed and the things of this world.”

Most of us entered CPS largely because we had little choice. We exited CPS persuaded that a life of voluntary Christ-followership demands constant service to other people. For two years we had served our national government, the church and each other. Somehow the conviction that our lives were not our own was translated into an unshakable belief that we were destined as God’s people to serve the world.
—Marvin Hein, A Community is Born: The Story of the Birth, Growth, Death and Legacy of Civilian Public Service Camp #138-1, Lincoln, Nebraska 1944-1947 (self-published).

[T]hose to whom CPS has been a challenge and have had as their motive service for Christ and the Church will make excellent relief workers and am hoping that they will be able to go soon into all parts of the world to witness for what they believe.
—Ellen Harder (former CPS nurse, written while working with MCC at Taxal Edge, England) Mennonite CPS Bulletin 4/2 (July 22, 1945).

Broadened inter-Anabaptist horizons

In most instances [the discharged CPS worker] will be interested in cooperating more closely with other Mennonite groups. He will have formed acquaintances among them, which he will not forget and he may not always sympathize too much with old prejudices. He will know other Mennonites as they are.
—Unnamed CPS worker, MCC Workbook, 1945.

Bennie Deckert reflected that “when we were at home many of us lived largely to ourselves. We had very little contact with the outside world, with men of different denominations, occupations, different sects, communities and states. Our friends lived nearby, perhaps in our very local community. Now we know men from nearly every state, denomination, and from nearly all walks of life. To many of us Mennonites has come the realization that there is much more to the word Mennonite than is embodied in our own local group.”
—“Three Years in CPS,” Rising Tide (June 1945).

Women and CPS

Civilian Public Service (CPS) Camp
No. 45 Camp sign situated on the
Skyline Drive in Luray, Virginia. Camp
No. 45 was a National Park Service
base camp located in Shenandoah
National Park and operated by MCC.
It opened in August 1942 and closed
in July 1946. CPS men maintained
and improved park and recreational
facilities, including roads. They also
performed conservation and fire
prevention duties. (Photo courtesy of
Edgar M. Clemens)

Lois Schertz: “Even though the working conditions at the Mt. Pleasant State Hospital were deplorable, there were many good things that came from that experience for me as a woman. The unit became a family. We bonded together in a beautiful way, both men and women. For example, in our church services, men and women both participated. This was my first experience in being allowed to lead a worship service. (I went back home after the war and it took a good 30 years for that to happen).”
—Lois Schertz (served at CPS unit at Mt. Pleasant State Hospital, Iowa), “War, Alternative Service, and a Reality Jolt,” Women’s Concerns Report, no. 116 (Sept.-Oct. 1994), 5.

In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, I left public school teaching because I knew that once our country declared war, I could not supervise war bond sales. Nor did I want to be part of the accelerating groundswell toward war that seemed to be required of public school teachers.
—Mary Wiser, “Searching for a Brotherly Life in a Warring World,” Women’s Concerns Report, no. 116 (Sept.-Oct. 1994), 8-9.

Expanded understandings of nonresistance and peace witness

We want to do more than take a stand against war. Many of us entered CPS with the vision that camp was the place where we could make a clear cut witness against war and for the positive aspect of our belief. We believed in the spirit of nonresistance, but also in the power of love to overcome evil.
—Elmer Ediger, Mennonite CPS Bulletin 4/4 (August 22, 1945).

Along with a stronger faith in the nonresistant position has come a greater sensitivity to the all-embracing implications of the Christian gospel. If nonresistance is held in regard to war only and not in attitude toward the mentally ill, the negro [sic], the under-privileged, employer, and fellow employees then nonresistance finds itself on the same level as a Sunday religion. In appreciating the totality of the way of love there comes a deep awareness of individual inadequacy, yet a drawing responsiveness to the call of Christ to permit him to penetrate every thought and act of our being.
—Unnamed CPS worker, MCC Workbook, 1945.

Mennonites, CPS and collaboration with the state

The irony of CPS was that Mennonites sought to remain free of governmental control, but by force of circumstances and tradition found themselves in one of the most intimate relationships ever established between church and state in American history, and with the military arm of the government at that.
—Al Keim, Gospel Herald, August 7, 1979.

Mennonites hold that it is the Christian’s duty loyally and faithfully to obey the state in all requirements which do not involve violation of the Christian conscience, that is, a violation of the teachings of the Word of God. They assuredly believe a Christian must obey God rather than man when the demands of the State conflict with this supreme loyalty to Christ but they also hold that the Christian should ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ and ‘Obey every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.’ Although they acknowledge that it is within the province of the state to require service of its citizens, they reserve the right to refuse such service if it is contrary to conscience. This attitude toward state service does not constitute an endorsement of conscription or compulsion as such, but is rather an expression of the principle of obedience to the powers that be. In like manner, the Mennonite Central Committee takes a positive rather than a merely negative attitude toward the Selective Service Administration and other government agencies which are responsible by law and presidential directive for the administration of this state service.
—from Mennonite Civilian Public Service Statement of Policy, approved by MCC Executive Committee, September 16, 1943.

From left, Floyd F. Yoder from Kalona, Iowa, Orville C. Smith from Sumner, Iowa, and three other men (names unknown) help clear fallen trees after a March 1942 tornado in Locan, Illinois. (MCC photo)

[I]t is quite possible to accept an evil compulsion in a Christ-like manner. But it is also a serious matter to judge anyone’s refusal to accept conscription as being un-Christian. For there are those conscientious objectors who cannot acquiesce to government pressure to perform civilian service in lieu of armed service because war and conscription for war are inseparable. We have a profound respect for the men who have worked with us within CPS before deciding that they must bear their witness in jail. They have been a continual challenge to us in our stand.
—Delmar Stahly, “Invitation to Conscription,” Box 96 (monthly publication of CPS unit in Mulberry, Florida) 2/1 (August 1945).

Alain Epp Weaver directs strategic planning for MCC. Frank Peachey and Lori Wise are MCC U.S. records manager and assistant, respectively.

---

Learn more

The Civilian Public Service Story. Website. http://civilianpublicservice.org

Gingerich, Melvin. Service for Peace: A History of Mennonite Civilian Public Service. Akron, PA: MCC, 1949.

Goossen, Rachel Waltner. Women against the Good War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997

Reflexiones de Pax (1951-1976)

[Articulos Individuales de la edicion de Intersecciones de Invierno 2020 se publican dos veces blog cada semana. La edicion completa puede ser encontrada en MCC’s website.]

El hombre de Pax “es un obrero cristiano pacifista a favor de otros en el nombre de Cristo…. En su mejor momento, se olvida de sí mismo, pensando solo en los demás…
El hombre de Pax no construye puentes de entendimiento y buena voluntad entre los pueblos y comuniones dando conferencias o predicando, sino a través de demostraciones prácticas, a través del trabajo físico duro.
—Peter Dyck, “Pax Bridge Builders,” Euro-Pax News, agosto 1959.

Todos los trabajadores que han pasado dos o más años trabajando en un área de necesidad y con personas en una tierra y cultura diferentes no regresarán igual que antes. Para muchos de ellos, esta es una escuela de ‘golpes duros’….
De esta escuela, inevitablemente, va a salir algún hombre bien temperado y probado, en quien la Iglesia puede buscar liderazgo en el futuro.

—Harry Martens

Inaugurado en 1951, el programa Pax del CCM proporcionó diversas oportunidades de servicio para cientos de hombres jóvenes (y algunas mujeres jóvenes) en muchos contextos de todo el mundo, incluyendo proyectos de ayuda y reconstrucción después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en Europa, asistencia humanitaria a personas refugiadas palestinas en la Ribera Occidental controlada por Jordania, la construcción de una carretera a través de la región del Chaco en Paraguay y el trabajo de desarrollo comunitario en Grecia, Bolivia y Congo. Los últimos trabajadores de Pax concluyeron su servicio en 1976. Para la mayoría de los trabajadores de Pax, su participación en Pax cumplía con las obligaciones de servicio alternativo a través del programa I-W de los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, el CCM buscó que el programa Pax no fuera solo una alternativa al servicio militar, un programa para “cristianos reclutados”, sino una forma proactiva de testimonio cristiano de paz con “voluntarios dispuestos a ir la segunda milla”. Los extractos de los informes, boletines y actas de conferencia de Pax abajo destacadas ofrecen ventanas a los gozos, desafíos y motivaciones de los hombres y mujeres que sirvieron con Pax. Estas reflexiones e informes extraídos muestran a los trabajadores de Pax evaluando sus esfuerzos como testigos cristianos, como una forma proactiva de no resistencia, como una forma alternativa de servicio a los Estados Unidos y como una contribución a los esfuerzos anticomunistas. Las “matronas” de Pax, que formaron hogares fuera del hogar para los “chicos” de Pax, reflexionan sobre cómo su trabajo de cocinar, limpiar y remendar la ropa ofreció un testimonio cristiano, a pesar de que estas mujeres de Pax también estaban empujando más allá las expectativas de género para el servicio. Finalmente, estas reflexiones muestran a los trabajadores de Pax entendiendo su servicio como una forma de educación transformadora, una “escuela de golpes duros” que abrió nuevos entendimientos y pasiones por el servicio cristiano.

Pax como servicio cristiano

El hombre de Pax “es un obrero cristiano pacifista a favor de otros en el nombre de Cristo…. En su mejor momento, se olvida de sí mismo, pensando solo en los demás…
El hombre de Pax no construye puentes de entendimiento y buena voluntad entre los pueblos y comuniones dando conferencias o predicando, sino a través de demostraciones prácticas, a través del trabajo físico duro.
—Peter Dyck, “Pax Bridge Builders,” Euro-Pax News, agosto 1959.

Desde que estoy en Pax, siento que mi crecimiento y desarrollo como cristiano se ha incrementado enormemente, a través del compañerismo con jóvenes de la misma fe y al conversar sobre la Biblia con ellos. A través de estas conversaciones aprendemos a conocer mejor a nuestro Señor. Que el Señor nos bendiga mientras cada uno de nosotros trabaja en sus viñedos.—Richard Lambright, “Informe de actividad”, Tsakones, Grecia, 7 de marzo de 1956.

Le Fever, un hombre Pax, trabaja en un proyecto de vivienda en Bielefeld, Alemania en 1957. El programa Pax del CCM funcionó principalmente como una opción de servicio alternativa para los objetores de conciencia reclutados en el servicio militar de EE. UU. de 1951 hasta 1975. Algunos hombres de Canadá también participaron, a pesar de que en Canadá no existía el reclutamiento forzado. (Foto del CCM).

Para mí, Pax fue lo último en servicio. Por supuesto, significó sacrificio, al menos en nombre, como perder dos años de ingresos, vender un lindo Ford del 41 y dejar amigos y familiares. Pero sabía que valdría la pena. Las oportunidades para la aventura, aprender nuevos idiomas y aprender sobre personas de otras culturas, y ver el histórico ‘Viejo Mundo’ fueron privilegios que incluso los líderes del programa reconocieron y nos otorgaron. Entonces, ¿por qué no ir? …Pero aún había una razón más profunda por la que elegí a Pax, un motivo muy básico… Este era el deseo de devolver el amor de Dios haciendo algo constructivo por otra persona. Pax me brindó esta oportunidad.
—David Burkholder, “Why a Man Goes Pax”, Youth’s Christian Companion, 16 de septiembre de 1962.

Los hombres PAX deben estar impregnados con la verdad de que, en primer lugar, son personas de Servicio Voluntario. No son‘cristianos reclutados’, sino más bien ‘voluntarios dispuestos a ir la segunda milla’. …PAX no debería ser dos años que superar, sino dos años llenos de oportunidades y trabajo desafiante. El compañero PAX debe crecer internamente y contribuir positivamente durante estos dos años.
—“Sugerencias de operación de Pax”.

Pax como servicio alternativo al país

Ser un patriota significa contribuir lo mejor que podamos al bienestar de nuestra nación y esta es nuestra posición activa de paz en lugar de tomar las armas.
—Omar Lapp, Backnang, Alemania, 13 de agosto de 1955.

[Los europeos] se dan cuenta de que estamos aquí para ayudarlos a vivir mejor, pero al mismo tiempo se dan cuenta de que estamos aquí en lugar de estar en una división de las fuerzas armadas. Podríamos hacer bien en preguntarnos si estaríamos haciendo este tipo de servicio si no fuera parte de nuestro requisito para con el gobierno de los Estados Unidos.
—Robert Beyeler a Robert Good, “Informe de actividad”, 28 de mayo de 1960.

Soy un hombre Pax porque creo que Cristo estaba diciendo la verdad cuando propuso que amar a tus enemigos y bendecir a quienes te maldicen es el camino de Dios. Creo que el amor de Cristo es práctico. Este amor no solo puede hacer milagros en el corazón de un individuo. Es la respuesta a la sospecha, al miedo y a la desconfianza que generalmente termina en violencia.

—Jim Juhnke

Estas pequeñas aldeas en las montañas [de Grecia] siempre han sido un terreno fértil y una tierra de nadie para las facciones que participan en la guerra civil. Los rebeldes comunistas encontraron seguridad en las montañas sobre las aldeas y continuaron recibiendo refuerzos de simpatizantes comunistas ubicados al otro lado de la frontera de Yugoslavia a menos de 10 millas de distancia. La ideología comunista recibió seguidores de las filas de los pobres agricultores refugiados debido a su bajo nivel de vida. La necesidad de eliminar las causas del comunismo es uno de los mayores desafíos que enfrenta el cristianismo en la actualidad. Eliminar las causas de la guerra presenta una gran oportunidad para nuestro testimonio de paz. —Dwight Wiebe, “Status of Pax Greece 1955”.

Creo que este es el momento para que el mundo cristiano demuestre el amor de Dios en contraste con el miedo comunista. Esta es una oportunidad real para nosotros como Iglesia Menonita para ayudar a satisfacer físicamente las necesidades de nuestro prójimo, pero también ministrar a su necesidad espiritual al dar testimonio del amor de Cristo.
—Arthur Driedger en un hogar para refugiados húngaros en Klosterneuburg- Weidling, Austria

Pax como testimonio de paz

Hablamos con soltura del amor de Dios. Imprimimos, “En Dios confiamos” en nuestras monedas. Pero no confiamos en Dios. Confiamos en ametralladoras, misiles balísticos y bombas H. Confiamos en los 40 mil millones de dólares que damos cada año para la defensa. Creemos que si no fuera por nuestros ejércitos, las fuerzas del mal se apoderarían de las principales partes del mundo. Entonces pagamos nuestros impuestos y nos escondemos detrás de la débil protección que pueden comprar. …Soy un hombre Pax porque creo que Cristo estaba diciendo la verdad cuando propuso que amar a tus enemigos y bendecir a quienes te maldicen es el camino de Dios. Creo que el amor de Cristo es práctico. Este amor no solo puede hacer milagros en el corazón de un individuo. Es la respuesta a la sospecha, al miedo y a la desconfianza que generalmente termina en violencia.
—Jim Juhnke, “A Paxer´s Testimony”, 11 de mayo de 1959.

¿Cuál es el papel y responsabilidad del cristiano en este asunto bastante confuso de la construcción de la paz? Una cosa debe estar clara: para los cristianos, la paz no es un negocio sino una vida cristiana. No es un movimiento, sino obediencia, no una estrategia, sino discipulado, no una posición, sino una Persona. Pax no es simplemente otro movimiento o manifestación por la paz. Los hombres Pax son ejemplos vivos de paz, que demuestran el amor de Dios en el corazón y en la vida. Un programa de servicio cristiano como Pax es una respuesta natural al amor de Dios ante la necesidad humana. Somos pacificadores porque somos Sus hijos.
—Roy Kauffman, “Pax Men as Peacemakers”.

Seguimos pensando que es un milagro que se estén construyendo puentes sobre los escombros y ruinas de una tierra a otra, y que podamos unir manos. Y estas manos no están vacías, sino llenas; la gente se está ayudando mutuamente y el pasado difícil y cruel se está olvidando lentamente. Estamos especialmente contentos de descubrir que los niños, que han sufrido más que las personas mayores, reciben una consideración especial por parte de los Amigos estadounidenses — otra muestra de una relación humana nueva y sincera.
—Carta del alcalde de Wedel, Alemania, a la oficina del CCM en Frankfurt/Main, 4 de enero de 1955.

Mujeres en Pax

Respira allí un hombre PAX
con el alma tan muerta,
Quien nunca a sí mismo ha dicho:
¡Las matronas fueron hechas en el cielo!

“Un tributo a nuestras matronas”, hombre Pax anónimo

A los chicos les gusta mucha variedad en sus comidas y son sorprendentemente aventureros en su alimentación. Les gusta una casa limpia, pero también una que sea habitable… Aunque se dan cuenta de que la matrona nunca podrá caber en los zapatos de sus madres, siempre quieren un hogar lejos del hogar. Espero haber podido darles uno.
—Joyce Shutt, matrona en Enkenbach, Alemania, “Reflections of a PAX Matron”.

J. Lester Yoder, hombre Pax, de Belleville, Pennsylvania, le muestra un cerdo a un granjero griego en 1962. El programa de agricultura del CCM introdujo cerdos de raza pura a los agricultores en Grecia a fines de la década de 1950, y los trabajadores de Pax brindaron capacitación y orientación sobre la cría de cerdos. Los participantes del programa debían construir un albergue para cerdos y un recinto resistente para calificar para el programa. (Foto del CCM / V. Cross).

Por la noche me retiro a mi habitación y reflexiono sobre los acontecimientos del día. Sí, he estado ocupada. No se han desperdiciado muchos minutos. Sin embargo, no me siento satisfecha y no puedo evitar preguntarme: ¿hay realmente un propósito por el cual estar aquí? Es cierto que a los muchachos les gusta venir por una comida sustanciosa después de un día de duro trabajo, pero ¿será que hacer comidas y limpiar pisos son mi único propósito para estar aquí? Me gusta pensar que no. De ser así, estos dos años serían una pérdida de tiempo y esfuerzo. Entonces mis pensamientos se alejan del trabajo de mi día y empiezo a pensar en los compañeros. Están aquí porque creen que el mal en este mundo nunca se puede corregir con la fuerza y el derramamiento de sangre. Están aquí no solo porque no creen en la guerra, sino porque creen en la paz. Están aquí porque conocen a un Salvador que nos enseña a amar a todos las personas y hacerles el bien. Entonces me pregunto: ¿Cuál es mi propósito por el cual estoy aquí? Mis pensamientos se vuelven más firmes y empiezo a ver y comprender el propósito. Estoy aquí porque creo como lo hacen los muchachos. Entonces, si puedo hacer algo para fortalecer esa creencia, hacer que su estadía sea más placentera, ayudarlos en su esfuerzo por construir un poco del reino de los cielos aquí en la tierra, sentiré que mi tiempo ha ha valido la pena.
—Anne Driedger, matrona de Pax en Bechterdissen bei Bielefeld, This is Not a Dream!” European Relief Notes, enero de 1956.

Debo dominar el arte de decir cosas agradables, no debo esperar demasiado de mi prójimo, debo hacer que mi trabajo sea amable y agradable, debo ayudar a los miserables, simpatizar con los tristes y nunca olvidar que una palabra amable, una sonrisa o una acción amorosa cuesta poco pero son tesoros para los demás. No es solo mi deber, sino más bien mi privilegio ser y hacer estas cosas, revelando a los demás que la no resistencia es significativa para mí y con la ayuda de Dios la vivo a diario.
—Tina Warkentin, “What Non-Resistance Means to Me.” 10 de febrero de 1959.

El Servicio Voluntario del CCM en Corea requiere “algo de glamour, algo de ampliación de experiencia, algo de aprendizaje nuevo y mucha dedicación y trabajo duro”.
—Lydia Schlabach, enfermera en Seúl, Corea, 1962.

Nuestros compañeros hacen un trabajo maravilloso en la construcción de nuevas casas, pero ¿no han oído hablar de las chicas del CCM que ayudan a las chicas de la aldea a construir y reparar su ropa?. Los granjeros de Pax ayudan a los granjeros de la aldea a mezclar alimentos y hacer silos, mientras que las damas de Pax ayudan a las amas de casa de la aldea a familiarizarse con nuevas recetas. Así como los hombres conversan sobre problemas personales con los hombres, las mujeres conversan preocupaciones personales con las mujeres.
—Lois Martin, matrona de Pax en Grecia, 1962.

Pax como escuela transformadora

El trabajador de Pax, Joe Haines, lleva a Ibrahim, uno de los niños más pequeños
en el Orfanato y escuela de Hebrón, Ribera Occidental en Después de que Joe Haines completara su asignación de Pax en el Orfanato de Hebrón, se convirtió en supervisor del programa de educación del CCM en la Ribera Occidental controlada por Jordania en (Foto del CCM / Ernest
Lehman).

No hace falta decir que todos los trabajadores que han pasado dos o más años trabajando en un área de necesidad y con personas en una tierra y cultura diferente no regresarán igual que antes. Para muchos de ellos esta es una escuela de “golpes duros”. Están lejos de sus hogares cómodos, de una tierra de abundancia y ahora viven en circunstancias muy modestas y día tras día ven la necesidad humana y la desesperación. …De esta escuela, inevitablemente, va a salir algún hombre bien temperado y probado, en quien la Iglesia pueda buscar liderazgo en el futuro”.
—Harry Martens, “You Are My Witnesses”

El hombre Pax regresa a casa con un odio por el materialismo y una pasión por la paz y la acción social. Siente que tiene un destello de verdad que no se puede perder, e intentará expresarlo cada vez que tenga la oportunidad.
—Por el Editor, “Paxman Come Home,” Youth’s Christian Companion, 16 de septiembre de 1962.

Compilado por Alain Epp Weaver (director del departamento de Planificación, Aprendizaje y Respuesta a Desastres del CCM), junto con Frank Peachey y Lori Wise (administrador y asistente de Registros del CCM EE. UU. respectivamente).

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Aprende más

Pax MCC. http://www.paxmcc.com/.

Redekop, Calvin W. The European Mennonite Voluntary Service: Youth Idealism in Post-World War II Europe.

Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2010. Redekop, Calvin. The Pax Story: Service in the Name of Christ, 1951-1976. Telford, PA: Pandora Press, 2001.