Follow Up on "Ownership"

"Ownership" is the title of the previous post.  In it I referenced having had a conversation in which I mentioned the "ownership" conversation on Facebook.  The lead-in for the in-person conversation was this question:  "Do you think [our church] would be ready for a [FotW(church name)] -type church?  

"Well, I think some of us would be, but not all of us," I said.  I can't remember what all I said after that, so I'll simply try to summarize some of my thinking here rather than recount the conversation.

I realize that I really don't know enough about what FotW is like to know whether I'd like a church like that or not.  The church is in Boston, and many of the attendees are students at Sattler.  I do know that they meet in homes, they have communion often, the women wear coverings, and they think of themselves not as Anabaptists, but Anabaptist-adjacent.  

Very recently I got a FB friend request from the wife of one of the pastors.  I am also part of a FB group in which her husband is a moderator (or at least he was when I was part of the group earlier--I took a break between then and now).  

In the in-person conversation, I said that I think the people at our church who would be ready for a FotW-type church are generally forward-thinking and outward-focused.  When our church started (in 1958), many of the decisions about how things would be done focused on maintaining good relationships with the Old Order Amish we had just left, although certainly the leaders in the new group would have thought of themselves as being forward-thinking and outward-focused too.  I think that would have been how many others in Anabaptist groups saw them as well.  I recognize that most of the people younger than I am (I just turned 70) do not remember how things were at that time, and they have no sense of needing to use Old Order Amish thinking and practice as a reference point of any kind.  

When I see people disregarding the values that came to us through that avenue, I think I feel like people must feel who love a handicapped child or an adult with dementia, and they see others ignoring, or worse, mocking them.  Of course we can't make people respect or love what we respect and love, but when they do, it's ever-so-sweet.  Not only does it make us feel affirmation for our perspective, we consider it to be revealing of maturity and good discernment on their part.  Our gut feeling is that they too will come to value these good things for themselves if they can receive traditions as a gift, and embrace them in practice.

While I see value in being forward and outward-thinking, I also see benefits in looking back.  I'm concerned that when we fail to do that, we can too mindlessly discard some of the very good things that have come to us through our traditions.  When we discard those good traditions, we run the risk of losing some of the very characteristics that are appealing to a watching world.  Not only that, we lose some of the cohesiveness that makes thriving possible for those who are part of the group.  

I tend to think also that we make too much of what we need to do to accommodate people who want to join our group from different backgrounds.  I suspect that some of the accommodations we think we should make are actually not that important to people looking on.  

Admittedly, I'm basing this partly on what I hear from Hiromi.  Honestly, I think he might be more in favor of our church maintaining its distinctiveness than most of us are who have grown up in these traditions.  He doesn't bat an eye about us asking those who wish to join us to "do as we do" if they want to be members of our church (Caveat:  There is one notable exception, which I will not elaborate on here.  Suffice it to say that having a FotW-type church would not resolve that one issue.).  Granted, his perspective is informed by his Japanese background--something which adds some unusual dynamics to the mix.

In the in-person conversation, we talked about women wearing home-sewn cape dresses.  I know that this is definitely not the expectation in the FotW group.  I believe most of the forward/outward-thinking crowd thinks our practice is impractical, a needless relic from our Amish past.  Although I have at times have had similar thoughts, I noted in our conversation that I think uniformity in our home-sewn dresses also provides benefits.  I, for one, am really glad I don't need to shop for my own clothes.  Some of the people who have made the switch but still seek to wear modest clothing find shopping very challenging.  Life is streamlined in a good way, as I see it, when shopping for ready-made clothing is not needed.  Changing styles dictated by designers or retailers are a non-issue.

What's not to like about a creative/crafty endeavor like sewing, not to mention the fact that it's a great self-sufficiency skill?  There is, of course, the occasional person who becomes part of a church like ours who doesn't know how to sew.  Something always works out for people like that though.  Others sew for her, she can plug into the garage sale market, or she sometimes learns how to do it herself.  

What I've gone on about here for some time is essentially an outward expression of non-conformity.  I think some of the FotW enthusiasts would see this as giving credence to their observation that our way of being a church focuses on the outward at the expense of the inner life.  I'd like to call foul on such rhetoric.  I may elaborate in a future blog on why I think this is not a fair critique.

Before I sign off here, I'll add a few notes to remind me about what I still want to address.

1.  Boston is not rural Partridge.

2.  A Swiss-German cultural background is not the same as an Indian or Mediterranean background.

3.  When it comes to meeting needs, a big meeting-house church in Kansas might have resources to meet those needs in ways in which a FotW-type church would come up short.  I have in mind a specific case of exactly that happening recently--for a person who until recently had only remote connections to both groups. When it takes "a village,"  we can be a village--maybe better than they can.

4.  Income levels of those in leadership in the FotW group are very different from that of leaders in our church, although I presume that pastors are not salaried in either case.

5.  Getting the right balance of top-down leadership and widely-shared responsibility is always a challenge.  I suspect that both "they" and we have arrived at something that works reasonably well in our respective situations, but might not work as well if transplanted into a radically different setting.  

6. We really don't need to be more like FotW.  We need to be "more like us" in all the good ways, and, above all, we need to be more like Christ.  I remember a time when most of us thought it would be a good thing to be more like Bill Gothard.  At this point, that seems like a horrible thing.  

7.  I would like to hear from some proponents of FotW exactly what seems good about their group and practice.