A Gentle Boldness: Sharing the Peace of Jesus in a Multi-Faith World

Preface

Iwas born in Shirati village in Tanganyika, East Africa, by the shores of Lake Victoria. My parents were Mennonite missionaries from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and they bore witness to Jesus and his peace among a people who had never before heard of Jesus. Bumangi was my boyhood home.

When I was a child my mother read Egermeier’s Bible Story Book at bedtime. As a little boy of six I asked my parents this question: What difference does Jesus make?

The answer to that question is the reason I am a Christian. For eighty years I have asked that question day by day as I travel in the way with Jesus. I hear wherever I travel that Jesus is the principal peacemaker. Paul refers to his mission of peacemaking as ambassadorial peacemaking. By God’s grace I have been appointed to serve as his ambassador for peace. I and my wife Grace have been investing our lives in this mission of serving as peacemakers for Jesus.

About three years ago Amy Gingerich, executive director of Herald Press, asked if I would be interested in writing a book on missions. She said, We need a book that celebrates the joys and challenges of living as a people of peace. We need a book that encourages and inspires a joyous and exuberant commitment to Christ and his mission in our day.

I told her I would love to write that book.

She said, Then go for it.

That invitation formed the seed of this book, a book that I hope encourages and inspires a joyous and exuberant commitment to Christ and his mission in our day. The Anabaptist communities with whom I am most closely associated—Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the United States—form the core of the book, along with a wide diversity of stories, each a miracle because of how many people were touched through the years. The stories began one hundred years ago, when there were no Mennonite churches in the East Africa region, and today these churches comprise a million followers of Jesus. It’s amazing how, from a small farming community in eastern Pennsylvania, seeds were planted that have brought a tremendous harvest.

This is a book of miracles.

This book celebrates the joy of communities of persons coming to faith in Jesus and bringing transformation to their homes, their communities, and their nations.

This book lends itself well to encouraging conversations of Jesus bringing about his kingdom in your own respective communities, discussing what is happening in your own home area.

As Grace and I have worked on this two-year effort we have sometimes shed tears of joy, and it is with enormous enthusiasm and hope that we share with you what we have heard and experienced in communities around the world.

As it says in Revelation 5:9, You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.

May this book encourage you to fulfill your part in bringing to fruition Christ’s work in our day.

Introduction

Saying Yes

Iwas flying to Nepal when an unexpected email came through from the office of the president of Tanzania. I was traveling through Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania, as a global consultant for Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), working on a Swahili translation for my book A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue . It was a five-year process.

In any case, it was during this time that I received an email from the president of Tanzania, who had become interested in the work we were doing with that very book.

"The president has heard you are in town and is delighted that A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue is now available. He would like you to stop into his cabinet room before you leave town. Your meeting with the president has been scheduled." The email went on to explain the date and time of the meeting, where to go, and what to expect on arrival. It turned out, the president was eager to speak with me about Muslim-Christian relations and to encourage a path forward where both groups could continue to live in harmony in Tanzania.

We were surprised and grateful for this invitation by the president of Tanzania. But my itinerary during that trip to the region was completely full. I glanced over the days, the people I was to meet and the places I was to go, and I simply had no extra time slot to meet with the president. I would have to decline.

I wrote back with my apologies (in hindsight I do wonder, how could I be so dense?), saying thanks but no thanks. I couldn’t come. My schedule was full. Maybe another time. I closed my computer. I convinced myself the opportunity would come around again.

I have to wonder how many times, as Christians, this is our response to the call of Christ, when that still small voice speaks. How many times does Jesus himself come calling, asking us to do something, to say something, to go somewhere, and we are quick to point out the busyness of our schedules, the many burdens on our time? How many times do we politely refuse Christ? What if we committed to begin accepting these invitations?

This is a book about saying Yes.

Very soon after my reply to the office of the president of Tanzania, I received another succinct email from them. I could tell by the tone that they were not used to being told No. The message was simple and to the point.

When the president says come, you come.

Fair enough.

So as soon as I landed in Nepal, I told my hosts, We’ll have to meet another day. I’m going to see the president of Tanzania. And I got back on a different flight and returned for my meeting with the president.

After going through security, my wife Grace and I were ushered into a waiting room outside the council chambers of Tanzania where the president held important meetings. Others waited there as well, and we were called in one at a time. Later, we would discover that the president broke out of a cabinet meeting to make time to meet with us.

He came into the room, greeted us, and we sat around the table together. I’m extremely excited about this book on Muslim-Christian dialogue, he said. Christians and Muslims simply do not understand each other.

He went on to say that he would like a large number of books, all of which he would pay for himself. I think that might be a bit many, I said, taken aback by the number. Perhaps we should start with half that?

Bishop Amos Muhagachi (middle) and I (left) presenting A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue in Swahili to Jikaya Kikwete, former president of Tanzania, 2011.

He was very concerned that every Christian and Muslim leader in Tanzania have a copy.

In addition to ordering the books, he wanted me to host a meeting between all the key Christian and Muslim leaders of Tanzania, a dialogue that he hoped would open up a way of peace between the two groups. I was asked to plan it and steer it, along with Tanzania’s Mennonite bishop Amos Muhagachi and Steven Mang’ana.

These meetings took place a few months after he called me to his office, when we had an unprecedented seminar for Muslims and Christians in Tanzania. I ran it alongside my Ugandan friend and Muslim coauthor of A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue, Badru Kateregga.

I remember one of the first things we said as we greeted the attendees: All the children of Abraham are to bless all the people of the world. This is God’s command in the Torah, is it not? There was a lot of nodding and murmured replies in the affirmative.

Okay, well, you are all children of Abraham. Are you making people joyful and blessed as you relate with them?

What followed was a wonderful, spirited conversation about how each group was blessing the world, as described by the other group. So, Muslims listed the ways that Christians were blessing the world, and Christians listed the ways Muslims were blessing the world. It was a tremendous conversation.

On the second day of our two days together, the roof nearly blew in spirited contention. The conflict was in response to comments made by my partner, Badru, who urged that Tanzania become a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Divine intervention and the wise leadership of the Muslim and Christian co-moderators finally got us back on track.

The conflict revealed the apprehension felt by both Christians and Muslims regarding faith in the political order. Christians prefer the Tanzanian secular state while the Muslims yearn for an Islamic state. The tensions that surfaced revealed the need for regular dialogue, and as a result, I was invited to help facilitate similar local dialogues at the town and village level.

There were seeds of peace sown that day in ways that I never could have planned or imagined, were it not for the invitation I received and (eventually) said yes to.

If, indeed, when the president of a nation calls, the response must be Yes!, then how much more should our answer be Yes when Jesus calls! How much more eagerly should we lay down our responsibilities and previous engagements, and follow Jesus into the calling where he would like to lead us?

Again and again, throughout my life, I have heard that call, for I have been appointed by Jesus to be his emissary. I will always be amazed that Jesus chose me for ambassadorial service. Sometimes the Holy Spirit has a great plan, yet no one is listening. The summons from Jesus comes in different ways, through different people—you might, as you listen to the call of Christ, be as surprised to hear the call as I was.

I am writing this memoir as an encouragement to you: listen to Jesus, and reply to his call with an unreserved Yes!

The stories in this book are accounts of Jesus calling and sending ambassadors to the ends of the Earth. It is a calling we must not ignore.

But there were other seeds sown as well, decades before that day, and we bore witness to the fruit of those long-ago planted seeds after we left the president’s office and stood at an immigration desk going through departure formalities. The officer glanced at me, glanced at Grace, looked back down at our passports, and asked us an interesting question.

I see from your passport that you were born in Shirati, Tanzania, he said to me. The Mennonites who live in Tanzania are from Shirati. Are you perchance a Mennonite?

Indeed, I replied with a smile. I am a Mennonite Christian, born in Shirati.

We Mennonites love Jesus. And we like to sing about Jesus. May I sing a song for you? So, right there in the immigration line, Grace and I were serenaded by a fellow Mennonite Christian. He sang two songs of praise to Jesus, and the passengers in the queue were delighted.

How could it happen that a Tanzanian immigration officer in Dar es Salaam (a name that means Place of Peace) would cross our path, tell us he is a Mennonite as well, and bless us with hymns in his native Swahili?

This book describes the amazing answer to that question.

Part I

Tanzania: The Seeds of Faith (1933–1952)

1

The God Who Went Away

Eighty years ago, in an apple stand in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Central Market, on a market day that might have seemed like any other, a woman named Emma called over to her son, J. Clyde.

There he is, Clyde, Emma said. Go and ask the preacher your question.

Earlier that week, Clyde had confided to his parents that he believed God was calling him into missionary service in Africa. His father, David, openly wept as his only son described this inclination that God might be calling him to leave the family farm and move overseas. Emma had wisely encouraged her son to share the calling with their pastor, Jacob Hess, the next time they saw him.

The opportunity came in a busy farmer’s market stall. Clyde motioned for the pastor and led him into a side aisle.

Pastor Jacob, he asked earnestly. Should I go to Africa as a missionary?

What a question.

At that time, a small missionary team from Lancaster was blooming in Tanganyika, a sovereign state that made up the modern-day part of mainland Tanzania. In 1933, Eastern Mennonite Missions took action to seek an area in Africa where the gospel was not known. Several weeks before Clyde asked his pastor to confirm his calling, a train was chartered for 475 passengers to carry well-wishers from Lancaster to New York City, for a grand farewell at the dock, seeing off the first Mennonite missionaries to East Africa. Fervor for mission among Mennonites, essentially a peasant farming community, was a response to revivalism that swept through their congregations across North America at the end of the nineteenth century.

One of the seeds of these Mennonite revivals occurred in 1896, with a tragic train and buggy accident just north of Smoketown, Pennsylvania. Enos Barge and his fiancée were killed on a foggy evening after coming home from a party of young people, and their death spoke powerfully to the young people who, up until that time, were rarely baptized until after they were married. After that accident in Lancaster County many young people repented and were baptized, and for some of them this revival also meant a recommitment to the mission of the church.

But this conviction for mission didn’t begin in the nineteenth century. It was formed within the Mennonite movement in Germany, as well as the Swiss and Dutch wings of the early Anabaptist movement, as far back as 1525, when sixty Anabaptist leaders met in Augsburg to plan for the evangelization of the world as they knew it. Their favorite preaching text was the great commission of Matthew 28:18-20, yet most who met in that missions gathering were martyred within three years. Consequently they became known as the quiet in the land.

By the sixteenth century, European church life had become united with the political system. Christians who believed that following Jesus in a politically centered way went in directions that didn’t harmonize with Jesus and his teachings. The state system opposed practices such as adult baptism, a central practice of the burgeoning Anabaptist community, and that was the center of the persecution.

The freedoms of America opened the doors to rekindle the vision for mission that characterized the early Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. As a child I knew we were a people whose history included martyrs. That legacy ran deep within Mennonite spirituality.

However, it was only in my church history classes many years later that I learned about the sixteenth century refusal of Mennonites to participate in the wars against Muslims. It was in those classes that I learned of Michael Sattler, a man who would rather die as a martyr than join the European armies and kill Muslims for whom Christ had died. Many followed his example, a costly decision that led to martyrdom and being labeled traitors against Christendom.

Mission and peacemaking have always belonged together in Anabaptist missiology! For example, an eleven-year-old boy, John Mellinger, who later became president of Eastern Mennonite Missions, asked his father why Mennonite pastors seemed to ignore the great commission of Matthew 28. That question was used of the Holy Spirit to expand the stirrings of interest in missions. And on my desk is the Dordrecdcht Confession of Faith from the Dutch Mennonites, published in 1632. This seventeenth-century document calls on all believers to proclaim Jesus as Savior and Lord and to take the gospel to those who are not believers.

So it is that these Anabaptist traditions have made their way through the centuries. Four hundred years later, Sattler’s love for Muslims would reappear in my own heart.

The inquisitive conversation in the aisle at Central Market that Clyde had with his pastor was happening among Mennonites throughout North America as a response to the movements of the Holy Spirit at that time.

Revival meetings sometimes packed out the meetinghouses. One service was so filled with repentant believers that a young man’s only option was to walk atop the benches in order to come forward for the prayer of confession. The youth culture at the time was very much formed by revivalist preaching, since many young people attended church on Sunday evenings for the social and spiritual development. My grandfather was so affected by the revivals that he discontinued raising tobacco and turned his fields into orchards.

These revivals often grew, spilling over into tent meetings, such as the George Brunk tent meetings of the 1950s. Thousands attended, and when an invitation was given to accept Jesus, people flowed to the front of the assembly by the hundreds for prayer and confession.

Bishops sometimes fretted that the renewals were developing a new kind of Mennonite. Indeed mission and renewal were happening, sometimes in spite of objections from conservative bishops.

Jesus was calling, and people were responding with an unhesitating, Yes!

My father, deeply embedded in this culture of revival, leaned into Jesus’ call, but he experienced no such objections from his own Mennonite pastor, who with quiet command took in his lanky, six-foot frame, leaned in and said, Young man, let the Lord have his way. The simplicity of this response moves me, even to this day.

That young man, J. Clyde Shenk, the one earnestly seeking God’s call on his life, eventually became my father, and his Yes to the invitation of Christ shaped my life forever.

My father left that meeting with his Mennonite pastor in Lancaster’s Central Market and shared his growing conviction with his fiancée, Alta Barge, who was also experiencing a call for missionary work in Africa. The struggle to confirm this calling was intense, and it wore on my father as he engaged with God. He lost sleep, his appetite, and thirty pounds as the days passed. He didn’t want to leave his father alone to run the farm; yet he had heard the call. How could he say no?

He imagined entering this life of deprivation: there would be no tomato soup; he assumed he would have no John Deere tractor at his disposal, as he did on the home farm. Nevertheless, within two years my parents were in Tanganyika.

But my father’s conversation with his pastor didn’t happen in a vacuum, and unbeknownst to him, there were larger movements going on at that time that would support Jesus’ call on his life. Businessman Orie Miller, the general secretary of Eastern Mennonite Missions, along with the board, had taken action in 1930 to move forward in mission, in spite of strong resistance. During one board meeting, the treasurer cautioned the group: they could commit $9.62 to missions in Africa, obviously much less than what would be required.

Orie expressed his conviction that the funds always follow the vision.

A year later Orie Miller and farmer Elam Stauffer set out to explore where the