Our forty mile coast into Boise Sunday turned into a seven hour Buschert snack-tempered fiasco. First Timothy got light feet and pulled ahead of the group only to miss a turn, ride six extra miles down I-84 and loop around to take a rest and wait for the group 2 miles behind where they had stopped to wait for him. On his hiatus, Kendra tasted pavement after Nathan and Sarah forgot to communicate an upcoming hazard. Forty minutes later Tim found the group, we called in the search party and headed to Russ and Janet Buschert’s house – two generous hosts from Boise Mennonite who, besides offering us real live cycling guides through the safest streets of Boise, fed us marshmallows, ice cream, cherries, popsicles and other unique and mostly-nutritious energizers. From Russ and his friend Tim (Yoder) we learned a lot about cycling; sort of embarrassing to realize you don’t know much about riding, fixing, being around bikes after a week of trekking across the mountains and deserts of Oregon – eating right; they may have felt bad after giving us those snacks – and how to spot goatheads, those sharp little thorns that grow on sly bushes that snake out into the road and are relentless on our tubes and tires that are apparently engineered Eastern US-specific.

The food prep folks at Hyde Park were planning for thirty, so eleven of us ended up eating pretty well – Alicia still claims they didn’t hear that number from her. We’re not sure who they heard it from, but we hope the other churches are visited by the same messenger. Then the meeting… our second… lovely in similar and different ways from the first. We had more folks over the age of thirty at this one and I liked it that way. To hear a person my parents age echo something that I’ve been talking about with friends for a long time – and most likely say it with more precision and wisdom – for me, foretastes the chatter of the Community of God. Humbling our fervent, anxious hearts to listen to (often wily) church veterans is a portion of what it means for young adults to do church in the tradition of the Anabaptists. As members of a church who historically claims to be a body of believers gathered together to discern truth, we must learn to listen. But we must also learn to speak, for theoretically – and I might highlight this precept as crucial to the healthy development and sustenance of our tradition – my theological and not-so-theological ideas, nurtured by only 22 years of theological and not-so-theological development, carry as much weight in the community as our pastors’. Yeah, I said it. Now I’ll say this:

On Sunday evening, at Hyde Park Mennonite, the members of the church (who happened to be older than most of us) listened to us, and we listened to them – and, together we sought to discern truth. I remember something Janet Buschert said and, as a result – because we were practicing church (as mutual participants in a creative drama Jesus set up to help us learn more about who he was and why we should care) – I have something to say. Janet has been thinking about the word “yieldedness” in relation to conversations. She’s been trying to learn that in order to enter honestly into a conversation with other believers (who admittedly she might have some negative preconceived notions about), she must yield to the possibility that she might be changed. We’ve probably all heard a form of this idea before, but know it’s incredibly hard to actually live out.

On Sunday evening, I found Janet’s reminder particularly helpful as I thought about being a Mennonite Christian in a post-modern world. One of the questions that comes up in the respectable, yet befuddling, chaos of inter-faith, inter-denominational and intra-denomonational dialogue, is ‘can any of us find within our traditions something unique to offer anyone else?’ and out of that question one might ask, ‘beyond offering, do we have access to some piece of Creative revelation (and therefore the authority of Christ) which demands we hold the church accountable to holding to that ‘unique thing?’ Janet’s words gave me a little bit of wiggle room between the rock and the hard place set up by strains of post-modernity. Anabaptists do have something unique – our most basic theology of the ecclesia (the gathering, the church). As a group of believers gathered together to discern truth, we have to be yielded to the possibility of change in conversation. For only by openly engaging in and mutually un-covering pieces of truth together can we, wishing to remain in line with the 16^th century Anabaptists, profess to practice church. That means two things. First, it means that we are, indeed, part of a growing and changing community – our ethical traditions and cultural worship styles are important, but they are hardly timeless or culturally transcendent manifestations that encapsulate Jesus’ way for the world. But that doesn’t mean that our traditions and cultures should be blank-slated (even if they could be) and that we should imagine, somehow from scratch, what Jesus would be up to today. On the contrary, it means – secondly – that we come out of particular and important stories. And we have a responsibility to those stories. For Christians it’s the scriptures, traditions, reasonings and experiences that make us who we are. The question then becomes, ‘how can we enter conversations disciplined in the consistent and constant practicing of church?’ ‘How, in conversation, do we constructively engage the stories of others and, without forgetting our own experiences, carefully entangle ourselves in the divine mess of re-generating a mutually Created truth?’

Janet offered me a small foot-hold on the slippery slopes of post-modernity. I hope she was challenged Sunday night as well. Let’s not forget the critical place of honest, open-to-change conversation in Anabaptist ecclesiological theologies. And here’s a sound, and practical challenge for us all. I have been speaking only in the context of US American Mennonites – and that dialogue, at least for me, is intimidating enough. Bikemovement is about something more though. Bikemovement is asking me and you to consider broadening our understanding of the church to the world outside of US borders – outside of North America. The broader the conversation, the more complicated it becomes. Sure. But to truly realize the Creative reign of our God – we must demand of one another at least an attempt (or the financial support of such an attempt – check the website) at this imagined, truly representative, dialogue – a microcosm of the true global church.

Join us as we do church – for some us, this is the first time ever. And it’s exciting.

~ Tim Showalter

Posted by Tim Showalter

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Trip06. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.