Mennonite

A Call for Recovery of the Visual Arts in Anabaptist Worship

by

Traditionally, Anabaptists have been wary of the visual arts in worship. This article, however, observes that modern culture presents unique challenges that were not present during the early Anabaptist opposition to the arts and that can be met by artists. Thus, the article calls for a union of art and ethics and a dual concern for both the transcendent and immanent, resulting in the intentional and imaginative use of the visual arts in worship.

Our problem with the arts is rooted in our rather uncritical adherence to Anabaptism. Any resolution must begin with a recognition that the Anabaptists joined other reformers in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. All the senses were employed in Roman Catholic faith and worship. But in the interest of reforming the church of the day, or even recreating the New Testament church, a significant narrowing occurred; the Word—the written Word and the heard Word—became the front and center focus for the mainline reformers. The Anabaptists added a significant qualifier: the acted Word, or better, the incarnate Word.

In the reformation process, what happened to all the other senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste? Particularly for the Reformed and the Anabaptists, these senses were at best adiaphora, at worst dangerous distractions from the true Christian faith. The arts were thus casualties of the Reformation, and to this day they struggle to regain legitimation within the reformational traditions—not least the Mennonite tradition.

Proposal with Reference to Mennonites and the Arts. A series of theses—not ninety-five, only an immodest eight—outline a modest proposal regarding Mennonites and the arts.

Thesis I: All theologizing, and all thinking about the Christian faith, is relative to a context, to a historical situation. Language, culture, economic conditions, and political dynamics shape the questions and provide a contour to the answers.

The discussion of Mennonites and the arts in our day is not without context, not without history. Certain internal and external dynamics to the Mennonite tradition bring us to this moment when artists consider their corporate place in the larger Mennonite community. Space need not be taken here to analyze why this discussion arises now rather than some years ago. A comparative note may, however, be interesting. Whereas in earlier centuries the arts flourished among the Mennonites in Holland, they are less prominent today. The current renaissance of the arts among Mennonites is primarily a phenomenon of the immigrant Mennonite cultures like those of North America. Why this is so is a question for another essay.

Thesis II: Anabaptist theology in the sixteenth century was defined, at least in part, over against a Roman Catholicism that was rich in its sense of the transcendent world and its aesthetic correlates, but weak in its response to the immanent world and its ethical correlates.

The restitutional impulse tends to overreact, to confuse manifestation with essence. The Anabaptists largely assumed traditional theological commitments; they assumed the reality of the transcendent order, so they paid little attention to such matters. In order to recapture ethics, they abandoned aesthetics. The two were considered alien to each other. Anabaptists joined Zwingli in his iconoclasm, smashing organs and even, for a time, negated the legitimacy of singing. Aesthetic perversions required the exorcising of the aesthetic, they seemed to say. (This is detailed in Rodney J. Sawatsky’s “Symbol as Reality: Christianity as Art” an unpublished lecture presented to the symposium on “The Arts and the Prophetic Imagination: Expressions of Anguish and Hope” at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, January 13, 1991.) The degree to which the aesthetic served as a necessary pillar of the transcendent was apparently unrecognized. Transcendence, however, was not their problem.

Thesis III: Mennonites, in their quest to be faithful to their Anabaptist origins, have wrongly assumed that they must continue to emphasize precisely what the Anabaptists emphasized because they have failed to contextualize theological emphases. Accordingly, four centuries later Mennonites still do not have a place for aesthetics.

The Editorial Committee of the recently published Mennonite Encyclopedia V did not include an article on aesthetics. I must, as a member of that Committee, take part of the blame for this omission. My sense is that even Mennonite artists tend to reduce aesthetics to ethics, and so they too may not have noted this oversight. If Mennonites think in terms of the classical trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, they have a limited place for beauty and are concerned primarily with the good. This parallels another tendency among Mennonites, namely reducing theology to ethics or collapsing the question of truth into the quest for goodness. Such narrowing of the agenda fails to consider the late twentieth-century context and functions as if the sixteenth-century worldview remains alive and well.

Thesis IV: Since the world in which or over against which we shape our theology is so profoundly different today than in 1525, we are not faithful to our forefathers and foremothers by repeating their response to their culture. Indeed in our day, we may well need to say precisely the opposite of what was said on some matters in the sixteenth century. (For a parallel discussion see: Walter Klaassen, “The Quest for Anabaptist Identity,” in Anabaptist-Mennonite Identities in Ferment, Leo Driedger and Leland Harder, eds. [Elkhart, Indiana: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1990].)

We live in a world where a transcendent and a personal God is not assumed. The opposite is true. We are the measure of all things; we will make and remake the world; we are the creative and the creators; we will mold, make, and realize ourselves. If there is a god at all it is a god of self, of nature, or of community, or of justice. All is immanence! Human action and human beings are all.

The Anabaptist concern to recapture a place and role for the immanent, for human decision and human action is victorious in our day, but with the victory has also come defeat. For the Anabaptists, ethics were always related to God; they were a response of obedient faithfulness to God. The transcendent referent of our action is, for the most part, lost in modernity.

Sadly, the sense of a transcendent God is being eroded not only outside but also inside the church. We struggle against great odds to maintain a sense of the superhuman dimension in our understanding of reality. Theology is so readily reduced to psychology and politics. Perhaps this is why some are drawn to Anglicanism, Pentecostalism, or even the occult, where transcendence still seems a reality.

Hence to be countercultural, to challenge the world, to be nonconformist, to be biblical, to be faithful to Jesus today will necessarily mean being different from the reformers of the 1500s. Today we need less human action and much more of God’s reality, or better said, we need to place all human action in relation to God’s reality.

Thesis V: Words, literal words, are very limited vehicles to communicate transcendent reality. Metaphors, symbols, icons, and harmonies nurture the imagination with rumors of angels. If ethics were a necessary corrective in the sixteenth century, aesthetics is the necessary corrective for the late twentieth century.

Our artists carry a heavy burden in our day. We need them today more than ever before to create new metaphors, symbols, and icons that connect us spiritually, emotionally, and imaginatively with the God who is beyond our grasp.

Thesis VI: While in the sixteenth century we emphasized ethics and basically negated aesthetics, today we should not follow suit by emphasizing aesthetics to the exclusion of ethics. The two need not be and ought not to be over against each other, but rather close partners in the Christian cause.

Yet, Mennonite aesthetics has too often been subsumed under ethics. Out of their own sense of alienation and marginality in relation to both the church and the larger society, as well as out of their own sensitivities to the injustices around them, Mennonite artists have repeatedly painted the picture of human brokenness and played the sounds of human discord. Their message has been that of the ethical prophets crying “woe, woe.” Surely little can sensitize as profoundly to human evil as the arts can.

But does our world not know all about brokenness? Is such imitation of brokenness really prophetic, or is it simply falling into lockstep with cultural inertia? What we lack is a vision of peace and of wholeness rising out of the ashes. We have all kinds of pretty and nice and superficial, but above all, we lack beauty! We desperately need a recovery of aesthetics.

Thesis VII: The modern assumption that aesthetics is all in the eye of the beholder must be challenged. Aesthetics in this century has been completely relativized. Beauty no longer is premised on any objective criteria. Subjectivism and individualism reign. In turn, self-indulgence is the constant temptation of the artist.

If the arts can be a major means to regain a sense of the transcendent in our materialistic, scientific, technological world, then art and the artist will necessarily move beyond subjectivism and individualism to consider both the larger community and a more objective understanding of beauty.

Art, by definition, is a lonely task. It is not a function of a committee. It is an expression of individuality, of individual imagination and creativity, but not necessarily an expression of individualism. Art at its best is not created simply for the artist, or for fellow artists, but for the edification of the larger human community.

Regaining some objective criteria for beauty is difficult. Yet we desperately need to try. Ethics have faced the same morass. Yet ethicists, especially Christian ethicists, have refused to opt for a complete relativistic subjectivism. Surely Christian artists must do the same with aesthetics.

The cultural norm says aesthetics is dead. A countercultural response insists that normativity in the arts as in ethics is alive and well and living in the Christian community.

Thesis VIII: A primary arena, although definitely not the only arena, for the artist’s call in the postmodern world is in public worship. It is in and through worship that the God who is not limited by time and space, by human action and imagination, is best known (See John Rempel, “Christian Worship: Surely the Lord is in this Place,” The Conrad Grebel Review: A Journal of Christian Inquiry 6 [Spring 1988]: 101-118).

Words are of great importance in worship. Our preaching and our prayers desperately need to relearn the power of well-crafted and well-delivered words. Indeed words, both written and spoken, need to be reclaimed for their symbolic and poetic possibilities and power. Yet words are limited. The nonverbal arts offer us vehicles to realize the reality of the transcendent more powerfully than can any preached word.

If the arts are to fulfill their calling in worship, they will point not to the artist, but through the art to God. This kind of art in recent decades is relatively rare. But it is the kind we all long for, and which is vital to a renewal of a multidimensional cosmos in which God is alive, moving, and being.

An Anabaptist Theology of Worship

by

Anabaptists see the church as a radical body of believing disciples. Worship arises out of this community of faith and is simple and egalitarian. It recounts God’s story of redeeming love through the ongoing experience of the community of faith.

Worship says In the beginning God … and worship says, Yes, God’s actions are working out in our history for good. Worship respects and recognizes the various vitalities by which we enjoy life, the various values that govern it, and the various visions which transform it. Anabaptist worshipers respond to such revelations. Worship is therefore the interaction of the revelation of God and the response of the people who follow Jesus. We bring the phenomena of our living into the phenomenon of the living Jesus. We carry our various realities in into the presence of God.

Anabaptists have a faith-vision that calls forth unique worship patterns. The Anabaptist vision is almost five hundred years old and includes Mennonites, Brethren, and various Baptist and Congregationalists with sixteenth-century Anabaptist theological roots. The faith components may look very similar to those of other faith families, but what distinguishes Anabaptism is a combination and a configuration of “ABC’s”:

A. Authority of Scriptures, no t as a creed or code but as our stories and story to be believed and obeyed—that which forms and expresses our identity;
B. Baptism of believers (not infants) whereby one’s own faith in God, much like one’s love for another, evokes a public commitment;
C. Church as a community of the transformed, working out with others who are also a part of the body of Christ, thus a rejection of rugged individualism;
D. Discipleship of life, following Christ in imitation and participation;
E. Ethic of love in all relationships, an agape stance affirming even adversaries, seeking justice, building peace, reconciling relationships, confronting waste, living simply, honoring ecology, giving relief, sharing faith.

In worship, Anabaptists are consciously and communally responding to God. The purpose of worship is, all at once expressing gratitude to God and renewing, reaffirming, and reforming all aspects of life according to the ABCs of faith.

Worship and Liturgy

What does Anabaptist worship include and what does it look like? We’ve already alluded to the two necessary ingredients of divine expression and human experience—revelation and response. Simply put, worship is being present with Presence. We now examine three things that make liturgy happen in Anabaptist worship: experience, expression, and environment.

The Experiences We Have. Worship includes actual settings: It is involvement, taking place in the active and concrete here and now: a blessing for this meal, going to church, a dedication for this child, a consideration of this question and that issue.

Worship has to do with the wholeness of our various separations and sectionings. God gives us his peace, bringing harmony to our various dissonances. The biblical metaphor of the potter is telling: God taking clay and answering our song, “Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me, … mold me, make me, … fill me, use me.” Biblical precedents include the Corinthians’ love feast fiasco, Jacob’s wrestling with the Lord’s angel, Mary’s new vocation, Peter’s awareness that Cornelius is “in.” One cannot discard weekdays and have a weekend, or this pain and have that promise, or that brother and have this sister. Each fragment has a larger view, a larger setting, a greater dimension.

Worship has to do with all of our struggles; it takes them all seriously. Honest worship pays attention to our human conflicts; they are “tools at hand.” Life-stages and life-developments are the stuff that makes for worship. Anabaptist liturgy puts struggle where it belongs—in worship.

The Expressions We Make. With what symbols shall we tell the story—to us, to others, to God? Language comes in word and deed, helping us to praise, confess, commit, speak, and listen. In worship, language is always inclusive. Music both glorifies God and builds the body of Christ through expression in thought and feeling. It uses a variety of styles. Actions can be natural and spontaneous as well as planned, as in the examples of drama and dance. Silence also speaks: it is the still small voice of quietness. Preaching is allowing the Scriptures and the sermon to address us and then to respond to the living God. The sermon also allows for congregational preaching expressing itself as incarnation into today’s life and, therefore, as a redemptive sign and event.

The Environment We Need. The preacher and liturgists do not need “to be up there.” The best liturgical aid is people—seated in a semicircle allowing for a sense of community and communication. Visual aids (banners, paintings, free-standing cross, an open Bible, a candle, a globe, a Communion cup) can powerfully suggest, “We now have met to worship thee.” Biblical liturgy doesn’t occur only in the meetinghouse. Worshipers meet also in Sunday school rooms and in living rooms. A lit candle on the table in business and committee meetings reminds us of our purpose.

Worship and Rituals

The previous section shows that Anabaptist liturgies include the entire range of human experience. Here we see that all of life’s pilgrimage is the stuff of ritual performance—the locus where God is met. Assembling with others on the first day of the week is a repeated action and sign of our worship of God. Each Sunday service proclaims the giving of Christ anew. Sunday worship, like all repeated events, can deepen both revelation and response. Special acts of worship that signify God’s self-giving, and our self-giving in return, are properly called sacraments. Anabaptists are suspicious of this word, however, because of the track record in which sacred things have been exploited—in instances in church history when sacraments have become cultic objects. In Anabaptist worship ordinance has replaced sacrament, a radical and far-reaching switch. Ordinances, rites, and rituals are troublesome words for Anabaptists. “Performances” that God’s people enjoy might be better received.

Baptism is an initiation into the body of Christ, not only by believing in Jesus but in being part of the church. It marks the beginning of a pilgrimage of a lifelong journey of worship and witness. It is ordination into co-ministry with Jesus. It symbolizes cleansing and new life, an outward sign of new birth and new creation. Anabaptists practice believer’s baptism (sometimes referred to as adult baptism)—an experience akin to marriage in that baptism is a service of two parties who have consciously fallen in love with the “ring” (the water) as a sign and seal of that love relation.

The Lord’s Supper engages in living memory; it implies being present for a living memorial. It promises that something more is coming, particularly as one opens oneself to “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” The future is present. Christ is present in the taking of the bread, which includes our “taking.” Our openness to Christ, our attitude of acceptance whereby we hunger and thirst after the brooks of eternal life, make this time of taking a junction where we meet God and where we receive drink that satisfies and food that nourishes. If we eat and drink “all of it,” we accept Christ’s joy and pain, fulfillment, and searching. We accept Christ’s continued purposes for the world, and we enlist in that mission. We fine-tune our motivation; we receive manna to carry on.

Other Performances include ordination, healing, reconciliation, marriage, death, agape meals, foot or handwashing, and the various markings (dedication service of a new home, high school graduation, mortgage burnings, child dedications, and commissioning of teachers and officers).

Worship and Living

It’s a cliché in church bulletins—“Enter to Worship … Depart to Serve”—but a cliché rich in meaning for Anabaptists. Biblical, Anabaptist worship begins at church but does not end there; it pushes us into witness and work and then back again to worship where we can be revived. Liturgy means the work of the people (not, as commonly believed the assembling of the saints). What goes on on weekdays follows what goes on on their weekends—the rhythm of the church gathered and the church scattered. Accordingly, Anabaptist worship underscores the biblical learning that believers bring to the world. For Paul, liturgical worship was an exercise of work and witness (taking offerings to Jerusalem, a hoped-for missionary trip to Spain, witness to the high officials of government) (cf. Rom. 15:9, 24–29, where the actual word “liturgy” is used). Later he designates as worship whatever we do as unto the Lord (1 Cor. 10:31).

Conclusion

Anabaptist faith-vision and Anabaptist worship-practice go together. The faith of a Christian as a disciple—can be analogized as a caravan, a people “banded together to make common cause in seeking a common destination,” whose existence is in a continual becoming, a following of its Lord on the way toward the kingdom. This vision is in contrast to a commissary, which has existence in its own being in maintaining its divinely given essence. The faith of shalom—God uniting and integrating holistically all the details of life’s pilgrimages—is found in human experiences, expressions, environments, and life’s repeated events. A life of faith is a response to the living Word, to the Bible as central, not so much as a message-book but a voice-book, speaking not only about worship but also as worship, giving voice to the presence of the living God. Anabaptists are at worship as they meditate on its words—from Genesis to Revelation—experiencing the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Ammann, Jacob

by

Jacob Ammann (c. 1644-c. 1711) was the founder of the Amish Mennonites. Ammann was an Anabaptist minister from Switzerland who strictly followed the practice of “avoidance.” In 1693 he and 4,500 followers permanently left the Mennonite church, which disagreed with his views. Various attempts at reconciliation have proven unsuccessful. His convictions continue to influence the Amish to this day.

Sunday Worship in Mennonite Churches

by

The traditional style of worship in Mennonite history has been simple, exhortatory, and penitential, focusing on conversion and holy living. Preaching has been the climax of the worship assembly.

In the 1960s various cultural influences and impatience with conventional patterns led to a continually widening liturgical diversity in the Mennonite mainstream. The more openly expressive worship of black congregations was, for the first time, noticed with approval by the larger church. Meanwhile, upwardly mobile, white, professional congregations turned to a more cerebral style in which the sermon became more or less a lecture followed by discussion. The charismatic movement led some congregations in a quite different direction. The marks of its influence were the singing of choruses repeatedly and intensely, encouragement of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit like tongues, and attention to the immediate personal needs of worshipers through testimonies and prayers. A final influence was that of the liturgical movement, with its attention to aesthetics, the deliberate structuring of worship, the church year, and the lectionary.

The pursuit of Christian unity, whether with fellow-Mennonites beyond the North Atlantic world or with believers of other denominations next door, created a spirit of openness to change and diversity. The recent assemblies of the Mennonite World Conference have been showcases for diversity of form and spirit in worship.

Today in North America there are Mennonite congregations that worship much as they did a century ago. Others have defined themselves by one of the worship styles referred to above. Most, however, while fed by one or more of these newer sources, work at integrating innovations with existing patterns. Most of the worship resources published by most of the conferences occupy this middle ground. This position also characterizes the new hymnal published in 1992 in cooperation with the Church of the Brethren.

The Sunday Service

Typical Sunday services might proceed in the following way. The congregational singing includes chorales, gospel songs, evangelical Scripture songs, and Roman Catholic contemporary hymns. The worship leader is a member of the local worship committee but is not a minister. After a few opening hymns, she welcomes the congregation and leads in an opening prayer taken from a contemporary volume of worship aids. One week a mixed adult choir might sing a nineteenth-century anthem; another week’s service might include a guitar ensemble offering a Scripture song. One or more Bible passages are read, either the preacher’s choice or selected according to the church calendar (use of which is usually limited to the weeks from Advent through Pentecost, often passing over Epiphany season and the early part of Lent). One of the passages might be rendered as readers’ theater. A brief story or object lesson is presented to the children. The sermon, twenty to thirty minutes long, is occasionally expositional but more often a call for evangelism, peacemaking, or personal growth. Before the congregational prayer people are invited to share “joys and concerns.” The intercessions follow, one week as a pastoral prayer, another as spontaneous offerings from the assembly, and yet another as a litany. A hymn and announcements follow after which the leader dismisses the people with a benediction.

The breaking of bread is not part of the weekly service, although it was in some settings at the time of the Reformation. Until recently most congregations celebrated Communion twice a year with a preparatory service and, in many congregations, footwashing. In evangelically influenced conferences and congregations a monthly Eucharist is common. Even where this influence is not predominant, the frequency with which the Supper is celebrated has increased to four to six times annually, most often on holy days like Good Friday and Pentecost. Sometimes the breaking of bread is followed by or incorporated into a fellowship meal.

Baptism and Other Practices

The baptism of believers occurs in public worship once or twice a year, usually a week after candidates have given a testimony of faith to the membership. This service is among the most solemn and festive gatherings of the year. It is usually concluded with Communion. In traditional congregations the holy kiss is given by the minister to baptismal candidates and mutually given at footwashing.

Some communities have begun to use the passing of the peace each Sunday or at the Lord’s Table. Also, in these and in charismatic congregations, anointing with oil is observed for the sick. This is usually a private service.

Some striking, longstanding rituals are perpetuated in diverse Mennonite communities. In conservative Russian Mennonite churches, for example, care is taken to receive the Communion bread on a clean, white handkerchief. In some communities of Amish background the communicant bows halfway to the floor with the right knee after having partaken of the cup.

Form and Freedom

Most Mennonite congregations have become more conscious and deliberate in their commitment to both form and freedom. The widespread use of worship committees has led to long-range planning of worship that involves members and ministers and pays attention to diversity of themes and forms of expression. Books of prayers are commonly used and adapted by worship leaders. Friendliness and personalization are cultivated through, for example, individually welcoming guests and writing prayers or songs for particular occasions.

Since about 1980 one or more regional worship seminars has been held annually. The church press regularly features articles on worship, mostly of the “how to” variety. The 1992 hymnal has elevated the preparation of spoken worship resources to the same status as that of hymn tunes and texts. This new book of worship is set up according to the rhythm of praise rather than according to dogmatic categories. It begins with “gathering” and ends with “sending.” For the first time in a congregational book there are separate services for the Lord’s Supper and baptism.

The temperamental, spiritual, and liturgical diversity has immeasurably enlivened and deepened contemporary North American Mennonite worship life. Now that this expansion of the ways in which we come before each other and God is in place, care will need to be taken to nurture common memories, music, and gestures and to keep alive the simple reverence for which Mennonite worship has striven in the past.