September 17th

God led us through 'that'

To my dear TFMC family,

I was meeting with my Pastor’s Learning Circle yesterday and somehow, I’m not quite sure how, we got on the topic of experiences of God.  Something that was reflected was that a lot of the stories in scripture are stories of people’s experiences of God.  And, one thing that we talked about at length was that the stories that made an impression and the ones that were told and were re-told weren't individual experiences of God, but rather they were the corporate experiences of God.

Take for instance the story of Exodus.  That is a corporate experience, where the Hebrew/Israelite people had a corporate experience of God leading them through their freedom from enslavement in Egypt throughout their wandering in the wilderness.  The testimony that the Hebrews/Israelites share, in one voice, is that “God led us through ‘that’.”  It was a multigenerational experience of God’s presence which has sustained, and continues to sustain Jewish people today.

This got us thinking about our own fatih tradition and our own stories. I think of some of the stories from the radical reformation, and how we share the early Anabaptist stories.  Looking back, we testify to the way that God led and sustained the early Anabaptists through the emergence of this new way of following Jesus.  Oftentimes under extreme duress.  We can say that, “God led us through ‘that’.”

Our group also reflected a bit on how we have this generational story of the emigration of Mennonites from Europe over the decades to North and South America.  A testimony that is commonly shared, is that “God led us through ‘that’.”  This is a significant part of our story, one that we’ve told and retold.  However, the difference between this story and the Exodus story  is that with a few generations removed, these stories don’t seem to have the same staying power that the Exodus story has.  And we wondered, why might that be?

One thought we had was this, we have become more focused on ourselves as individuals.  And as individuals, instead of having corporate stories of experiences of God, we have our individual stories.  Drawn from our own hardships where we can name experiences of God’s providence.  

This then led us to a question, as a community? Local and larger, when was the last time we can look back, and say that “God led us through ‘that’.”  And what was that story?  We didn’t come up with any answers, but I’m confident there are some.

It’s stories like these, stories of our experiences with God, which capture people's attention.  People want to know stories of God’s engagement with humankind.  People want to know that God is still alive and active.  And it’s our stories, individual and corporate, that serve to both remind us of God’s continuing work in the world, and also to witness to the world that God has not left, has not forgotten, and is still deeply concerned for creation.

Yours,

Craig Janzen Neufeld, Pastor