May 24thBecoming Mennonite
AB/SK Canadian Mennonite Correspondent
I’ve often joked that my memoir will be titled Becoming Mennonite: The Emily Summach Story.
I became a member of a Mennonite church for the first time when I was 29. I didn’t grow up in an Anabaptist church, nor am I ethnically Mennonite. When people ask me how I found the Mennonite church, I used to tell them the story of a providential google search and a welcoming little congregation in rural Saskatchewan.
Yet, after four years as an MCSask Pastor and two years as a correspondent for Canadian Mennonite, my answer to the question of how I found the Mennonite church has changed. I found it because of the Holy Spirit.
Like many modern, North American people of faith, I struggled with the idea of the Holy Ghost. It felt a little “woo-woo”; this notion of an ephemeral being who was active in my life and in the world. I’d seen too many terrible decisions made by people who claimed to be acting on the leading of the Holy Spirit. How do we make sense of this Helper that Jesus promised to his followers in John 15:26?
One of my favorite books to read with my two children is The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown. The allegorical story tells about a little bunny, who in a fit of anger, tells his mother that he is going to run away from home. The little bunny imagines all the things that he will become into in order to escape his mother’s presence. A mountain climber. A fish. For every transformation the bunny imagines, his mother is still there. “If you become a bird and fly away from me, I will become the tree that you come home to,” says his mother. “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, I will become the wind, and I will blow you where I want you to go.”
The Holy Spirit is like that Mother Bunny. Present and watchful, deeply invested in our lives, steering us into the spaces and places where God’s love will find us. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see that we live in a God soaked world. And lest we think that we are in control of our own destiny, the nudgings (sometimes shovings) of the Spirit reminds us otherwise.
How did I find the Mennonite Church? Because the Holy Spirit convicted us to seek a local body, rather than commuting. Because this particular church followed the Spirit’s leading in their context and had female leadership. Because the Holy Spirit spoke to us through the love and hospitality of a small group of people. Because we found a community, through the Spirit, around a dining room table crowded with small children, piled with plates of spaghetti. We found the Mennonites because the Holy Spirit, gently, lovingly, brought us here.
As we turn towards Pentecost, may we notice the direction of the Holy Spirit in our stories, and give thanks to God for that gift.