Feature Article: Spring 2008
Are we a pilgrim people or people of a place?
by John D. Roth
One spring day nearly a decade ago, while driving through the isolated Costa Rican province of San Carlos, I stumbled unexpectedly upon a fascinating microcosm of Anabaptist-Mennonite history. My first clue was a group of Costa Rican women walking along the muddy mountain road dressed in plain clothes and wearing head coverings. Then on the outskirts of the tiny village of Pitál, I suddenly encountered a tidy brick homestead with a freshly painted barn a manicured yard, and flourishing flower gardens.
The Penner family, as it turned out, were Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites who had moved to Pitál from Spanish Lookout, Belize, only a few years earlier. The patriarch of the family was born in Manitoba, but his wife was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where several Kleine Gemeinde congregations had settled in the 1920s. The children had mostly grown up in Belize. On the mantel were faded photographs of greatgrandparents who were born in Tsarist Russia and were among the wave of 18,000 Russian Mennonites who emigrated to the western states and provinces of the U.S. and Canada in the 1870s in search of religious freedom and new economic opportunities. A genealogical listing in the family Bible pushed the family lineage back yet another generation to the Vistula Delta (now Poland).
Just up the road from the Penners lived the Yoder family, part of a sprawling clan of Beachy Amish who had come from Virginia to Costa Rica as missionaries in the 1960s. Over coffee around their kitchen table I heard stories going back in time and space to colonial Pennsylvania, and beyond that to the Alsace and Switzerland.
Here, woven together in this tiny greenhouse of Mennonite ecumenicity, were the threads of a wonderfully complex story: born out of the same 16th-century renewal movement in central Europe, these two traditions had traversed oceans, continents, and cultures before meeting up again nearly five centuries later in a remote region in Central America.
But was this a story of Anabaptists as a pilgrim people or as a people of place? On the surface, it might seem obvious that the Penners and the Yoders in Pitál embodied the ancient biblical theme of “strangers and pilgrims.” Like Abraham and the Children of Israel, they and their forebears had consistently been ready to launch out in faith, leaving behind the comforts of the familiar to put themselves fully into God’s hands. At the same time, however, there was no mistaking that these were people with a deep sense of tradition and place. Although their identity had not been tied to a fixed physical location, the rootedness of their faith within the concrete particularity of culture was undeniable: the distinctive form of dress, the prominence of the German family Bible, the tidy European-style homesteads, the deep roots of family connections, the stark simplicity of the meetinghouse all pointed to a people who were deeply rooted.
So which is it? Are Anabaptists a pilgrim people or a people of place?
Perhaps this is not the only way of framing the question. In April 1525, only a few months after the first adult baptisms that had given birth to the Anabaptist movement, Zurich authorities arrested Elsy Boumgartner of Zollikon on the charge of “rebaptism.” When they offered to release her if she would promise never to return to the area, Elsy stubbornly refused. Instead, citing a verse from Psalms 24:1—“the earth is the Lord’s”—she insisted that “God had made the earth for her as well as for the rulers.”
During the century that followed, persecuted Anabaptists returned repeatedly to this verse as the basis for their freedom to leave or not to leave as the Holy Spirit led them. In the fall of 1614, for example, exasperated Zurich authorities executed Hans Landis—a 70-year-old farmer from the Swiss hamlet of Horgen—in large part for his persistent refusal to comply with orders to leave the area. Over a span of 25 years they had arrested Landis on numerous occasions for his role in spreading the supposedly heretical doctrines of the Anabaptists; but each time he refused to acknowledge their right to banish him from the region. And each time he had cited the verse: “The earth is the Lord’s.” In this appeal to Psalm 24:1, we hear themes of resistance, judgment and comfort that echo resoundingly through the entire Anabaptist tradition.
For Anabaptists facing persecution, the claim that the earth is the Lord’s was a form of resistance, especially to the political rulers of their day. Although Elsy Boumgartner and Han Landis both addressed authorities with respect and assured them that they were not interested in political unrest, the appeal to Psalm 24:1 was a powerful statement of a different allegiance and loyalty. Since the earth belonged to God, the decision as to where they would settle rested in God’s hands, not in the mandates of secular princes or rulers. The message is clear: wherever Christians find themselves, their allegiance will ultimately be to the One who is Lord over all the earth.
Psalm 24:1 has also served Anabaptists as a text of judgment. A full historical account of mobility in the Anabaptist story would need to acknowledge that those migrations were not always motivated by Abrahamic faithfulness or a simple desire to serve God. Frequently Mennonites have set out for distant territories because of church divisions at home or in the hope of better economic opportunities or to claim land that had only recently been cleared of indigenous people by colonizing powers. At times in our history, the gift of place has become a possession to be grasped; the gift of tradition has been distorted into a self-serving idolatry. Here, the reminder that the earth is the Lord’s is a call to repentance and renewal: if political leaders have no ultimate claim over the things of this earth, then neither do we—the earth is the Lord’s, not ours!
Finally, throughout the Anabaptist tradition Psalm 24:1 has been a reassuring word of great comfort in the midst of uncertainty. In times of persecution when Anabaptist groups have been forced to pack their bags and move elsewhere, they did so in the confidence that God would be with them. Since their identity as Christians was not tied to any particular nation or territory, they could move on in the knowledge of God’s enduring presence and love. After all, if the whole earth is the Lord’s, then Christians will find themselves truly at home anywhere in the world. Today, Mennonites gather for worship in at least 70 different countries.
The future shape of the Mennonite witness in Pitál, Costa Rica, is still unfolding. Children of the first immigrant families are now completely bilingual, and the traditions embodied by the Penner and Yoder families are being leavened and transformed by the contributions of local converts. The worship service that I attended in a plain-style Mennonite meetinghouse featured a native Costa Rican preaching enthusiastically to a congregation seated on benches separated by gender. Together we sang gospel hymns translated into Spanish, in a creative variation on four-part harmony, accompanied by a guitar. The potluck that followed featured rice and beans, and the conversation shifted fluidly from Spanish to German to English. But through it all, there was no mistaking the warmth of Christian fellowship that is only possible through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Truly the earth is the Lord’s!
John D. Roth is professor of history at Goshen College, author of Beliefs: Mennonite Faith and Practice and Stories: How Mennonites Came to Be, and a member of Berkey Avenue Mennonite Fellowship in Goshen, Indiana.