Mel Shetler

ROSEDALE, Ohio -- Rosedale Bible College's fourth Evangelical Anabaptist Symposium "Reaching Out Without Selling Out" will focus on how churches can be faithful to Christ while engaging a world that doesn't take him very seriously.

When participants gather on RBC's campus November 12-14, they will hear from speakers who have answered this question in dramatically different ways.

Mel Shetler from Maple City Chapel in Goshen, Ind., leads a church that meets in a renovated Wal-Mart and doesn't shy away from high-tech worship and outreach. John D. Martin, a teacher at Shippensburg Christian Fellowship (Penn.) wears a plain coat and belongs to a body that pays each other's medical bills.

Dan Ziegler

Dan Ziegler, RBC's president, grew up in New York City as the son of a church planter from the Bible Fellowship Church. Today, he eschews neckties and violence and is knee-deep in doctoral research that examines the way outreach vs. faithfulness plays out in the Conservative Mennonite Conference (RBC is the CMC's educational institution).

David Greiser, director of Hesston College's Pastoral Ministries Program, is leaving the prairie to pastor North Baltimore Mennonite Church (Md.) and wants to convince us to move to the city with him. And RBC faculty member Phil Barr, raised in a nominal church setting in post-Christian England, has served in secular settings as a missionary and a pastor.

Ziegler opens the symposium on Thursday evening and will frame the discussion with a model derived from his research on core congregational motives within the CMC. "I found that while all of the churches I studied were driven by both 'outreach' and 'faithfulness' motives, there was a dramatic difference in the character of the congregation depending on which one of these two motives was prioritized first," he said. He wants to look at how this dichotomy "creates both dissonance and synergy within the conference."

David Greiser

On Friday evening, Martin will talk about bearing witness to the kingdom of God. His church focuses on "how to work out and express the kingdom on this earth," he said. "We re talking about living in close community and demonstrating to the world how Jesus intended us to live  not selfishly accumulating wealth but sharing with each other and living equally with each other" and helping each other.

"It s an ideal that our practice doesn t always completely match," he acknowledged. But Shippensburg Christian Fellowship has been around for 23 years, and the members still try to meet each other's financial needs. They own their own houses and businesses, but when there are needs in the brotherhood, the church assumes those costs. "We don t have a lot of money," said Martin."And we've had a lot of hospital bills. Everybody digs deep and we just pay it until it's been paid.

Martin explained that living the kingdom life is not just about economic equality. It also means that there s no clergy class or hierarchy in the brotherhood.  At SCF, he said,  all the brothers participate in teaching and preaching. The voice of each counts in every decision according to his wisdom, experience, age, and responsibility in the congregation.

John D. Martin

He added, "We see the Bible as a revelation of Jesus Christ, not as a text to be manipulated into theological categories." Jesus Christ is the key to understanding all Scripture and any interpretation that violates what he taught and did is a misinterpretation.

The church has 99 members, he said, with about 30 families and an attendance of 150-175 without visitors. "With visitors, about 200. We get a lot of visitors."

One visitor who came to stay about five years ago is author David Bercot. He wrote Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, a look at early Christians and a call to return to early church values. When Bercot found out that the pastor at Shippensburg had ordered a case of his book The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down to give out to church members, he thought, "That s what I wanted to be part of  a congregation that was comfortable" with early Christianity s understanding of the kingdom of God.

He and his family moved to Pennsylvania from Texas to be part of the church. It's worked out "fairly well," he said. "Like any other group, it s not the perfect church, but they ve been supportive and that has not waned."

They've attempted outreach in the community with limited success, Bercot said. However, probably a third of the people do come from a non-Mennonite background. "All of us are already Christians, but a lot of non-Mennonites have found that they fit in better here than in most other conservative Mennonite churches."

Phil Barr

On Friday morning, Shetler will talk about Breaking the Barriers: Becoming Churches that Reach Beyond Ourselves. "I hope we will discover how Paul s principle of wanting to be 'all things to all people' as a way for them to hear the gospel message is carried out in a practical way today," he said. "Would we go to the extent of being called a 'winebibber and a glutton' in order to connect with the people of our culture as Jesus did?"

Greiser will speak on Friday too, discussing why the church needs the city. "In my talk I want to persuade people that the Christian church throughout its history has grown and flourished when it has immersed itself in the cities and proclaimed the gospel there," he said. Though many Mennonites still have fears of cities, the Anabaptist movement was born in cities and its most successful outreach has often taken place there, he said.

Asked what he d like to see happen at the symposium, Ziegler said he hoped "that there would be honest dialogue between the 'big tent' folks and the 'narrow way' folks and that together, we would discover in some new ways what it means to be a people full of grace and truth."

For information on how to register, click here.

This article originally appeared in the October 19, 2009 issue of The Mennonite Weekly Review.

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