Philip Fountain introduces the Mennonite tradition of Christianity and their commitment to making peace.

My book Pursuing Peace in Godzone, co-edited with Geoff Troughton, brought the things I love most together: rip-roaring stories, larger than life characters, humour and cunning, dogged faith. It tells diverse narratives of Kiwi Christians from after WWII to the present, who pursued peace out of a conviction about the political and social implications of their faith. I have found Christian peacemaking a compelling and alluring subject and it gives me full reign to indulge my inquisitiveness into what makes peaceniks tick.

Talking with Dad

My interest in Christian peacemaking derives from two primary sources. The first were conversations I had with my father. Dad was a theologically-literate Brethren lad who was born in India to missionary parents. In his 20s he was conscripted into the New Zealand Army when his birthdate was read out over the radio. Against his parents’ wishes, he signed up and was commissioned as an officer. Dad and I have debated the ethics of the military service ever since I can remember and these discussions were formative for me.

Dad was conscripted during the Vietnam War, and this backdrop hung over his experience, though he was not deployed overseas. In our conversations, he recalled the outright racism that dominated army training at that time — a fear of the “yellow peril” dominated New Zealand’s security concerns and this was conveyed in colourful language by the drill sergeants.

He also told of how military training taught people to kill — a process involving systematic training to overcome the moral inhibitors that might kick-in during actual combat.

I find it impossible not to respect the stance he made as a young man responding to the call to defend his country.

I find it equally impossible to accept that training to kill is congruent with Christian love. This tension runs through the history of the Christian Church. Christians have always wrestled with the challenge of what it means to follow the Prince of Peace in a violent world.

Our deliberations were no great contribution to these debates. But it is one thing considering peace in the abstract and quite another thinking it through with real people navigating the ambiguities of lived history.

Meeting Mennonites

The second major stimulus for my interest in peace emerged via my friendships with North American Mennonites. There are no Mennonite Churches in Aotearoa, though there is a network called the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand and occasional Mennonite sojourners do make their way here from time to time.

A series of stimulating conversations with Mennonites in the early 2000s resulted in my embarking on doctoral studies in anthropology researching the development, disaster relief and peace building programmes of the Mennonite Central Committee, a North American NGO, in the context of Indonesia. Two years of fieldwork proved to be quite a tutelage on peace.

Mennonite Commitment

Mennonites trace their origins to the Reformation. At the same time that Luther and Calvin were doing their reforming thing, there emerged a series of other movements. Among these were groups that would, eventually, be called Mennonites. Sometimes called the Radical Reformation, these were eclectic at inception, though over time they gained some semblance of coherence. Catholics and Protestants called them Anabaptists, meaning “re-baptisers”. Refusing to acknowledge infant baptism, they baptised again those who made a confession of faith. This disrupted policies of “cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, whose religion) and it presented a forceful critique of both Catholicism and Protestantism.

Mennonites also emphasised the necessity of understanding Scripture on their own, something many clergy found undermining.

Though this wasn’t universal early on, Mennonites came to a pronounced pacifism as a mark of faithfulness, resulting in their rejection of involvement in the military. Their pacifism was part of a broader emphasis on discipleship as embodied ethics and not just belief.

Disgusted with their apparent disloyalty and heterodoxy, both Protestant and Catholic rulers responded to the Mennonite movement with bloody persecution.

Mennonites are named after Menno Simons, an ex-Catholic priest and one of the few Anabaptist leaders who survived the initial few years. Despite ongoing violence, the Mennonite movement continued to grow, though it also morphed over time.

Escaping from Persecution

Although Mennonites came from the urban and educated elites in the Low Countries, South Germany and Switzerland, they fled to rural areas and migrated to other countries. Some headed East and settled in “colonies” in today’s Ukraine, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire.

Other Mennonites made for the New World, arriving in Pennsylvania and forming part of “Pennsylvania Dutch” society. From there, they spread out to the mid-West and beyond to Canada.

Living Separately

In North America, Mennonite communities flourished as rural and separated societies. For years, they maintained Plautdietsch as the home language, High German as the language of Church, and spoke English only with outsiders.

They wore peculiar clothes (“plain dress”), mostly married other Mennonites and pursued a distinctive way of life guided by their understanding of the faith.

Taking a Pacifist Path

WWI and WWII, however, shattered Mennonite isolation with the imperatives of Total War. They experienced widespread hostility when they refused conscription, especially as they were labelled “shirkers”, and also spoke German.

Both Canada and the US established conscientious objection schemes during WWII which propelled Mennonites and other Historic Peace Churches to organise and coordinate alternative service.

After the war, Mennonites continued their active service with an increasingly international orientation. At this time the Mennonite Central Committee, the organisation I studied in Indonesia but which also works in many countries around the world, began engaging in aid work in earnest.

Serving Peace

During the second half of the 20th-century thousands of Mennonites travelled overseas on stints of service, often for three years at a time. The structure of their service was designed to parallel conscription as “the moral equivalent of warfare”. Pacifism became an active embodiment of peace.

Mennonite service could involve a wide range of activities and, indeed, in Indonesia the programmatic emphasis tended to change markedly every decade or so. Interestingly, it was only in the late 1990s that Mennonite Central Committee volunteers engaged directly in peacebuilding initiatives. Not all of these experiments in peacemaking were immediately, or obviously, successful. But I became deeply impressed with their methodology.

The Mennonite Central Committee created space, with modest resources, for small-scale, relationally-oriented initiatives that enabled peace to be practised, rather than merely preached.

Success was not envisioned as a matter of being biggest or chalking up impressive quantitative statistics. Rather, the question was how to live at peace in contexts where there weren’t always clear or simple answers. For many of my Mennonite friends this was a genuine struggle.

The stories Mennonites shared were not the sort that get newspaper headlines. They more often concerned difficult relationships, hesitant first steps and awkward exchanges. Their stories were of struggle, grit and passion in which they navigated ethical uncertainty with hope and courage.

Small things, perhaps; but also beautiful and alluring. Just as with my father’s wrestling with the ethics of warfare and the stories of creative Kiwis doing peace work in Pursuing Peace in Godzone, I find something deeply compelling in the struggle for peace.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 231 October 2018: 18-19

Note: See Pursuing Peace in Godzone review in Tui Motu Magazine, Issue 230 September 2018.