A Faith You Can See from the Highway

Let me start with a story from someone else’s life: I met Jaclyn in 2023 when we both took an online class in Anabaptist history and theology. Jaclyn, who’d been raised in the Lutheran tradition, told this story:

“I spent some time in Shipshewana, Indiana,” she said. “There is a large Amish and Mennonite community there. I was on a ‘buggy ride’ with an Amish driver, and he pointed out how you could tell certain homes were built by Anabaptists. That planted a seed. I started to wonder about the type of faith that informed daily life so deeply you could see it from the highway.”

It may not be enough to “live simply, so that others may simply live.” Why? Because the people that our society deems “other” are not allowed to simply live in this country today—not without fear of brutality or detainment or deportation or death.

“I Want It to Mean Something”

If someone looked at us from the proverbial highway, what would they see? What kind of people do we want to be, given all that is happening around us and abroad? What kind of world do we want to help create? 

These are questions I’ve been holding for a while. 

In 2011, while pursuing an M.Div. at YDS, I declared during a stroll with a friend, “If I am going to call myself a disciple of Jesus, I want it to mean something!” 

I was expressing a concern dear to the early Anabaptists: rather than merely worshiping Jesus or declaring Christian faith with words alone, can I try to embody Jesus’ approach to life in the way I live? 

Can we?

My childhood religious education had taught me how to belong (or perform belonging) in Christian spaces. But it hadn’t taught me how to become ever more Christian—how to live out the deepest values of my tradition, with others, so that my inner commitments, callings, and deepest desires matched my outward actions. 

A Childhood Disconnect

From an early age, I’d been graced with an innate and profound sense of the presence of God, which felt more real to me than anything I heard in Sunday school. Yet Christianity seemed like a set of ancient, improbable claims I had to pretend to believe in with certitude to belong in the church. A child of divorce, I worried that if I shared my honest theological questions, I’d be ousted from the community. And community—one built on mutuality, social reciprocity, and trust, where each person is known and loved in their particularity, cared for both materially and spiritually, and free to show up with all the complexities of who they are, even in times of conflict—was what I longed for. 

Perhaps you carry a similar longing these days, inundated as we all are by violence, divisiveness, and contempt?

A moral community is what I try, imperfectly, to help build and practice with the Mennonite Congregation of Boston (MCOB), where I serve as pastor. 

Menno-curious

I have written elsewhere about my circuitous journey to MCOB and my relatively recent entry into the Mennonite world—an admittedly small world, if measured by global adherents, especially in the Northeastern US: MCOB, for instance, is the only Mennonite Church USA congregation in Massachusetts. 

Recently, Menno-curious folks have been approaching me with hope. They have wondered if a “fringier” sect of Christianity like ours might walk in the Way of Jesus differently than mainline Christians do, or if we might be less burdened than more populous traditions often are by the woes that sociologist Christian Smith enumerates in his recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: religious disaffiliation, declining church attendance, public scandal, political polarization, Millennial and Gen Z apathy, secularism, and a dilution of Jesus’ prophetic message under the grinding pressures of capitalism (North America’s unofficially official religion).^[1]

Let me give you the bad news first: we Mennonites face many similar struggles, and we certainly reckon with our own ghosts.

As “Anablackivist” and scholar Drew G.I. Hart has pointed out, the earliest Anabaptists formed increasingly insular communities in the aftermath of brutal 16^th-century European persecution— incarceration, torture, and execution by both Catholic and Protestant authorities.^[2] Eventually, some of them fled to North America, with their Bibles in one hand and Martyrs Mirror in the other.^[3]

The Quiet in the Land

It is hard to say exactly when Mennonites self-protectively learned to be “the quiet in the land,” living in unobtrusive ways in order to avoid the wrath of the state.^[4] But Hart is right: we have softened the radical practices that historically got Anabaptists killed—anti-Christendom activism, extreme pacifism, the keeping of a common purse, and a believer’s baptism that rejected Christian identity as inherited nationalism (from Latin natio: “birth” or “tribe”)—into much more palatable, much less prophetic guiding philosophies.

These days, most North American Mennonites tend to be privileged rather than persecuted. Anabaptist gatherings are increasingly divided along political lines. We grapple with the fact that much of the generational wealth that has fueled largely white (even if increasingly diverse) Mennonite communities in the US springs from the historic acquisition of farmland stolen from native peoples. And we are tempted to practice the “negative peace” of conflict avoidance and adherence to the status quo rather than risk the “positive peace” of challenging and transforming systems of oppression.[5]

But it may not be enough to “live simply, so that others may simply live.”^[6] Why? Because the people that our society deems “other” are not allowed to simply live in this country today—not without fear of brutality or detainment or deportation or death. This is a deeply human problem that demands a meaningful, active Christian response, no matter our political leanings, no matter our Christian denomination, religious tradition, or philosophy.

In other words, like members of other spiritual and ethical communities these days, many Mennonites are raising their voices, devoting time and material resources, and putting their bodies on the line as an expression of their deepest Christian values, while many others are still wondering what is ours to do.

Blessed are They Who Pay Attention

The good news: thankfully, as a Mennonite pastor, my job is not to have all the answers. Most days my job may even be “non-essential” to my congregation, which did just fine without a paid pastor until about 20 years ago! 

As Mennonite minister Melissa Florer-Bixler has recounted, some say the 16^th-century Anabaptists chose “the least essential person in the community as their pastor: that way, when persecution came and the pastor was inevitably killed, the community wouldn’t lose an essential service like a cobbler or a mason.”^[7]  

Instead, Florer-Bixler suggests, the pastor’s role—like the role we may all be called to fulfill if we wish to be truly alive in community—is to “pay attention.” Because how will I work toward healing past harms, and how will I love my neighbors—and my “enemies,” for that matter—if I do not take the time to “learn to know them”? How will we?

As one of my congregants remarked recently, “Everyone seems to be stuck on the threshold of action, asking ‘what should we do’ but never taking the first step. But I say, if you want to know what to do, then build a relationship with your neighbors—all of them, especially those most vulnerable. Get to know them. Really. They will tell you what they need. Then you will know what to do.” 

Practicing Scales

I wish my childhood self could have been catechized with such wisdom. Perhaps then she would have seen Christian congregational life not like a gated community but like a practice room: a place where we do scales, where by stumbling repetition we routinize the basic patterns and commitments of showing up for each other, so that we keep showing up—as honestly and openly and lovingly as possible—in the wider world. 

With a heart cracked open to the wounds within us and around us, attentive to repairing collectively the hurts we have caused and those we carry, may we co-labor to build a world that everyone can call home. 

An ever-more moral community.[8]

A daily faith so alive you can see it from the highway. 

The Rev. Kate André ’12 M.Div., ’13 S.T.M. is pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston. She has a B.A. degree in Music and Drama from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. At YDS, her master’s thesis focused on sketch comedy and improv as methods of community-building. She has served as Director of Campus Ministry at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, as a theology teacher and campus minister at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City, and as a chaplain resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She is a trained yoga teacher and a former Cohort Coordinator for Contemplative Leaders in Action, a young adult formation program in Ignatian spirituality and leadership. Now a doctoral student in Religion and Education at Boston College and serving as the Mennonite/Anabaptist chaplain at Harvard, she is a member of the Alumni Board of YDS.