August 1, 2001

Every now and then, one of Silicon Valley’s high-tech workaholics makes a wrong turn off the freeway and stumbles upon a Californian Brigadoon. It’s called Alviso, a backwater village that has so far managed to miss out on the technological revolution. In Alviso, everyone lives within a few blocks of the tiny church that is its centerpiece: Our Lady, Star of the Sea. On weekends, scores of children arrive for Bible study, violin lessons or catechism training, sometimes held in the garage beneath the parish house.

It was not the sort of place where one would expect to find the folks who produced the More-with-Less cookbook, but the massive and hermetically sealed Opryland complex in Nashville was where 9,330 Mennonites gathered in early July for a momentous meeting.

Stanley Hauerwas talks about Catholics like Jane Goodall talks about chimpanzees: he spent many years among them as an outsider, came to appreciate their strange practices and rituals, and grew to love them so much that he almost, but not quite, felt like one of them.

Fanny Makina, a farmer in Malawi, is tilling her plot of land with a hoe and spade. Next she will plant crops of corn, peanuts, squash, beans and cassava, and mark each row carefully with a stick. In most years, Makina harvests enough food for her family and has food left over to sell. Even in years of limited rainfall, she has income to buy fertilizer and other supplies.

“My children don’t lack for clothes or shoes. I am able to pay their tuition for school,” she says proudly. By Malawian standards, Makina is tremendously successful.

It was a shoo-in vote by the coziest of ecumenical partners holding their biennial conventions together for the second time. Delegates from the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), seated in side-by-side sections in a cavernous convention hall, took turns discussing, then approving handily, their denominations’ participation in the successor to the Consultation on Church Union. With all nine denominations now in, the Churches Uniting in Christ will be launched formally in January.