Looking for a Third Way in PA (part 1)

At noon last Friday, I arrived at the Lancaster, PA train station. A 16 hour odyssey sent me from the Downtown Riverside MetroLink station to Los Angeles Union Station, to the LAX Flyaway, to United flight #196 -- the red eye -- to Philadelphia. Once in Philly, the trip continued with a SEPTA train from the airport to the 30th Street Station, and finally, the Amtrak 643 Keystone service to Lancaster. Once there, I was welcomed by Faith and Matthew Manickam, and their parents, Wanda and Joe.

I had come to Pennsylvania for three reasons. First, I was there to do some training at Mennonite Central Committee offices in Akron, just a quick buggy ride from Lancaster. Second, I was there to attend, and try to keep a low profile at, the ordination recognition of a friend. Third, I was also going back to Philadelphia to present to the Franconia Mennonite Conference Board a series of recommendations developed by the Vision and Finance Plan Team I've been facilitating for the past year. In all three experiences, I rediscovered the power of, and the absence of, the vaunted so-called "Third Way" in Anabaptist-Mennonite circles.

A word of background is in order. Since 1973, when Walter Klaassen published the book, "Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant" (Herald Press), we in the Mennonite and to a lesser extent, the Brethren in Christ world, have fancied ourselves as "People of the Third Way." The problem is that we have never really figured out what that meant. Is the Third Way a synthesis of Roman Catholic and Protestant thinking (Anabaptism -- both Catholic and Protestant)? Or, is it a movement cut from whole cloth -- something new in God's economy, rejecting both the absolute hegemony of the Roman church in Western Europe, and rejecting the magisterial authority of later State-sponsored Protesting churches (...neither Catholic nor Protestant). In short, is Anabaptism unique because it offers a welcoming critique of the past, or because it charts a new, unfettered future?

In the face of such scholarship, my personal tendency is to try to say, "yes," as often as possible...

Wherever one emerges in this debate, an unintended consequence is that in the past 35 years or so, there has grown up a sort of Anabaptist-Mennonite exceptionalism that, while mostly healthy in its capacity to create and center identity, can also be quite arrogant and ultimately, anti-intellectual. Our need to "Anabaptize" everything -- liturgy, hymnody, curriculum, even new ideas -- is sign of an immature exceptionalism...

Which takes me back to Pennsylvania.

At MCC, my presentations centered on the theme, "Anabaptism: A Missiology for Service ." In these 8 hours of presentations, I was trying to communicate a point of view that suggested the real ground of Anabaptist exceptionalism is not our radical ecclesiology nor our pacifism. These are derivative of a deeper theological exceptionalism grounded in an understanding of Jesus that all of Jesus matters to everyone, everywhere. Nothing about Jesus: his birth, life, teachings, death, resurrection, and promised return, is inconsequential. In constructing a Christology that does not cut and paste those portions of the Jesus story that trouble us, the Anabaptist movement is ready to engage a global, urban, post-Christendom world with that which is truly good news -- God, through Christ, signals a love so vast, a grace so amazing, a hope so full of promise that everyone, everywhere (especially those of us already in the church) must come to terms in a new way with Jesus. I think this is what one might call, "Third Way Christology." Such a view of Jesus tends to confound those who spiritualize Jesus by restricting his importance to afterlife, and the margins of personal behavior in this life. This view also confounds those who spiritualize Jesus by restricting him to the role of messenger, instead of Message...as it did at MCC.

The ordination I attended on Sunday was also an example of the challenges of the Third Way. The largest Mennonite Church USA, the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, does not permit the ordination of women. Such a prohibition is understood as largely outside the expectations of denominational polity -- women are ordained in most area conferences, with the exceptions being LMC, and a few, very small area conferences that have a historical relationship to LMC. Mennonite polity tends to be relational, and not rule oriented, so one never is able to force compliance. The cohesive center of Mennonite polity is that it is truly voluntary. So what happens when those who would consider themsleves prophetic voices show up?

In LMC, the latest prophetic voice regards the ordination of women in the face of a vote, about six months ago, which essentially reaffirmed the historical stance of LMC prohibiting the ordination of women. This vote fell just 4 votes short of a required 2/3 majority to overturn the stance and allow for ordaining women. In the aftermath of this vote, the James Street Mennonite Church in downtown Lancaster, proposed moving forward with the ordination of Elizabeth Nissley, and the recongition of the previous ordination of Kathy Keener Shantz. Kathy had been ordained in 2000 by the Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference, where I serve as one of the Regional Conference Ministers. Thus Kathy's ordination transfer brought the PSMC into this Third Way conversation...