When Mennonites were settlers

I’ve wandered through church traditions the way my family has migrated across the geography of the Americas. My mother came from Costa Rica, my father from Colombia. My sister and I were born in Los Angeles; then we moved to Tucson, Arizona. Now I live in Durham, North Carolina, where I make my ecclesial home in the Mennonite tradition. After a migration from the Roman Catholicism of my birth, through charismatic and Pentecostal versions of evangelicalism, I wandered into a Mennonite congregation in 2004. I’ve been a member ever since.

I’ve found my belonging within a Christian tradition born and reborn in the travails of migration, of survival from persecutions—church cultures revised with every resettlement, theological identities re-formed with every relocation. The Mennonite faith is a wandering tradition with a diasporic sense of peoplehood—a disposition similar to my family story, crisscrossed with departures and arrivals, always making a home among new neighbors. To seek the peace of the city, of the land, of people and place, Jeremiah’s vision guides Mennonite sensibilities for political belonging that aims to navigate a Christian existence in the world but not of the world, in the polis but not of the polis. To join this way of being Christian in the United States has been a kind of homecoming for my misfit identity as a child of immigrants.

In Exiled among Nations, John P. R. Eicher recounts the plight of Mennonites who left Russia at the end of the 19th century—some as refugees, others as voluntary migrants—and spent the next century wandering through Germany, Canada, and Paraguay in search of hospitality. Eicher tracks their theological disagreements and cultural tensions as they attempted to make a life among strangers.