July/August, 2024
Editorial
Volume 59, Number 4
At the 2023 BRF General Meeting, the focus was on “Brethren Values: What Are They and Why are They Important?” Brethren ministers, Nathan West and Nathan Rittenhouse, spoke to those questions. Brother West’s message was published in a BRF Witness at the end of last year (Vol. 58, No. 6). Brother Rittenhouse’s message has been broken into two parts. Part-1 was published in the previous BRF Witness (Vol. 59, No.3). Part-2 is covered in this edition of the BRF Witnesses.
Values are things that we deem to be important or beneficial. The Protestant Reformers rediscovered the truth that salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ, not by human works and outward ceremony. They found that the teachings of the institutional church of Rome often did not align with the truth of Scripture, and so, they valued truth and faith.
The Anabaptist movement recognized the value of the rediscovered truths of the Reformers but found their focus to be too narrow. So, while holding to the importance of the truth of Scripture, Anabaptists also placed heavy emphasis on obedience to Scripture, as evidenced in discipleship and practical Christian living. For them, faith meant following. They also emphasized the church as community. Some have said that the faith of the Anabaptists was more horizontal, and they asked the question, “Do you obey Jesus?”
The Pietist movement arose, while essentially holding the same beliefs as the Anabaptists, placing more of an emphasis on the experience of conversion and personal piety. Some have said that the faith of the Pietists was more vertical, and they asked the question, “Do you love Jesus?”
These Anabaptist and Pietist values, against the backdrop of the rediscovered truths of the Reformation, shaped the early Brethren. But do they still? – Can they still? The following article suggests that these foundational values are not simply Brethren but are none other than pure New Testament Christianity, and as Brethren, we have a lot to learn from where we have already been.
— Eric Brubaker
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BRETHREN VALUES; WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT? (Part 2)
By Nathan Rittenhouse
In part-1 of brother Nathan’s address, he noted that about every 500 years the church seems to encounter significant disruption and upheaval. There is some kind of turbulent feature in culture that changes the way the church operates. After that, for about the next 100 or 150 years, everyone is asking the question, “Okay, who’s in charge?”, “Who’s the authority?”, “What’s going on here?” He noted that September 11, 2001 may have been such an event. If so, then we are about 20 years into the 100-year period of answering the questions, “Where does authority lie?”, “Says who?” These are not just religious questions but are collective across our globe. People are asking, “Who’s in charge?”, “Who gets to decide?”, “What are the moral dictates?”, “What is the foundation of ethics?”, “How is it that we ought to be operating?”, “How should we structure our lives?”, “How then should we live?”
RETURNING TO THE EARLY DAYS
Going back then to the topic of disruptions and turmoil and big questions of authority being asked and a kind of restructuring and people trying to figure out how to church…looking at the number of churches that are closing and preachers that are leaving, it can be rather despairing. But I think there’s a phenomenal silver lining in this and this is where the Brethren will have a role to play as we talk about the future of the value of our values.
Alan Kreider in his book, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom offers some hope. He tells about a Methodist preacher who in 1949 taught at Cambridge and wrote this,
“After a period of 1,500 years or so, we can just about begin to say that at last, no man is now a Christian because of government compulsion or because it is a way to procure court favor or because it is necessary to qualify for public office or public opinion demands conformity or because he would lose customers if he did not go to church or even because of the habit of his own intellect in his mind. This fact makes the present day the most important and most exhilarating period in the history of Christianity for 1,500 years. And the removal of so many kinds of inducement and compulsion makes nonsense of any argument based on the decline in the number of profession Christians in the 20th century. We are back (listen to this) for the first time in something like the earliest centuries of Christianity, and those earliest centuries afford some relevant clues to the kind of attitude to adopt.”
So, what’s he saying there? Long story short is if you look at the chaos of the first centuries in which the church was formed, the church grew out of that and we are now actually looping back into that. The church in America has been a really weird anomaly in the history of Christian interactions with the country in which we live. We have had a wonderful odd run at it, but that is crumbling and going away. But what’s going to spring up in its place is going to be more similar to the conditions that the early church grew up in. The gospel actually starts to make much more sense when you are living in a world that is fascinated by spiritualism and the occult and demon possession. I’m having more and more conversations about that, and the New Testament has a lot to say about it.
BRETHREN IN THE BRIAR PATCH
You may remember in the children’s book Brer Rabbit when he gets caught by Brer Fox. He becomes the Tar Baby and he says, “Whatever you do, you can skin me, but don’t throw me into the briar patch.” He talks this all up, and then Brer Fox takes Brer Rabbit and throws him into the briar patch. But then you hear Brer Rabbit giggling at the end, saying, “I was born and bred in the briar patch.” You know, what everybody thinks is terrible, this is where I was born and bred. There’s a sense in which our culture is shifting back into a direction of the briar patch. But the Brethren were born and bred in the briar patch. That’s our native soil. The church grew the best out of that.
NOT DESPAIR – BUT HOPE
There is a sense in which we can lament the loss of many things in our culture. On the other hand, let’s not act like the church can’t thrive on the other end of that. The flip side of this is, is that there are many things in our culture that people say, “Oh, well, the Christians will outgrow it.” No we won’t, because we’re going back into a culture that the church came out of. You think things are weird sexually in our culture now? Have you ever looked at the street art in Pompeii? Don’t. Go back to the first century and look what was going on. Today’s culture is mild. There is nothing new under the sun. The church works. Jesus is real. He is Lord. The Holy Spirit is alive. He changes people’s lives. So there’s a sense in which we can look at this and say, “It’s okay.”
WHERE WE’VE BEEN AND WHERE WE ARE
The old writer that Alan Kreider was referring to was saying, “Going forward, we have a lot to learn from where we’ve already been.” There’s value to that, but it requires a church that is willing to say, “Here’s where authority lies, in the scriptures, not in this and this and this and this and the politics and the music and whatever, because those are all things that are transient, that are shifting and fading.” We have learned through our history how to walk down this narrow path in the midst of chaos. We live our lives as if scripture is speaking to us.
CHAOTIC CULTURES: WHERE THE CHURCH SHOULD FOCUS
Alan Kreider goes on to point out that in chaotic cultures, particularly looking at the way catechism and the teaching of new converts happened in the first century, the church went through a process, sometimes of up to three years, to help people rid themselves of all their worldly habits. There are four main categories that the church has to focus on when helping people get rid of their addictions: sexual addiction and sexual ethics, the use of the occult and spiritualism, an addiction to material wealth and possessions, and a resorting to violence. Those four again are: sex, spiritualism, materialism, violence. The church knows what to do about this. We need to remind ourselves.
BRETHREN OPPORTUNITIES
Yes, there are things that are being lost in the church and the culture. But yes, there are new opportunities that are being formed and we have the ability to say, “We have some practice walking through cultural malaise. Let us help you.” To be Brethren today, I think, is sort of like owning a lithium mine on the cusp of a culture that’s about to go electric. You’re going to have to build a lot of batteries in the future, but in order to do that, you’re going to need a lot of lithium. Who has the lithium? The church is going to have a lot of questions about how do you maintain a faithful biblical identity even when it hurts. And we’ve been practicing in our little lithium mine over the past several hundred years, not just in this country but in others, of the Anabaptist theology, hybridized with the pietist way of thinking about scripture and church and community.
DISCIPLESHIP: STAND FIRM ON YOUR OWN
I think there are three things for us to think about as we are leaning into this, when we’re thinking about preserving and sharing a style of discipleship with, not just the world, but with the church around us. First, we have to stand firm on our own. This starts with us as individuals. What is the Lord shaping and growing and forming in you and in me? It starts here. What about the communities that we’re part of? Have you ever been on a plane and they go through the little safety demo at the beginning that nobody ever listens to? I always want to tell the flight attendant, “I’m a preacher. I can identify with speaking and nobody listening.” But what do they say about the oxygen mask? Do you put yours on first or do you help somebody else first? You put yours on first. I don’t know if those things do any good, but it makes you feel better to know they are there, doesn’t it? You put your oxygen mask on first before you help somebody else, because if you pass out in the process of helping somebody else, it doesn’t do anyone any good. So, there’s a challenge there for the future of our congregations. We need to put our own oxygen mask on first. If you die off before you can help anybody else, it doesn’t do anybody any good. Seek the Lord. What is He asking you individually to do, and then what is he asking of your congregation? Sometimes it is to go and plant a church. Sometimes it might be to be like Elijah and go sit on a mountain for a while. Sometimes it is to stand fast and stay steady. Whatever it is, stand firm and lean into it.
DISCIPLESHIP: COMMUNICATE CLEARLY, COMPARATIVELY & THEOLOGICALLY
The next step is to communicate clearly, comparatively and theologically. There has been a rich history within our churches where we have relied on families to be the primary discipling agents of our congregations. But now we’re running into a time when not everybody has that support structure. What happens when you baptize someone who is a young woman who has zero extended Christian family members? Is your church prepared to teach people to be Christians who didn’t grow up in Christian homes? How do we communicate the gospel clearly? We take too many things for granted. We act as if everybody already knows things that they clearly don’t. If you grew up in that system and you have the privilege of a godly home and heritage, praise God for that. But don’t act like that’s normal. You are going to have to teach and go way back and get down to the nitty-gritty.
Communicate Clearly: Years ago, I was working at a Brethren camp, and I was supposed to teach a whole group of 14-year-old boys how to use pressurized propane stoves. I was in the middle of a physics degree at the time and I knew how that stove worked. I laid it out for them the physics of compression and gas. I thought, “This is the best presentation on a pressurized gas stove that probably has ever been taught here.” But do you know what the problem was with the whole program? There wasn’t a single boy there who had ever struck a match before. You have to light a match to light the stove. I thought everyone knew how to do that. But no. People don’t use matches anymore. Do you see what I was doing? I was speaking at a high level about Bernoulli’s principle and pressurized gas. But we needed to work on practicing striking our matches first. There’s a call here for us as a church. Don’t forget to teach people how to strike the match. We can overshoot and so when I’m saying speak clearly, that’s part of it.
Communicate Comparatively: There is also a huge blessing when we can speak comparatively, when we can say, “We believe this, but we don’t believe that, and here’s why.” We can put it in tension and say, “I love a lot of Methodist people, but here’s the reason I’m not Methodist.” “This is why I drive past the Presbyterian Church on my way to the church that I attend.” That’s helpful to bring clarity when we do it comparatively by saying there are reasons for the differences that we have. They’re not just taste or preferences or cultural, they’re biblical theological principles.
Communicate Theologically: Can we connect the specifics and the principles? Can we connect the dots for people? We should seek to be able to answer the question, “Why do we do what we do?” I was traumatized when I started studying Brethren theology to figure out that there was a rhyme and a reason to many of the things that we did. I thought we were just making it up as we went along. That’s not true. There are theological reasons for all kinds of things that we do. They are there. There’s a reason for it. One theologian said, “Before you can understand tradition, you dare not innovate.” Ask the question, “Why is the fence there in the first place?”, “Why is the gate closed?” You should figure that out before you open it. Let’s be people who do that well.
DISCIPLESHIP: USE YOUR HISTORY
We stand firm, we communicate clearly, and then thirdly, don’t be afraid of using your history. Be willing to talk about who we are, who we aspire to be, and who we were. I have met a lot of people in the last decade who have said that one of the things they love about the Church of the Brethren, and this is particularly young people, is the history. We identify with the people at the Eder River. Our fundamental problem right now is finding any congregations that remotely resemble what we look like in our history. There’s a hunger for what it is that we were, but there’s a difficulty of being that again. And so use the history well. If you’ve ever stepped on a rake and it hurt, tell other people, “Don’t do that.” We have a history of saying, “Here are things that have worked well in the past, here are things that haven’t gone well in the past, here are pitfalls, here are dangers, this is how you do it.” We have a history that is the foundation of a wonderful mentorship that we can have not only within our own congregations, but with the other people who desire to follow Jesus in the culture around us. There is a hunger out there for full-bodied communal discipleship.
FULL-BODIED COMMUNAL DISCIPLESHIP
I was in a debate on a podcast in the UK last week on the subject of animal rights. They asked, “How did you get interested in this topic?” I said, “Because I’m a disciple of Jesus and I want to live a life of integrity in every category.” That was my only reason. Actually, I’m just curious. But, how should I think about what I eat as a Christian? If Jesus is Lord of everything, is there anything that you can’t start talking about and end up seeing how it applies to your faith? No. That’s part of our evangelistic technique moving forward. Full-bodied communal discipleship. People are looking for people who are consistent, and I’m looking for that in myself. It includes this wonderful idea of a familial ecclesiology and a concept of the church that is based on the idea of family. That’s why Brethren is a really good name. There are a couple of reasons for that. First is because it is the biblical way to refer to a group of believers. But there is also the idea that we become the family that we don’t have physically, biologically, or otherwise. People say, “Well, you know, blood is thicker than water.” That’s true, but Spirit is thicker than blood. We form a real family, a real community that isn’t theoretical. It is real.
FUTURE GROWTH: MODELING & CONNECTING DOTS
My prediction is that the growth of the future of the church will not come from within the fold of the traditional Brethren. I know many young people who have no Brethren, Mennonite or Anabaptist roots of any kind. They are hungry for an expression of Christian living that resembles what has existed in many of our lives, and they don’t even know it exists. There is frustration when I see people asking a question and I know where the answer is, but the people asking the question can’t see the people who have the answer. How do we connect the dots? That is the mission of the Church of the Brethren moving forward. To help people who are longing for serious discipleship and asking, “If Jesus is serious about what He says, and I want to be serious about responding to what He says, what would that look like?” That is the way in which we work in a situation that is bigger than us, it’s a way forward. It is about Christ being honored and glorified, not about our denomination or our network growing and being restructured. It’s about the mission that God has for his people to go and to make disciples. As keepers of the faith, we are sometimes called to just stay steady, hold on and keep the lights burning and sometimes we are called to go and share.
DON’T HIDE YOUR HISTORY UNDER A BUSHEL
Because of our Brethren values, we have a 300 year head start on answering questions that people are just now starting to ask…”How do you live a faithful Christian life in the context of cultural confusion, in the context of a culture that you disagree with, in the context of a culture where you’re not in charge? How do you be different? How do you form communities? How do you form an identity within a community that dislikes you?” These are all questions that are alive in our time and will be more so in the next 10 to 15 years and that our church has been practicing for a very long time. Don’t hide that under a bushel. Find the ways to connect and say, “Come on down. We’ve been working on this for a while. We would love to share it with you.”
I collect hobbies as a hobby. I think just about everything is interesting. I’ve got a lot of projects going on and hair brain schemes and ideas. But when I’m trying to learn something new, what do I do? I go find somebody who’s done it well for a long time. I want somebody who says, “For the last 15 years, this is what I’ve been doing and it worked.” That’s the person I want to listen to, to teach me how to do the next thing. We want to be the church that when people say, “How can we do this well in the future?” we can say, “This is not what we’re going to do, this is what we have been doing and this has worked well for us and this has borne fruit, and you can learn to do this too. This is not exclusive, but simple Christianity, and it operates under the name of what it means to be Brethren.”
The question for us today is, “What is the value of brethren values, or what are their importance for us today and for the future?” They are of essence because they’re not just ours, they are for Christ’s church, and this is the way that we’re learning to live them out and Christ is growing them in us and using us then to inculcate them into the rest of the world.
The Lord has a lot of work to do on us all. Let the Lord work on you. There’s not a strategy to this. You be conformed to the image of the Son. As my grandpa Ginder used to say, “Get yourself ready and then let the Lord use you.” Discipleship is not a strategy. You be obedient to what God is asking you to do, and then when you look back you will be amazed at what He did through us in the lives of other people. That is the Brethren value. Seek first the kingdom and His righteousness and all the other things will be added. But we only get there if when we read scripture, we see ourselves as the context, the audience to which it is addressed. May God bless us as we try to live that out. Hear these words of encouragement and this blessing as we end.
“Now to Him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey Him – to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen” (Romans 16:25-27).
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The article above was adapted from a message that was delivered by brother Nathan Rittenhouse at BRF’s 2023 Annual Meeting held at the Blue River Covenant Brethren Church in Indiana. If you would like to discuss any of this with him in further detail, you can email him at [email protected]. Part-1 of the article was published in the previous BRF Witness (Vol. 59, No.3).
