In order to intentionally develop a community on this trip, we have undertaken the task of telling and listening to one another’s stories.  Each person takes a turn and can choose to share any piece of their history with the goal of helping the rest of the group to better understand why it is that they believe what they believe and struggle with some issues and not others.

Through this process, it has become clear that every experience is unique.  Each person has come to the place where they’re at in their understanding of church through experiences and history that have shaped them.  Much as these stories differ, I find my own to be extraordinary because I am the only person to have not grown up exclusively in the Mennonite church and culture.  Instead, my church history includes a mix of denominations.

My parents both come from very strong Lutheran backgrounds so that when I was born, I was baptized at the age of one month into the Lutheran church.  Four years later, my parents signed up with Eastern Mennonite Missions to work at a small rural hospital in Tanzania.  My earliest memories of church are in the large Mennonite congregation in Shirati, TZ, where my sisters and I would sit for two hours listening to long sermons that were in a language that we hadn’t learned.  Boredom was the word of those mornings.  Yet, I never remember dreading a Sunday morning.  It was always special to wake up to chai, choral music playing on our tape deck, and both of my parents home.

We lived in Tanzania for 6 years with one five month furlough in the U.S. to get back in touch with our Lutheran roots.  Returning to the states at the end of our term, we moved to an area where we had no family or connections except that of a doctor which my father had met seven years earlier.  Our church search was extensive as we tried to connect our different experiences to find a home church.  Eventually, we settled on a Lutheran Church in a town some twenty miles away.  We stayed there for five years until a combination of transitions including my sisters and I becoming involved in the local Methodist youth group and a big change in church leadership and at the Lutheran Church led our family to the Methodist Church in our town.  We attended there through the remainder of my high school years and became very involved there.

After high school, I took a year off to do the Rotary Exchange Program in Ecuador where I attended a Catholic school and church, excited to learn about another huge sector of the Christian Church.  Returning to the states, I began attending the college of my choice, Eastern Mennonite University, understanding that it was a small Christian school with a good education program and many family friends to recommend it.

The four years spent at EMU and a small Mennonite congregation nearby allowed me to think critically about the different churches that I had been a part of and how they had been formative in my faith walk.  At the same time, however, being the impressionable person that I am, I also began to develop an outlook on faith that mirrored many of my friends’, placing Mennonites at the top of a totem pole and seeing all other denominations as too extreme, conservative, liberal, etc.  An exciting piece of this project (bike movement) for me has been to reevaluate these ideas and begin to connect all of my denominational experiences into one larger faith.  Bike time can be a great time for thinking and processing and I am coming to a realization that, while I love the Mennonite church and hope to be connected with it in the future, the church is not so much the foundation of my faith as a personal relationship and conversation with Christ.  What this means to me is bringing my deepest thoughts, questions, and fears to God through prayer (both written and spoken).  While I value conversation with other believers as a means of providing insight and provoking more thought, I think it is vitally important to keep God a part of the conversation.
~Jenny

Posted by Jenny Hartwig

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 8:19 am 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.