While our sanctuary undergoes renovations, we held a joint worship service with our neighbors at North Broadway United Methodist Church. For the sermon their pastor and I each talked about our own faith traditions and how our congregations are living that out. Below are my portions of the sermon.
Text: Matthew 5:1-12
You all have been such good neighbors to us this summer. We have held both a regional conference and three Sundays of worship in your fellowship hall. And it feels very fitting that we now get to worship together, so many thanks for that.
In my experience, people tend to have three main frames of reference for Mennonites.
The first, and probably most common preconception, is that Mennonites are kind of like the Amish. We are Amish-lite. Same great taste, but less filled with rules and regulations about dress and technology. And this is kind of historically accurate. Mennonites and Amish do share a spiritual ancestry. The 16th century Anabaptists emphasized that baptism and the Christian life were to be arrived at through a conscious adult decision. Anabaptist means “re-baptizers.” At the beginning of the 18th century, Jacob Amman (Amish) believed his sisters and brothers in this stream...