Eigenheim's 125th Celebration

Photo Credit: Pauline Roth

Photo Credit: George Epp

Meditation for Eigenheim’s 125^th Celebration: Saturday, August 19, 2017

George Epp, chair

Service, Mission and Outreach Committee

Eigenheim Mennonite Church is the story of a community; a community steeped in the gospel of Jesus Christ, seeking to live out faith in harmony and to spread the good news in service to their neighbours and the world. Stumbling sometimes, disagreeing on issues sometimes, misunderstanding each other at times, but always conscious of the core and centre of community and faith: I Corinthians 3:11. “For other foundation can no one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” The story is not finished; we write new chapters as we go.

    The authors of the opening chapter came from a variety of backgrounds: There were the 1892 Chortitza Mennonites from Russia (Epps, Friesens, Letkemanns, Janzens, Duecks and others), the Prussian contingent (Tiefengrund Regiers, Friesens, and others), the Klaassens escaped increasing militarism in the USA, the Roths and Riekmans embraced the community although their history was Moravian. And since then and until the present, others have joined us, enriched us whether they shared our cultural history or not. It wasn’t identical outlooks that brought us together, welded us into a common story, but a need to be community--first in a new land and then in a rapidly changing age--to worship God in spirit and in truth with what we all had in common, a love for Jesus Christ and his gospel and a history of Anabaptist faith won through centuries of hard times, good times, confidence and disappointment.

     Chapter 1 was written by refugees; refugees who were not unaware that this place, Canada, could be their promised land, but could also be yet another disappointment.

     The story continued through times of drought, grasshoppers, smut and rust alternating with abundant rain and bumper crops, and in the country schools that sprang up and in the church, a new chapter was being written. Times of prosperity. New, modern houses replaced huts and hovels, large barns and bins swollen with bushels and bushels of surplus grain. Herds of cattle on green pastures, gardens filling jars and jars of good food for the winter. Cars, combines, trucks, telephones, electricity made life much, much easier. And the community that was Eigenheim needed to write a new chapter of its story. How to follow Christ faithfully in good times; how to be generous in a new age that offered more food, more conveniences, more leisure, more of everything.

     And there was a chapter written by two world wars; the call of nationalism and citizenship and the threat of guns and bombs against the peace message of Christ: love your enemies; do good to those who persecute you. How to write this difficult chapter? How to understand that such times shape understandings, bolster or undermine faith and attitudes? How to understand that the decisions made in difficult times echo down the generations? Some say, we are what we eat. It might be truer to say that we are what we’ve lived, what we’ve experienced. This chapter’s ending was never in doubt; the gospel of Jesus Christ is our guide; we are a peace-making community.

     Perhaps the chapter on technology and faith, a chapter still being written, is one of the most difficult. Television, Internet, Facebook and Twitter. Instant news, videos from Afghanistan live-streamed into our living rooms, into the eyes and ears of our children. Great opportunities for spreading good news, massive opportunities for crass marketing, for propagating hatred and fear, for tempting our children while alone with their “smart phones.” Marshall McLuhan famously warned us that “the medium is the message,” meaning that the content that gets flashed around the world is not the thing to be feared as much as the way in which new possibilities begin to shape community, habits, attitudes and eventually, faith itself. We are what we read, and see, and hear.

     Your personal life and mine can be spoken of as stories. Choices of school, career, family, location, money and means, all are chapters we write. As long as we live, the pen remains in our hand, the ink pot at our elbows. Stories turn, at least the possibility of turning, of writing new chapters that depart from the old is always there while we live. “I never did this before and it’s scary, but I will pluck up my courage and write a new chapter, if Jesus Christ and my community of faith will support me.”

     And Eigenheim’s story—125 years in the writing, so far—needs a new chapter. What will we be? What should we write? Will we rest on the past and hope for the best, or will we dare to write boldly a newness that’s in keeping with the age? These are questions with which birthdays and anniversaries poke and prod us.

     In the foyer today are artifacts of times and people upon whose faithfulness this community rests. By now, we have far more authors in our cemetery than in our pews. But that’s the created, natural order of things. Do we want numbers? Then we must write a chapter on winning and welcoming those who need both our faith and our community? Do we need outlets for our service energies, our surplus cash? We don’t have to look far for causes craving our generosity.

     For a community to write a chapter of its story takes a great deal of time and perseverance since a community, after all, is a gathering of individuals. Are we prepared to do the work of writing the next chapter that’s about all of us, together?

     It was God who called into being the Anabaptist vision, a vision that was sorely missing in the world. Eigenheim is one clay vessel containing the precious ointment that can heal and help, that can join with others in the feeding, the visiting, the sheltering, the comforting of God’s suffering children. Let’s pick up our pens with joy and expectation, dip them in the ink and write boldly the opening chapter of the next 25, the next 125 years.

     And let’s begin by feasting together at God’s table, joyfully, frequently. Let’s feel the gratitude to our fathers and mothers, our grandmothers and grandfathers who set the table for us.