On my first visit home from seminary, I told my pastor that I had been reading and enjoying Mennonite theology. My pastor, a former Assemblies of God missionary turned nondenominational church planter, affirmed my interest but also observed that Mennonites belonged to the "obedience stream" of Christianity while we belonged to the "Holy Spirit stream." Given his frequent juxtapositions between deadening legalism and life in the Spirit, this comment served as a clear warning not to get too caught up in the Mennonite focus on obeying Christ’s commands.
Nevertheless, I did (thankfully) get caught up in becoming a Mennonite—I converted in 2006—and soon learned of the lively debate among Anabaptists and Mennonites over the relationship between Christ-centered discipleship and serious attention to the Holy Spirit. Many Anabaptists and Mennonites have their own versions of my pastor’s warning, and they hope to encourage their coreligionists to see obedience as a gracious gift of the Spirit. Oftentimes this encouragement is phrased as a need to learn from Spirit-oriented traditions, especially Pentecostals and charismatics. Occasionally the encouragement is to recognize the traces of the Spirit in the Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition itself, to see the tradition as not only a part of the "obedience stream" but also at least potentially a part of the "Holy Spirit stream."
The articles in the present issue of Anabaptist Witness help us in this task by showing how Anabaptists and Mennonites, as well as others, have followed and might follow the Spirit in mission. American Pentecostal missiologist Jody Fleming argues that putting Anabaptist and Pentecostal-charismatic traditions into conversation may help us have a wider view of the Spirit’s work and therefore a wider, more holistic sense of our mission. Johannes Reimer, a German Mennonite Brethren missiologist who teaches in South Africa, describes how the Mennonite Brethren church was born of a Spirit movement that issued directly in mission. Reimer challenges his fellow German MBs to recover this missional vision of the Spirit even as they guard against excesses.
Former Mennonite Church Canada Witness worker Andrew Suderman—whose service included directing the Anabaptist Network in South Africa—addresses questions of mission and power in his essay. After tracing a post-apartheid drift by South African churches toward a "Constantinian" alliance with state power, Suderman details how the Spirit promised by Jesus empowers the church for kenotic witness and enables the renewal of prophetic, liberating elements of South African church history. Writing in "postmodern, post-Christendom" Britain, Assemblies of God pastor Chris Horton finds the sixteenth-century Anabaptist coordination of Spirit and discipleship particularly helpful for mission in his context. Spirit-motivated mission meets skeptics by prioritizing relationship-building and the integrity of the discipleship community.
Andrew Mashas works with Eastern Mennonite Missions in Pennsylvania. His contribution tells the story of the Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia as a work of the Spirit—from the MKC’s founding, then through a long period of persecution, and finally into its present flourishing. Carol Tobin, of Virginia Mennonite Missions, poetically meditates on the Spirit’s healing yet sometimes bewildering presence.
Together with the book reviews, the articles and poems in this issue of Anabaptist Witness invite us to discern where the Spirit has been, is, and will be moving. They invite us into the "Holy Spirit stream," to follow the Spirit in mission.
Jamie Pitts, co-editor